The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.
For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.
Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.
At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I would add one major change that the work from home experiment has achieved - its made the opportunity cost of the work commute clear. This is a time cost paid for by the worker.
As you stated, this is variable.
If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.
If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.
Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.
Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.
If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.
I've generally had a 30-40min commute most of my career, but also generally had a flexible enough start time that exact to the minute arrival at my desk was not performance impacting.
Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.
For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.
Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.
For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".
Why are you working at all during what was your commuting time? You weren’t getting paid for those 7.5-10 hours before, so you’re in a worse position now unless your pay increased commensurate with the extra hours. That should have translated into more personal hours, not more working hours.
I took on a role with earlier/longer expected hours, but with the agreement I would do it remotely. And yes it's for a lot more money, not just an extra 10-20% for the extra 10-20% hours.
To be fair though, my previous role I found the day got longer during/post COVID because senior managers suddenly felt empowered to schedule meetings earlier and later.
In some cases, it was getting brought into more senior manager meetings I previously wasn't privy to, that had always been too early (7-8am).
In other cases, it was moving those same managers goal posts because they'd always been online early and hey if you want access to them, the only place to find time on their calendar was like 8am or 5pm.
I know A LOT of senior IC / team lead people who fell into this trap during COVID.
> For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office
How sustainable is to work 11-12 hours a day though? If we do 5 hours of intense work and the rest is spent in meetings or other overhead activities make 8 hours just enough to make it sustainable over long periods of time…
Let's put it this way. I'm expected to be readily accessible for 9-10 hours/day, and reachable for some hours outside of that. I have some operational responsibilities in the morning, maybe 1~3 hours of meetings and fully understood we get in far less than 5 hours of intense work. People are generally cool with me being totally away from desk for lunch.
How I spend the time in between in terms of doing research/reading/etc is up to me. If I had to do this in an office setting it would suck to be stuck there when stuff does come up.
> I'm expected to be readily accessible for 9-10 hours/day
Why? Are you contracted for 45-50 hours per week? Or if contracted less, are you compensated for the additional hours?
I'm contracted for 38.5 hours per week. That's 8.125 hours Monday to Thursday and 6.00 on Friday. If I work longer than this I am compensated with time off in lieu. I do have to log my time daily. Overall works great. I'm fairly paid and have a good lifestyle.
I actually find it hard to imagine working 9-10 hours every day for any extended time period.
BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.
I enjoy my commute as well but no amount of justifiying it changes the fact I’d be much better off with either a shorter commute or none whatsoever by going fully remote. I’d even be okay with hybrid. Wasted time on commute ads up to a minilifetime that could be used in different ways
True, my WFH option has allowed me to spend weeks at a time with my parents and siblings, who live far from me, at very important times in their lives.
Previously I’d see them during holidays only, and now I see them once a month and actually am able to spend quality time with them.
And while I respect the idea and value of non-remote, I don’t think any amount of “in-person whiteboarding sessions and relationship building” would be worth sacrificing for the flexibility of spending quality time with my family and seeing them more often.
It depends. In my case the commute is a (seriously) bumpy bus ride that takes 2-3 times more than by car (the bus has stops and it takes a longer route and I have to change the bus at least once, that adds extra latency). Fortunately the bus is relatively empty in my stop so I don't have to stand.
This means that I couldn't read anything. Shaking of the bus also gives me time to time a mild headache. Now if the ride was smoother (like a train or a tram) and I still could sit and read then indeed I would agree with you.
Fortunately I don't have to commute very often so I can tolerate this to a degree but if I had to commute every day then it would add considerable extra strain into my life.
Normally the day should be divided into 3 equal parts:
1 sleep time,
2 work time,
3 personal time.
Commute time effectively steals from either personal time or from sleep time and this comes on top of getting ready for work that is also a major waste of time in the mornings.
When for many years I had a long commute into London I appreciated I was lucky that it was on a train line without any train changes required. So that was a calm productive "me time" on the train for over an hour each way. Usually do some work on my laptop, some hacking on hobby apps, some film watching etc. Also a lot of snoozing.
But I also self-selected roles closer to the end station in London so the commute at the other end was short-ish.
Whenever I had to do any other commute: by car, bus, multiple changes, etc it was always a grind and shortlived.
However, I was able to stop even the not-so-bad commute long before COVID as I wanted to be at home when the kids came back from school as they are only young once and briefly so. Though I miss the "me-time".
Getting the extra reading time is nice, and if I didn't have a family I'd be all about that. But for me I get to spend mornings and evenings with my son, but if I had to commute half an hour then the morning would become just a rush to get him to daycare and the evening I might get to see him for a few minutes before he goes to bed. Sure the hour of reading would be nice but it would greatly diminish the quality time I'm able to spend with the little man.
You need to get out of your bubble. After having traveled to more than 60 countries on all the continents (except Antarctica), I can assure you that a majority of humans do not have good reliable public transport. It is a luxury that only some parts of the world have.
Just as an example, right now I am in an Indian city where there is some minimal public transport but a majority of people need their own vehicle to commute for most of their journeys. And it is not an unusual scenario for India, which contains more population than Europe and North America combined.
I do not think that it is valid to compare a developing country that can't provide even proper sanitation to US.
We can compare US to Japan, to Europe, perhaps to some parts of China but certainly not to India - it would be too much apples to cucumbers comparison.
Perhaps, but we can say that there are certain reasons why the public transportation can be not very good in the developing world.
Imagine that we but every country and their development index and their public transportation development index on a XY graph? Would US still stand out?
Let's assume that it does. Then we can say that US is a global outlier.
I now see where you are coming from and based on your definition, it makes sense that US is a global outlier. However, the dimension of developed status of a country was not at all apparent in the original context which was only about WFH, commute and public transport.
You're being silly. The majority of the world also doesn't have access to airplanes, but that doesn't mean they don't work. OP is certainly not in the ridiculous bubble you're describing.
We need to keep in mind the framing of this- it’s a discussion about commuting vs wfh. In the universe of locations where that’s a serious conversation the US is an outlier in terms of poor public transit.
Don't you think Indians too have serious discussions about commuting vs wfh? Now I am asking this seriously - what bubble are you living in if you think that topic doesn't pertain to people in developing countries?
Why would you think comparing the developing world with the USA makes in any way sense - do you actually think the US is at the developmental level of India?
When comparing similarly wealthy countries the US is absolutely an outlier in this.
> Why would you think comparing the developing world with the USA makes in any way sense
Because you said - "Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally." "Globally" implies the entire world. Now why are you moving the goalposts? If you wanted to confine the discussion to the developed world, just call out US being an outlier in the developed world.
It stands to reason that someone who has travelled to over 60 countries would have the ability to understand what someone is trying to say without being this needlessly pedantic.
Probably we have different reasoning processes then. But this discussion is about WFH vs remote and the impact of not having to commute. It is a very pertinent topic to a lot of workers in developing countries because they too have to endure shitty commutes every day.
> BTW this is where commute by public transport shines.
That depends on the public transport. When I lived in London (inside what is known as the zones 1-6), I had a walk, a wait for space on a train, then stand for 40 minutes on that completely packed train, then a change at a crowded station, then another wait for space on an underground train, then stand on a completely packed underground train. All of this while dealing with angry and rude other people trying to push on each step before you. I would get to work completely stressed and in a bad mood already. That is on a good day. On a bad day the trains would just be cancelled, or the underground halted, or something and it would take hours to just get to the office.
The only way I would consider going back to something like that is for a huge, huge amount of money.
It shines when comparing to commute by private transport, but not so much when comparing it to no commute at all. If you didn't have a commute to the office, you would still have an hour to do your reading, but you could do it in bed, or in a coffee shop, or in your kitchen, or on a walk...
I find that a reason to leave the house and be a part of the hustle and bustle is fundamentally good for my energy and mental health. I bet I wouldn't read in the morning as much if I didn't have that commute.
This is very subjective, as well as personal and irrational, but I find it to be true. I benefit from having a reason to go out into the world in the morning. WFH and the freedom to go to the coffeeshop or take a walk didn't match up.
I have a public transit commute, but at the end of the day it's 8 minutes of walking to the train, a transfer after 7 minutes, and then a 7 minute walk to the office from the train. Never enough unbroken time to get into a book :(. I've learned something new about public transit commuting--look for a commute with as long a single stint on the train as possible, while still trying to minimize total time.
Once you add those numbers, the total is usually insane. While I do miss being in the office sometimes (mostly for the social life), it's just too expensive for me as a worker right now. It's not just the time spent on commute, it's also the money that you have to spend to stay within a commutable distance from the office.
Also, my profession is being a Software Engineer, not a train passenger.
> You spend around 8 hours on travel weekly which amounts to around 45 days of full-time work per year and will sum up to 450 days of full-time work (3600 hours) over 10 years.
It's 4 years of full-time work days (9000 hours!) over 25 years.
And if you're driving to the office, that's 450 hours where you can get into a fatal accident, with about half of them in the morning when you might be too sleep-deprived to safely operate a motor vehicle. Driving on four hours of sleep is the equivalent of drunk driving. And if your start time is the same every day, then it's likely you'll have many nights where you fall asleep too late, maybe even because you're preparing a presentation for your morning meeting...
Money to stay within commutable distance, but also the cost of the commute itself.
E.g. my yearly cost of commuting when I did added equivalent to about $2.5k/year in after tax transport costs.
I've typically told recruiters about 20%, from a high base, and frankly that is lower than it ought to be when accounting for both the time and costs, but given I already live where I live, I feel I could justify it in terms putting extra cash straight into my pension pot and retiring earlier. But not enough to lower it further to find a point where someone is more likely to take me up on it.
... but not even close to enough to car-commute more than about 10 minutes to it, given the option. That's roughly the cut-off. Under 1.5 bikeable miles (that's ideal!) or maybe 5 miles by car.
And to get that short a commute, I'd need all kinds of other compromises in most cities. Worse schools, more expensive and smaller housing.
Is my preference for the office worth hundreds of hours a year lost commuting, thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, and all the extra micromorts from the commute? LOL. LMFAO. God no, it's not even close. No typical commute is a low enough cost that I'd pay it to be in the office. It's way off.
So, though I do in fact prefer working in the office... nah.
lol I imagine that Company A will find some sucker, but instead of getting A+ workers that can realize company B> company A, they are going to get the leftover workers, their second choice. To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.
Why call people suckers? Maybe they don't mind commuting? Maybe their commute is only 15 minutes, and not 2.5 hours?
> To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.
Even if they were "leftovers", their value to the company they know in and out after 10 to 20 years and their productivity skyrockets compared to the A+ rock stars that left the company after one year.
I think they would be referred to as 'suckers' because they are spending time for their employer for which they are not compensated in that scenario (two options, both pay the same, but one requires you to sacrifice significant portions of your day for no compensation).
You negotiate compensation before accepting the job and generally have the option to move.
If anything it’s people failing to consider commute times when looking for work that’s the issue not company’s requirements. Going they will pay me 10k more per year but I’ll spend X more hours a week commuting is effectively being paid to commute.
Hence calling them suckers. Doing the commute is fine, but not taking it into account is potentially seeking yourself short(even if you end up feeling forced to take an offer you feel doesn't take it into account - at least then you're aware).
Given the low proportion of people I've extended employment offers to over the years who even try to negotiate terms or drill down into employment terms that might affect the value, I'd assume it applies to most engineers.
At some point I got a week more holiday than every other employee in the UK at my employer at the time because I was the only hire who had questioned a contract clause and gotten them to confirm my preferred interpretation of a woefully misleading clause in writing before signing, and when they later wanted to stick to the technicalities of how it was written I was able to just forward them an email from the COO confirming that in my case they'd agreed to my interpretation.
Most people seem to only pay attention to the headline amount, and then grumble about the consequences after the fact.
The only reason I can imagine that somebody would genuinely like a long commute would be if they hate their home life and are trying to escape from it. They'd probably be better off just getting a divorce instead.
My commute is about 40 minutes each way by bus, plus a 5 minute walk on both ends. I love it. I get outdoors for a short walk four times a day, I read books and magazines on the bus, see what's being built or new businesses opening around town, sometimes I get to meet neighbors and other commuters, or help out random strangers with directions or whatever. My commute to work is definitely a benefit to my life.
Nothing stops you from doing that if you work from home, so while the trip might be a benefit to you, it is entirely orthogonal from whether you work from home or an office.
On the contrary, not being forced into the office let's you choose your journeys.
No. theres a reason why humans have always had routines that are agreed upon by society. We are social creatures. We are not made to be individualistic islands with all the responsibility to perfectly dial in our mental health ourselves.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You're arguing I would be a happier or better person if I stopped doing a thing I enjoy doing? Why?
During the summer when I work from home I take a 20 minute walk at 8:30 (and water my tomatoes) and a 20 minute walk at 12:00 before settling back into my home office with lunch.
If I’m feeling up to it, I get another 30-40 minute walk in once it cools off in the evening.
I don’t mind driving in during the winter though, because then I don’t have to pay to heat my house (beyond 15C for the cat) for the day.
Yeah I hate how the wierd basement dwellers are telling us how to handle our mental health. 99% of humans are not basement dwellers who don't like seeing people. People are becoming more socially awkward because our society is forgetting the fundamental social nature of human beings. So maybe some people think they like it. But the statistics don't lie - mental health is going off a fucking cliff. We're not meant to live like this. There are a few basement dwellers who are really that introverted, and there are some people who just have commutes that are THAT BAD (and that's bad town planning), but most people benefit from being outside our house for large portions of the week and having most of our communication being face to face. And that's just a fact.
I was explaining to someone why I enjoy my commute. It's totally OK if you don't enjoy yours! I would also hate having to sit in a car! People are different and have different situations and that's OK.
Reading on a long buss/train ride can be inherently pleasant. Similarly not all car commutes are stuck alone in traffic, I rather enjoyed commuting with my dad.
I did once work with someone who intentionally found a job far enough from home that he could justify a "bachelor pad" in town and just go home to the family home at the weekends. I wonder what proportion of weekend commuters do it out of a desire to stay away vs. financial reasons.
I've been WFH for 15 years and love it. My wife has been WFH for 3 years. While I do prefer WFH, I think there were benefits to us being apart during the work day and then catching up at dinner/evening. There are some downsides to being together 24/7, even in a good relationship.
There can actually be significant value to limiting optionality. This is the solution to "the paradox of choice"; sometimes it's actually better to have fewer choices!
I find this very unintuitive and even mentally rebel at the idea when I think about it, but I still think it's true.
But for example, consider three scenarios:
1. Work from home, with a consistent habit of going on a ten minute walk and reading for half an hour before and after work.
2. Commute with a ten minute walk and half hour train ride, with a consistent habit of reading on the train.
3. Same as (1), but family responsibilities and other distractions end the moment work begins and begin the moment work ends.
4. Same as (2), but spend the train ride doom scrolling.
For me (1) is best but also unlikely because there are too many other "choices" of what to do before and after work, so in practice I end up doing (3).
But option (2) of commuting by train would actually be better than (3) despite having less optionality! I would have more wind-up and -down time each day, and get more reading done.
But the risk of option (2) is that there is still too much optionality; instead of reading, I could scroll crap on my phone. Removing that optionality somehow - by getting a dumb phone or some other solution to keep myself from this bad habit - would be another improvement.
Clearly it would be better to make better choices without limiting options, but human nature being what it is, it often turns out better in practice to not have the other options at all.
It's 1.4% of the year (assuming that 130 hours a year is correct I didn't check it). That's less than two ounces out of a gallon of liquid or less than half a centimeter out of a foot.
In what other things is 1.4% considered "significant?"
Taxes jump to mind. COL adjustments vs inflation for the past few years also comes to mind. Beating some measurable world record by 1.4% is probably a big deal. I'm sure there are more examples if you look for them.
Bro nobody is spending 100% of their time being productive. we have to have transitional time. time going from one place to another is a net benefit because living in one box is anti-human. for me the cost of the time is so so worth it because i feel so much better seeing my colleagues in person. i become a shell of myself if i don't leave the house so losing the time is something i'm very okay with. its such a small amount of time to make my life 200x better.
I don't think that's entirely true. I know a few A+ people who enjoy being in the office and hate working from home. I don't know how many of those folks there are, but I don't think company A would be totally stuck with leftover workers.
Tech is full of people like OP. You got good paying job (because profession is hot) so you’re obviously smarter than everyone else, and your way of thinking and living is only right one.
I am starting to use coworking spaces now because WFH has something of a toll on my family, primarily because kids are loud, and it can be frustrating to work while your loud kid is screaming in the next room without enough of a sound barrier to prevent you from hearing it. I'm not angry at my child, but sometimes I get upset with my wife for not preventing this, or for telling me it's not that loud when it is impossible to escape the noise.
(And when they're not being loud, they're being cute, and it's a tempting and easy distraction to go spend some time with them in the middle of a work day.)
In this sort of dynamic, I see working at an office as a fairly healthy option. I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father), but I'm definitely more productive and less stressed out working from an office.
What is your office like? The ones I've had dubious honor to work in is like you describe, but with dozens of noisy adult children in the same room with me, not the next one.
I agree with this to an extent. Our kiddos are old enough to be in school. But if someone is home sick, I have to take the day off because it’s hard to get anything done.
A reply to you mentioned noise-canceling headphones. That doesn’t work for me, because the kids want to engage and play with the parents when they’re at home. It’s not just a matter of noise.
That said! I still agree with OP’s sentiment. I find that I’m much more relaxed without having to worry about the commute. More time to help the kids get ready and just enjoy the moment. More time to walk them to school.
Before, I would be a ball of stress trying to get people out the door in the morning so I could catch one of only two buses that could take me across the bay to work.
Same thing in the evenings. More time to pick them up, walk home, take serendipitous side adventures and help foster their curiosity. I love it.
I've bought 28sqm apartment to be my office, few mins by foot from our apartment when the kid arrived. It is just better to split work hours and family hours better at that point. Better for everybody. If the main apartment/house is big enough I would not have felt the need to do it probably.
I would still not accept working from office jobs though.
What's somewhat interesting is that at both very low and very high income levels, the % of stay-at-home parent is higher. So for people near poverty, or people making top 1%-ish income, it's less than a 2:1 ratio, more like 35-40%. For middle income like $40k-$100k, it's more like 3:1 or 4:1.
At no income level is it lower than 20% stay at home parent though, so not too much of an outlier in any case.
Hyperbole and language like this is exactly why it's so hard to have this debate in any rational way. The onsite crowd says that all their WFH colleagues are playing video games and doing laundry all day while the WFH crowd says employers are stealing from their employees' children.
I don't think the WFH crowd minds others going into the office. The pro onsite crowd on the other hand wants others forced into the office because their choice is unsupportable if people are given a free choice.
>98% of workers want to work remote at least some of the time 65% report wanting to work remote all of the time.
If 1/3 of your workforce meets 2 days a week your average utilization is about 14%. The logical conclusion is a ghost town that goes away as soon as your employer cuts the building off like a diseased hand.
I definitely like being able to wfh some of the time and I think having to work from office some of the time is a good compromise. When people aren't forced to go people don't go. Even i don't go, and i hate wfh all week. Because once people stop turning up, it starts to be pointless to go. I'm going because i need ftf interaction with people. If nobody turns up its not even fun. Also I have terrible time blindness and if I'm not forced to be somewhere at a certain time I will never get there....
Anyyway, where-ever i've been though that encourages a few days a week in the office, everyone says the big days where everyone comes in and we catch up are fun. The wfh days give us balance. only a handful of people attempt to avoid coming in like the plague. Most people don't like having to commute all the time, but very few people hate going outside and seeing people at work like the wierdos that argue for 100% wfh online.
I have a colleague that takes like a 1.5 hour train to get in and we just went to the pub together after work yesterday, sometimes i let her stay over at mine so she can be in office for an extra day. I love seeing this person. If there was no mandatory office, we would not be friends. Last year I worked 99% remote and I barely ever spoke to human beings and I wanted to die. We are not made to exist like that. And I think the wfh crowd is way too skewed towards middle aged people with spouses and children. If you don't have that wfh ruins your life.
Although you’re probably right, I think you’ve got the motivation of the pro office crowd wrong. They want folks in office because if any significant part of your team is remote then you are effectively working remote, even if you’re in an office.
Yep. Bingo. I want to interact with human beings otherwise my mental health tanks. I don't want to work remote and I even less so want to work in an empty office. If the office is empty I'm not going there because its twice as depressing.
This is basically what I said. The partially/fully remote crowd is the overwhelming majority. The only way to satisfy the minority is to submit the majority to the minorities preference. This doesn't seem altogether reasonable.
An ideal situation would be different companies with different philosophies in proportion to preference but this isn't really what's happening. You had a plethora of options during covid now you have a bunch of old people trying to force everyone back into the office.
I think a good compromise is just partially remote. I 100% see the benefit of not being in the office every day. I like going in 3 times a week. My company has a policy that every person must come into the office 3 days on mode (so like, if some weeks you don't reach 3 it's okay as long as most weeks you do), and allows 2 days for people who live far away. It works really well and satisfies my desire to be in the office and see other people there. Most people seem to enjoy it.
I think this is a remarkably dysfunctional policy that only serves to placate mostly irrelevant middle managers who now look as useless as they are and has literally no other virtues.
If part of your people are there and part are not then you must necessarily adopt patterns and communication techniques fit for remote work. Your remote people wont be happy because they have to come in and your in office people wont be happy because many days less than half the staff will be there.
If you want to have enough space for most people to be there on some days you need almost as much space as full in office. You can't realistically hire anyone who lives more than a 30-60 minute commute and because you want to have access to a large desirable workforce your building is probably located somewhere expensive as well. A large chunk of the most desirable workers who want to work remote are forever off limits or if you do make exceptions you now have jealousy and drama.
Hybrid work is the answer to how can I have all the disadvantages of both styles and none of the advantages while not being shitty enough that all of either group leaves.
There are good points here that would be nice to engage with in a fruitful discussion, but do you see how that's difficult to do when you lead with a provocative, emotionally charged phrase like
> I think this is a remarkably dysfunctional policy that only serves to placate mostly irrelevant middle managers who now look as useless as they are and has literally no other virtues.
You're wrong. Its the best office I've ever worked in with some of the happiest workers and a wonderful culture. I actually work there. You are getting very vitriolic about an extremely skewed hypothetical idea of my workplace that you've made up in your head. Meanwhile, I'm here, seeing happy workers all around me. And I'm not a manager. People like you sound grumpy and horrible and no wonder you don't like being around people. They probably don't like being around someone like you.
I know people with 1.5 hour commutes at my office. They come in twice a week. I ask them about it. They like coming in twice a week because everyone is really nice and friendly to be around. It's refreshing and fun. The only person management reprimanded about how often he came in was a young guy who lives less than 30 minutes away and didn't come in for 4 months. He doesn't really have an excuse. But everyone is allowed to skip a few weeks. It's not a punitive policy.
Let me also point out I'm not in the US. Living more than 1.5 hours away from your office is rare as hell and nobody is driving that distance. They're reading on the train. People leave early to miss rush hour. That's totally acceptable in our office. Because we're not micromanaging people. We just like people being in the office for culture. I know you can't fathom any reason to talk to other humans other than to control them, but some of us can.
And the people coming into the office are happy. We like seeing people, so we come in on similar days. Some people Mon-weds, some tues-thurs, some tues and thurs. Everyone knows noone comes in on friday and very few on monday. Most people come in on tues and thurs. So we coordinate. Because we are human beings with social skills.
Even the guy who avoided coming in for 4 months, when he came back said that he actually liked being in the office and would like to come in more he was just being lazy. I asked a girl who takes a 1.5 hour train and sometimes crashes at my house. She says she doesn't mind it at all she likes to have an excuse to come to the city and she still saves money over living here.
Here in the US the average person relying on public transit commutes 47 minutes each way. Leaving early is verboten and micromanagement as normalized as bringing your sickness to work with you and sharing it with your coworkers. Over 1 hour is not abnormal. Driving is shorter but much more expensive and more stressful.
Most workplaces aren't social clubs much less families. It doesn't make one a sod to pick their friends and family and their work for different reasons and be jealous with their free time. You should celebrate your great fortune and I'm certain work put in to have your life figured out so well.
Most of us settle if we are lucky for something that pays enough to live with a reasonable work life balance and would do well to guard our time to spend with real friends and family we pick rather than the folks who happen to work in the same profession.
Looked up the average commute in London workplaces. It's about 45 minutes so not far off. But it's largely train. Which is a bit less mentally tiring at least if you only have to do it a couple times a week and can avoid the absolute worst time. Mine's 30.
What I'm confused about with the hatred for office work amongst people who are mainly working in tech is that most tech companies pride themselves on good work culture. Even in non tech specific companies there are a lot who want to emulate that in their tech departments because it's famous and revered. So yes, I put in some effort and found a good company. I've never worked at FAANG or even a startup but I found companies that value tech culture enough to not micromanage their tech department. So of all the demographics of people to be moaning so much about their work culture I don't understand why it's tech people.
I would also point out that you should perhaps get more agitated about your labour laws because in other countries we have twice or thrice as much anual leave and live in less siloed communities and both of those are proven to increase longevity. Both having more holiday and going to the office when you aren't on holiday will probably make you healthier and happier. At the end of the day, I'm advocating for working practices that align with human nature and are good for our mental and physical health. The fact that you don't have that is a whole other legal and cultural problem that comes from having no labour movement in your country. Which is really sad. But that's the problem at the end of the day.
Is this also true of an hour spent winding up or down by going on a walk or reading a book or some other adult hobby?
Personally, I don't believe I must either be working or spending time with my children every moment they are awake. I'm a person too, not just a worker and parent, and need to have my own time.
At my last job, my manager was being flown in every week. He was in the office for three days a week and stayed at a hotel. His kids were apparently furious. The company was really committed to being in the office, but kept hiring people from different cities. It felt very destructive.
What about all of us that don't have children. who need social interaction outside the house to be sane? who have just started our careers and need friendly colleagues around us who will support us? who have been cast out of adolescence into a world where everyone tells us to stay in our room alone and maybe download an app if you don't want to be suicidal. not everyone is a middle aged parent my guy
You shouldn’t depend on work for a social life, or even social interaction. Moreover, it’s not the responsibility of your coworkers to provide that to you.
If you need mentorship, your employer may offer that as a formal program. You also might be able to reach out directly to more senior people. Frankly, I find more and better opportunities to provide mentorship over Zoom than I did in the office.
Good luck with your career and mental health, my guy.
The solution to that problem is to count the travel time and any required breaks as part of work hours while also reimbursing all travel expenses. That would require employers to pay the full cost of unnecessary in-person work on both ends and would strongly disincentivize them from doing it.
Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?
Wouldn't this subsidize other's to live further away from work? I think this might have up having unintended negative externalities. It doesn't seem "fair", because I could get paid more for living further away (assuming I'm compensated for commuting time beyond just the cost of depreciation, gas, and maintenance).
One twist on your idea: why not give the employers some incentives to spread out more? For example, if they want you to live in a city center Monday through Friday, they should have to pay for your city housing. (If you want to own a house and go there on weekends, you can buy one independent of the employer.) This would cause employers to rethink the idea that they should be locating themselves in places like San Francisco or New York.
If people stay in terrible working conditions to maintain health insurance, I can't imagine the kinds of pressures involved when your home is tied to changing jobs.
Not quite comparable though I would say, given that you know what you're signing up for when applying for a job. Travelling to a conference is a one-off whereas you'd be expecting to come to your job everyday (given the contract states this). You wouldn't accept a job in another country and turn round expecting them to pay for your flights, hotel etc. to be in the area during the work week
Aside from being compensated directly for daily commutes (on which we could reasonably disagree), there’s also an issue around liability: if someone crashes going to work and the other side wants to sue, should the company be liable, the employee, or both? Being “on-the-clock” makes it more likely the company would bear responsibility, as opposed to being “off-the clock”. Company cars seem to be less common now than they were even 10 years ago. A personal injury lawsuit could easily bankrupt a household, but is much less likely to bankrupt a mid-sized or large company.
It makes perfect sense to you, and me, but unfortunately, in America at least, the upper hand is very much with employers. I could be semi-OK with non-reimbursement for salaried workers if daily travel was factored in, but for those on hourly wages it’s immoral to have commuting expenses (time __and__ money) eat significantly into wages.
We actually deal with this nonsense in our household; my wife is hourly and between the commute, parking, and walking to/from her workplace she loses about 20-25% compared to the time she actually gets paid for. We also spend a lot on gas, and have been putting ridiculous miles on her daily driver. Not to mention physical fatigue and emotional stress; she talks about quitting at least once a week. All for a mediocre wage (I would have said it’s garbage if she was our sole earner - my compensation is about double hers and I WFH).
Edit: also, I remember company cars being a thing not too long ago. I don’t hear about them as much as I used to.
Not just time cost, but also monetary cost. At least in tech, most jobs exist in a small set of metro areas where housing prices are incredibly high. Pushing for more remote work enables more flexibility in where people live / can ease some of the housing pressure on these congested metros.
And the housing in those cities scales terribly when you have kids. What might’ve been doable with 1 or 2 people traps you into very high rent or mortgage (+ even worse commute) to have room for a family. I moved out of the west coast - which I really liked as a place - to be closer to family and to pay 1/3 to 1/2 for the housing
This is one of the reasons I've stayed remote, in spite of being OK in an office environment (and sometimes preferring it).
I'm moving out to a town 3 hours away, which is not really commutable into London. It's a better quality of life, and the housing options are much better. Selfishly, I don't much care about the housing pressure in London, but I do care about whether I can spend my downtime going places and doing things I enjoy, and remote working makes that MUCH easier.
I definitely agree here. For most of my career I was fortunate enough to not have a "real" commute. at most a 20 min walk to the office. The worse commute is when it was raining or snowing.
The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.
Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.
What’s wrong with incorporating exercise into one’s lifestyle, without dedicated exercise time? It’s convenient and sustainable. Sure, it’s not as good as dedicated exercise time in terms of the adaptations one would get, but it’s much better than the adaptations they’d get on their couch.
You wierdos want everyone to have to micromanage our own mental health like we're islands. Humans are social creatures with social rituals for a reason. We go mad without them. People shouldn't have to force themselves to do everything without any social support. (and i go to the gym 4 times a week with my own discipline so no im not incapable i just don't want to have to do that about everything ever)
I absolutely let my employer pay for my commute. Indirectly of course, but my income requirements are dependent on how much hours I have to put into work, which includes my overall time investment. Same with all other costs I have because of work.
That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.
If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.
It's not the financial cost of the time that's important it's the time itself - it's the requirement to completely go against my internal body clock to be at a location by a socially determined starting time - I start working at 10am usually - from home that means I can get up at 8.30 perhaps- to be in an office that means 6.30 am - I don't want to wake up at that time...
Usually office coffee sucks though. Do you have real manual espresso machine in the office and a person who is responsible for operating and regularly cleaning it? The automatic kind with "americano" and "espresso" buttons can't really make a good coffee.
It sounds like you're lucky to have that boss if you really enjoy coffee. I would wager most bosses are fanatical cheapskates that consider expensive coffee an unnecessary cost
It’s really more than that. I live in the city, my office is 7 minutes away most mornings.
The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.
I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.
End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.
Not only the commute, but also lunch breaks. In US and Canada, lunch breaks are short, but back in Brazil I had a 1:30h lunch break, and then at another job, 1:12. But I'm at the office, can't go to bed, I'm at the company's computer so can't do anything I want, also it's in the office, so if watching some TV show or anime that has more graphic content, that might also be a no.
I get calls for jobs that would increase my TC by 100k, jobs I’m confident I could land, and I won’t interview for any of them. That’s how much WFH means to me.
This is my experience. My productivity on coding is a lot hire remote. On many leadership / management-style tasks, it's a lot lower.
Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.
It's the point where you're no longer an individual contributor. Running a team and keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely.
Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.
I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.
I argue against this point. I believe it indicates a skill gap, not a physical law.
If you've played MMOs, been parts of raids, or been active in a guild - you figure out how to solve these problems.
I've been in a community management and moderation role entirely online - those interactions and issues were, by far, the most subjective and complex project discussions I have had to conduct.
I believe that there is an entire generation of workers AND managers, who will be entering the workforce with highly effective remote working habits.
The caveat is, that this applies to work that can be done online, where your product can be examined and verified online.
The MMO generation already entered the workforce a long time ago. Many of them are now middle-aged professionals. But because MMOs have always been a relatively niche hobby, with even the most popular games having only a few million daily players, their impact has not been that significant. They are a small minority in the overall workforce, and while they do have effective remote working habits, they have been self-selected for the ability and interest to form communities online.
I think that was the reminder that I am very much middle aged now.
You are right, however I would say that raids and coordinated e-sports were on the periphery when I was playing. I had to set up my own teams and lan tournaments.
Nice distinction to highlight though, thank you! The skill set would require specific coordination skills, not just being able to play team matches occasionally.
I suppose its proof that the skill exists, just not its distribution in the workforce.
Also, I think you're referencing a skill from something that people want to do — play a video game — to work, where it's something much harder to keep people focused on.
As a manager, with both WFH and in-office employees, the difference is very clear on my end: In-office employees do undeniably better. In my personal experience, of course.
It was certainly a learning experience to lead a fully remote team having only ever done so in an office, but I’m not convinced it’s explicitly more difficult on the whole.
Most offices I’ve been in have had deficient conference room setups and open floor plans, and I’ve come to enjoy the ease with which private conversations, pairing, and ad hoc meetings can happen without being disruptive to others or booking a room way in advance.
I do think that conversations have higher bandwidth in person, and I’ve really missed having a proper big whiteboard to gather around, but I’ve come to realize that this restriction can be a positive forcing function for organizations to write things out and maintain more organized planning documents, which is a desirable outcome.
> I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.
I think this is extremely cynical. Feedback makes for good organizations, and when I built teams, anyone who doesn't value, actively solicit, and provide good feedback doesn't have a very long tenure.
There are many things which go into building this culture, but I think I've only had one or two cases where this led to negative career impact for individuals. Most people adopt to this very quickly, very well, and work well in high-feedback settings.
I've absolutely never had, nor could imagine having, this problem on teams I've led.
Much more, I find the limitation is on my end. Going for a walk-and-talk is relaxing. A Zoom meeting is tiring. 1-2 Zoom meetings per day is not a problem, but a day of Zoom meetings basically leaves me a zombie. Group meetings are also much more tiring online than 1:1s.
I'm a good in-person manager. I'm also a good remote IC. I not nearly as good with those flipped around.
I also don't find any of these to be the case for me:
> keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely
I can do all of those individually -- quite well -- remotely. I just can't do those for anywhere close to 8 hours per day.
To be very clear: That's me. I'm not speaking for you or for anyone else, and YMMV. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing other stories or contradictory opinions, and how things work for others.
This is it. Add to the fact that poor managers don't really understand or know what their staff are doing, it gives them anxiety. If the same poor manager is in an office with them and can see them at their desk then it alleviates that somewhat.
Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.
I like your reply, but for different reasons. I am a middle school teacher, and my day to day is managing people. It is tiring, decidedly so, and yet at the end of the day, management is rewarding for me for because it is relationship building through gaining individual understanding and building classroom consensus.
I love my job and am good at my job. But if I’m to step outside of my classroom your latter quote becomes far too truthful for me:
“we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly”
Your quote applies directly to my supposed superiors; assistant principals, principals, and higher ups in the school board. Most of the managerial class outside of a classroom is trash at their jobs. Their management style seems mostly morale busting and ego inflation at day’s end.
I agree with you, just from a different occupational domain.
Yep. It's the old "butts in seats" philosophy. The new one is "keep your Slack dot green" (or equivalent.) Many managers were always clueless what their staff are doing at the office. Many still are. It's incredible that we have all these tools (Jira, Asana, Github, Slack...) plus many are forced to give status updates in daily standups and other assorted "agile" nonsense, yet there are still those can't figure out what people are working on.
I think this is largely it - the whole maker vs. manager thing... when your job relies on focus, being in a situation where you can control distractions is a benefit. But when your job relies on getting others' attention it can clearly be a negative, esp. if the culture is not thoroughly supportive.
It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.
I have a lot of interpersonal work, with people all around the world. Going into the office just to talk on these people on Teams doesn't give a productivity boost. Being able to do this or not is a skill, just like coding is a skill. I try not to bog down my team if I'm deficient in some skill, instead, I work to improve it.
I’ve seen team managers blame design work being poor or unproductive on having remote workers when most of the team isn’t. And then when everyone is flown in they claim a great victory when the output is the same or worse. I think many managers with poor performing teams are using the opportunity to blame poor performance on remote with zero data to back that up. It’s simply a useful group to blame for all your problems often due to hiring a team of less experienced people so you can pay them less.
Pretty much agree, but ultimately the onus on hiring the right people is on the hiring manager. The pattern here is management blaming their own incompetence on anything that doesn't lead back to themselves, such as WFH. Then you have higher level leadership eating this up because of their own laziness and incompetence. Incompetence all the way up.
Totally agree, since the individual's situation varies so much (both intra-team, in their personal life, and across time) the only conclusion that can be said at a c-suite level is that nothing should be broadly mandated and that teams should have the option to decide on their own about office vs remote.
I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.
Right, I think the important nuance is that "it depends" and therefore, top-down C-level suite dictates on Remote/Hybrid/In-office requirements are generally more punitive than useful.
If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.
I think you’re touching on an important point though, mix of in person and in office is really challenging, because some people see each other all day while others are literally more disconnected. It creates a heterogeneous mix of work relationships, and I’m not so sure that handling mix WFH WFO is purely evident of poor team management, it’s just difficult to have a cohesive team when some are physically there and some arent
I don't know how important all this social science stuff is to be honest.
I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people.
What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly.
Remote is a forcing function on better written communication.
It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?
In my experience, remote takes already-inefficient and error-prone workplace communication cultures that manage to muddle by with in-office workers at "merely" a significant productivity cost, and makes it totally unworkable.
The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work.
Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.
You mean having 3 layers of management do a drive-by at developer desks in the space of a day, with conflicting asks is bad?
Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time??
I sometimes wonder if all the time spent inputing and tracking various not-naturally-generated "metrics" is worth it. Manager and executive hours analyzing this stuff and devising systems for it and arguing over which systems to use and crafting mandates and plans, can be extremely expensive. Expensive ICs like programmers can easily lose 10-20% of their time to task-tracking and time-tracking and shepherding various things along that only exist for better tracking. Like, if we just didn't do those things at all... would productivity go down? Or up?
The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.
Yes, and often the management instituting such granular tracking systems are also the people who want to go outside it for their own "quick asks".
It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases.
Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences".
Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics.
You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.
Oh and to be clear I’m less commenting on productivity, more on the soft stuff like sense of belonging to the org, enjoying time at work, and building real relationships. These things are strictly local, no one expects to form relationships with the accounting team in Ireland, and having an explicit process for interacting with them is probably more important than an explicit process for interacting with your manager.
How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team
I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date.
The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.
Yep, I've been bullied the whole time growing up and I didn't start making friends until I was about 20. I am friendly but I'm not good at making friends with people I might never meet again at parties. Wfh makes me want to hang myself so maybe have some empathy that not everyones a thriving social butterfly like yourself.
I am sorry for what you had to go through and I have empathy for the fact that it's not easy for everyone to make friends.
That being said, there's lots of meetups, clubs, organized sports etc etc for people looking for a structured way to continuously hang out with a group of people sharing their interests. The key thing there is that it's voluntary association though.
Being forced to hang out with coworkers who you might not even like just because they happen to have the same employer shouldn't be a substitute for putting in an effort to make friends.
I dunno man, work is most of my life so it should be an enjoyable social experience for me otherwise it's just a mind-numbing time sink. For me its really important that I find a workplace with a good culture where I can have social interaction several days a week, because it's quite draining for me to constantly go to meetups and try really hard to make friends.
There are some social spaces I try to go to regularly but the people who turn up are not always the same. A lot of the time I'll manage to connect with one person, which is hard for me, and then I will never see them again even if I keep going to the same event. Or I see them about once every couple of months at the event. Or on the one day I'm going to the event my energy levels are low and I feel overstimulated by the novel environment and I don't manage to really speak to people. Putting myself out there a lot to new people in new places is something that I find stressful because I have been rejected and made fun of for trying to connect with people for the majority of my life. Honestly, i always had an issue with this, but I became better at being sociable in uni. Being in my house most of my time has brought my XP down and I find that the more I am stuck inside the more I regress in my abilities. I find it really hard to leave the house once I become unaccustomed to it. My brain just starts to break down.
I think a sports team might be the most consistent spaces but I'm pretty dyspraxic and when I do team sports I end up getting anxious and like hitting my team members in the face. I can't do that sort of thing.
What works for me is having a consistent space where I can slowly build up relationships with people over time. This is sort of how things have worked for the whole of human history. Work, school, uni, sports teams. This is where people make most of their friends. Always has been, always will be. And again, if I have to be working for most of my waking hours, I don't want to do it alone in my little box. It's not enjoyable. And saying that I must meet all of my social needs from concerted effort outside of work on top of all the other responsibilities I have is insane to me.
When I have a workplace that i know i can go into and see people a couple times a week, my mental health and energy levels are better and my social XP is stronger and I can actually enjoy socialising. Last year i was mostly remote, this year I've found a company with compulsory 2-3 days a week and lots of other young people. Its amazing. I finally feel okay. And yeah if I was working somewhere where I hated everyone and I didn't get any benefits other than money I would LEAVE. Don't stay at a place like that. Your mental health is too valuable and work should enhance your life otherwise you're literally ruining 80% of your waking moments.
Edit: on the point of leaving, yes i know some people have kids and can't move around like that. but this is why i'm pro mandatory hybrid not 100% in office. workplaces should be okay with you needing to stay home when your kids need sth or you coming 2 days if you live past a certain distance instead of 3 days. My office accomodates this. I come in 3, others come in 2 because they have long commutes. Everyone is fine with it. 100% wfh just punishes anyone who doesn't have kids.
Sorry to hear about your personal issues, but this statement "100% wfh just punishes anyone who doesn't have kids." is you projecting.
I work at a 100% remote company, and most of us are married (no kids) or single. We, or at least my specific r&d team have social lives outside of work and live in urban areas. Some of us even do a weekend dnd session online.
Hybrid mostly doesn't work from an economic pov. If the company employees can do their work 2-3 days from home, it's likely they could do their entire job from home, and a company just can't afford to spend money on expensive commercial real estate if it can avoid it.
If you're married that helps too. I live in London, not the middle of nowhere, but I find it pretty hard to make friends here who aren't just closed off to new people and hard to get to know below the surface unless you are sort of around them for a long time. I dunno maybe the American culture of friendliness helps too. British people take months of consistency to get past the small-talk stage with.
Edit: Also I now work at a company that has a 3 day office policy, which is one of the top reasons I chose the job. I think they're doing fine and they have no intention fo changing. It's not impossible.
I mean I get the intention of this stuff, but some of it skates dangerously close to accidental discrimination. I am not accusing you of this, but just saying people should be mindful it can accidentally lead you down the wrong path.
Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens.
Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important.
I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.
No its highly important that they will grab a pint after. If you've ever been part of a sports team you would know team morale is vitaly important to them and they socialise and party together ALL THE TIME. The military do it to. Anywhere where you need strong teams you need to have downtime with your team. Its WAY harder to do that remote. I've rarely made friendships with people 100% remote. It's not natural. And I never want to work somewhere where there aren't a decent amount of people that I would grab a pint with after work. And I'm like gay, nonbinary, and mixed race in like an predominantly straight male tech department. I love drinking with my colleagues it makes me feel like I'm not a robot and like I care about getting work done for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't give a single shit about making money for someone else.
IMHO, each team does something poorly, and it doesn't mean you go on a fishing expedition to find everything else they're doing poorly. Rather, you focus on what they're doing great, and incentivize/reward them for that. As a manager this has what has worked for me over the years, but YMMV.
It has to be a mix. If I only encouraged my employees at what their good at, and never pushed them to get better in areas they're lacking, things would go down-hill over time.
It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.
Well my style works for me, and your style seems like its working for you. Its quite possible we're managing completely different set of personalities. For many of the people I work with a job is just means to an end, and the concept of continuous improvement is alien to them.
> the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects
> in the setup that's decided
I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
>you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.
'place of work' is usually (here in Czechia) defined in a labor contract. So that cannot change because 'team decided'. I have contract with my employer, not with my team.
> workload splitting where syncing isn't very important
I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.
This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.
It doesn't make syncing harder. I've worked for high-performing global teams for DECADES, so this debate is amusing to me. It shows me which companies absolutely cannot scale past a certain point, and which perpetuate terrible communication and management practices papered over with in person smokescreens.
Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.
(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)
This kind of nuance is also brought up in sister comments, but you probably explained it best. With the caveat that C-suite mandates should not be the only determinant; let teams have some degree of autonomy and self-organization, and be able to advocate for what works best for them.
It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.
It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.
I hope it's OK to dissent here since all the other comments agree with you anyway. Regarding this:
> The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?
I am 100% in the remote work camp, but I agree with you. Every company has the right to make the choice that works for them... whether empirically driven or not, it is their prerogative to choose. But they do then need to hire the people for whom that choice works. And as people looking for work, we need to accept that some companies are non-viable for us because of the choices they make.
The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.
> If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement?
As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.
The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.
Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.
In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.
There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).
In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.
Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?
I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.
But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.
Also, people's circumstances change over time, but their work not so much.
As a new grad, hell yeah I want to be in the office to interrupt and be interrupted for the learning, interact to know other, hope for serendipitous encounters, have a good time after work, meet a potential partner, yada yada.
As a family person with decade of work history, I see it as losing my balance, a hindrance the interruptions, the banter, the random assignments because you ran into someone in the cafe, having to deny after hours stuff again and again for the kids or appointments, having to take the whole day off for a 2 hour appointment at lunch, blah blah blah.
Not all new grads are the same, neither all seniors. Let people pick. The illusion of loss of productivity has been shattered and there's no going back.
There was a point in time when all you could buy was a black ford model-T. Ford would love to do that. But it can't anymore. Times have changed. Took Ford a long time and many executive shifts to move on and get along with reality.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.
> At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.
The debate is dramatically simplified when you take into account the gargantuan environmental impact of maintaining massive 24/7 climate-controlled office spaces that are vacant other than 40 hours a week (vacant for 75% of the week) and having people commute 15 minutes to 1.5 hours a day to and from these office spaces in motor vehicles, versus simply not leaving your house and re-purposing these sky-scrapers for societal goods like cheap/free high quality public housing, etc.
You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.
You used "some" in a lot of your sentences and that sums it up perfectly. Some people work better at home, some people work better in an office. Some jobs require more collaboration than others. I am the first to admit that meetings are usually a tad more productive in person but arbitrary "two days at office" policies make no sense, especially if there is not a policy where everybody has to go in on the same day(s).
Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.
What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucked up, not your remote/not remote thing?
Yep very much this. Why on earth would you choose to live somewhere that is a 3 hour commute. DOn't do that to yourself. Move. If your commute is that bad, either you're choosing a stupid place to live, or your town planning is terrible. That's the problem, not working in the office. Everyone should be able to do a few days hybrid comfortably. If you can't, you should have a job in a city closer to you.
It's absolutely true that the real problem in the US is our public transit (and by extension basically all post-WW2 buildings and infrastructure) situation, but if I'm just a guy running a software company, there doesn't seem to be much I can do about that. Hence all the hand-wringing about remote work.
I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.
The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.
Also a very good point! We kind of have the same, in the sense that lower income brackets have tend to have a longer commute from the city limits, but in very dense cities like Frankfurt I see no real solution to that. Apart from a few "social housing" offers that need to be built on a quota for a lot of new buildings.
Texas -> Michigan is a very long way. Afaict this trend really got started with covid, where people fled to their home towns, right?
> I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work
The best. I have 14 minutes by tram from door to door.
COVID certainly was the thing that made this arrangement possible for me, though it's an open question how sustainable it is. Every all-hands for two years now has started with our CEO telling us how "energizing" it is to be back in the office. Things are a little different for us Linux weenies (sorry, I mean DevOps professionals) but I still kind of see the writing on the wall. That said, the housing situation is such (I brought enough Big City tech-job savings with me that I effectively own it outright, though rates were so low at the time that I do technically still have a mortgage) that I can now easily survive and even thrive with a nonprofessional job.
Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.
My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.
It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.
You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.
Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.
Well, I just can't imagine how constant scrutiny and involvement would help what is ultimately a management and expectations failure. "We hired x to concentrate for long periods of time and improve our test coverage, but they're not so good at checking their email and responding to customers within 15 minutes, guess I'll need to start calling them frequently so they get better at that".
Seems like poorly considered delegation, or a system problem. Good managers should be able to identify or discover through conversation if someone will benefit from more specific and frequent interaction, and bad ones decide it'll be a good choice and work backwards from that.
In other cases, or if established up-front, one should expect a certain range of regular capabilities be within some agreed upon parameters; you probably wouldn't ask your system administrator to get on the sales floor, but you might ask your sales people to be able to work the cash register and lock the doors.
I have worked with people who needed explicit instructions for every step to perform, and if they complete what is assigned to them they will quietly sit and pass the time until they are explicitly told to do something.
This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".
If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.
However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.
Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.
If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.
Thanks. Unfortunately, you do get people who are just poor at their job sometimes, it might be ability or life circumstances (death/divorce/illness/?). The real problem is when there's a mismatch of expectations - if I hire a principal for my team, and expect them to be independent, if they require hand holding or guidance, it doesn't matter how good their code is. Similarly, if assign out bug fixes to someone, and they don't do them and instead do the "juicy" work, it's not going to work.
The only real problem are the people who I can only describe as maliciously incompetent. They do the bare minimum that is asked of them, take advantage of all of the freedom and lack of definitions (no core hours meaning I don't work 10-4 Monday through Friday, that sort of thing), and when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.
The only solution for these people is for them to be part of large companies with rigid policies that they are guardrailed into and have no way to test the boundaries of. If you have one of these people on your team you need to get rid of them. My experience is that there's usually one in every 40-50 people. If you get one early on your team, you're in big trouble.
I think what you've described here is some sort of circular dependency on the mismatched expectations you described, and probably a failure of communication in both directions.
I could probably fit the description of the malicious person you described, but only because it wouldn't map to what my manager knows exactly how to work with, almost always defaulting to a doubling down of otherwise unnecessary tests of my competence, as defined by their uncommunicated expectations in terms of how they differ from what I'm doing and why. More specifically this seems to manifest as micromanagement. It's quite shocking to watch, it doesn't take much to set things on a bad course, and it's very difficult to recover from.
In the case of my last job, I was working remotely from the the PST timezone with people in Vietnam, Spain, and Germany where the manager was. At first I was waking up for a 6am morning meeting every day to have a little overlap with the rest of the team, but later I'd discuss it with my manager and change it to 3 days a week. I made it clear that despite being in a wildly different timezone, I'd do my best to be in attendance at the most important of the new meetings that were accumulating as the result of org change and boilerplate agile, and be available for a few hours in the morning and a few hours later at night that overlapped with other developers who needed to chat in real time with me, so I could get a block of relatively uninterrupted focus time in the evening or late afternoon. This actually worked pretty well, I kept up with responses on Jira, code reviews on Github, and delivering the features and bugfixes I committed to. I was originally hired as a contractor and then moved reluctantly to employment, which is when my boss started asking I keep core hours, which I agreed to. Things kind of kept moving along fine, but he seemed to be accumulating resentment about something, which impacted his ability to communicate respectfully. He started "checking in" during strange hours for no tangible reason, and when I didn't respond immediately, he would just keep sending more messages. Whenever I did respond, he'd seem to come up with an excuse for why he needed my attention, such as for a status update on something I'd already visibly commented on. My response was always to try and be more communicative, but surprisingly he kept getting more toxic, and more passive-aggresive, in what seemed to be an effort to remove what agency I had to get work done.
> when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.
All 1on1s concluded with him seemingly re-affirming his belief that frequent supervision is what he should do, ignoring anything I had to say, and this just kept compounding what almost resulted in burnout and depression.
At one point for example I had added and finished a ticket for a simple typo fix in a route, but noted that there was another ancillary issue worth looking at, not specifically related to this ticket and should be looked at independently at another time. He commented and said the ticket was incomplete until the ancillary issue was looked at, even though there were much higher priorities. So it sat paused or in-progress for some time while I finished my priority work, meanwhile he continues DMing me almost daily asking for status updates on this and other ongoing work. I eventually get around to investigating it, conclude that there's a good but undocumented and unbroken reason things were like that, and it's not something to pursue at this time, ensuring that I documented my findings thoroughly and visibly. He then assigned it to himself, realized he didn't have time to work on it, and then asked in the general slack channel if anyone would look into this, "because ___ refuses to", subsequently backing off only after I called him out on it and he wasted his time concluding exactly what I did, almost as if I'm a capable software dev
After that, he'd proceed to start moving meetings around to hours I couldn't possibly attend, cancelling 1-on-1s, and eventually I'd get laid off. Honestly it was insane and I hope he gets his head checked. The only reason I didn't burn out was because I mentally denounced his behaviour as laughably petulant and I shouldn't do anything beyond what I'm doing to appease it.
I've had other instances at other companies, and I do believe I'm the problem, but me as the problem wouldn't exist if people who had good communication skills and empathy were promoted to management. I've had 1 on 1s with spineless people approximately my age who spent the entire meeting prodding me with vague questions to try and get me to admit some pet wrongdoing, only to deny it upon being asked what they're looking for, when just stating it clearly could have helped work through the issue. Managers often avoid confrontation and resort to passive-aggresion.
Forgive the typos here, wrote it on my phone and it's a bit to review.
Edit: from his perspective, I understand that he was probably faced with home life problems and an issue of someone not conforming. So my point is that things appear wildly different depending on what your sense pf normal compliance is, especially if you have no apparent difficulties with shifting focus for example
I dont think this is about workers preference.
People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation, but when directly asked nobody will tell you they like micromanaged (seen this).
Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.
> People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation
This sounds more like it could occur at least temporarily when most people get some categorically new task that's potentially costly to screw up, and I could imagine it being voluntarily requested rather than overbearingly applied.
> Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.
I feel like managers identify a risk and apply their toolkit to it, which often ends up being increased oversight regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. It may or may not be I suppose, but it seems like only a niche person would respond with greater effectiveness in response to more frequent and perhaps intrusive scrutiny.
Seems if you have staff that needs constant oversight and micromanagement, it's a waste of your own time. Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?
I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
> Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?
I had to do something like this. Not every hour, but several times a day was needed to keep this person on track and productive. And no, I did not want to check on an otherwise-functional adult that frequently. Nor did anyone else, but circumstances led to them working on my team.
> I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
Yes, that was the best option and is ultimately what happened. Going through the required HR hoops was just as much effort as micromanaging, which is why no one bothered to do it for several years. It was easier to shuffle them off to another project and tell the lead "they're alright, they just need to work on communication".
> If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention.
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
I don't know the big companies. But a lot of smaller firms I used to install software systems own their own buildings (basically, a big residential house or a small warehouse). The company owner owns the building, the actual company leases the building to the owner.
A company owning its own building is common. The parent comment said "This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments" which doesn't sound like a business owning its own building.
It's common practice afaik, there's no secret there. I used to work for one and they are small peanuts.
Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.
That's not an example of company executives personally profiting or being invested in the company's real estate though. The comment to which I replied implied that executives personally profited from the real estate.
> This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments
Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
> Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.
Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.
In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently.
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time
Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.
As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit.
Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
A hard disagree on "companies that need them more than they need the company". A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing. But this is the culture we're in, paying the friends of the board millions regardless of their performance, because the board knows they get their backs rubbed as well.
Which always made me think it was odd South America didn't get more attention. I worked for Auth0 for a long time and they were started by a guy in Argentina and one in the US - the lack of time difference came up as a major benefit despite the geographical separation.
>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
> But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".
Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.
It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.
No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.
Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives.
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
> Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead
Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.
> For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support
Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...
> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.
The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants.
As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago.
Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one.
And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year.
Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
>I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.
Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.
Maybe you are living in IT centers like Amsterdam or Berlin, but anywhere in south or east Europe 100k USD annual salary is almost unreachable for local employment.
Best talents are not paid at the similar level globally. Even tech giants like Google have different salary for same levels in different countries inside EU. You can get x2 if you move from Warsaw to Dublin or x3 if you move to Zurich.
> Maybe you are living in IT centers like Amsterdam or Berlin, but anywhere in south or east Europe 100k USD annual salary is almost unreachable for local employment.
100K is indeed very high for S or E Europe, but in my experience there are very very few people who actually get that kind of money. Any of those are absolutely on the top end of a bell curve. Also I'm quite certain that the quantity of those kind of workers vs remote workers in USA is less than 1%.
> and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.
I don't think this can be true. An employer has to follow labor laws pertaining to the country of residence of their employees. Typically some sort of legal entity has to be established in those countries.
Not necessarily. You can sign a contract and push all legal stuff to the employee. Employee creates an LLC or other entity and selling consultancy services to the US client. No labor law attached to this relationship.
> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips.
What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.
People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position.
So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?)
I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to.
Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears.
Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away.
B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
Why not? Companies will eventually sort into ones where likeminded people are together. Some will be more friendly to remote than others. If I want to work in person with people, I’ll join a company that agrees. If someone wants to be remote, they might have to join a different company.
Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working on-site is borderline morally evil.
It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.
A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"
I love remote work but I don't know if I'd call it morally evil to have people on site. There's something to be said for being in the same physical space as your peers and the social bonds that form, etc.
But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.
"Net negative" is a more neutral way to put it. The way it's stated, if there is no productivity benefit and the employee doesn't like going to the office, then it's a loss for the employee and no gain for the employer. Overall a net loss in utility, no weightings needed in that example.
I see stories of people who have worked remote at a company for a year or so, and still have yet to see the faces of any of their coworkers. I get that dev work has a disproportionate amount of basement dwellers, but man, that is still so crazy to me.
For what it's worth I can have interesting, fulfilling relationships and friendships with people I only know online, both in and out of a work setting. But it is fun to hang out in person.
Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working remotely is borderline morally evil. It's unhealthier (loneliness, lack of work/life separation, physical inactivity), it's bad for the environment (climate control of a 100-people office is less energy intensive than that of 100 individual homes), and its costs are imposed on the worker rather than the business.
To be clear, I don't honestly believe the previous paragraph. I'm just using it to illustrate how one can pull out a "just so" story to argue the exact opposite that you're doing. I believe your argument is flawed in that makes a universal condemnation supported by generalisations based on local specifics.
I work in a company which, for all intents and purposes, allows its employees to be almost fully remote and yet a significant number of us actively choose to come to the office (partly motivated by things like free brunches from office management). The overwhelming majority of workers come to the office on foot, on public transport, by bike, or by electric scooter, and a tiny few come by motorbike. How is that "borderline morally evil"?
I agree with your example paragraph. I think it is only beneficial for highly motivated senior engineers with families to work remotely. As a junior who doesn't know what I'm doing half of the time and feels demotivated without support, and as a single young person without a family that got cut off from building a community because of COVID, when I have worked mainly remotely I've been severely depressed. Not seeing people or leaving my house for most of the week makes me want to die not work harder.
Well said. When I share a similar perspective some people seem to assume I'm extremely extroverted, or don't have friends or hobbies outside of work. I'm not very extroverted and I do have a full life outside of work. I still prefer a decent office to WFH, which makes me feel extremely isolated after awhile.
Yeah, I'm not extremely extroverted either which is an issue because trying to make sure I reach the minimum amount of socialising I need to not tank my mental health is quite hard for me when I'm expected to do it 100% by myself. When you have a life at the office, you have a certain amount of passive social interaction and I think that's actually easier for people who are a bit shy. I certainly have a few friends left from uni and hobbies outside work, but trying to make new friends without any settings where you meet every day is quite hard imo. And I do not have as many friends as I would like so it feels hopeless for me. Or it did until I joined a sociable workplace with compulsory office time and other young people.
GP implicitly assumed a large portion of cost is commute by car beside the general time/happiness cost.
For one, one would need to look into how many car commutes are avoidable to more precisely quantify the species-level irrationality of fossil-powered forced cramming of office towers inside cities day-in-and-out.
I work on-site, and #1 and #2 of your argument do not apply to me. You forgot to define preconditions. You are finger-pointing at those which work on-site and have a relatively high distance between home and work. I walk to my workplace, which is healthy and does not produce any CO2. And I am not loosing sleep, because I walk 10 minutes. Just because you dont like a thing doesn't mean you thought it through.
Because firms that are on-site-only don't scale unless they pay top of the line money to move people. Access to a remote workforce is a force multiplier that will be more relevant the more time we go forward.
Not quite, you're going to be paying rent for example regardless, you may have to invest in some office furniture which is usually subsidized but if not then consider the savings you would make through the year overall, perhaps transportation costs, lunches etc. Things add up fiscally. Ignoring the lifestyle benefits.
This is nominally true but when I was looking for a place to rent I needed to be sure it had a space for remote work, which made it more expensive. I tried working from a desk in a wide part of my hallway or in my room (shared with my spouse) and it really didn't work. If you have young kids a separate room is pretty much a must, and ideally, a separate structure (like a small backyard office).
Yeah, I guess this aspect is underappreciated here on HN: most "hackers" also hack in their spare time, so probably already have a desk (maybe even a separate room) where they have good working conditions at home.
In many places on Earth one would need to pay a substantially higher rent/price to get an extra room to use as an office. And in a family situation one would ideally need two extra rooms...
You don't have work anymore as a constraint, but it's not the only constraint to where people live.
If you are single and want to live alone, you can certainly optimize the hell out of housing costs. But of course, each single constraint you remove will probably let you reduce your costs by a bit.
Working remote need not be conflated with wanting to live in the suburbs. Indeed part of the reason I negotiated remote was because I live downtown, and the office is way out in the burbs.
It's generally more expensive to buy/rent a smaller place in a metro area near the office and commute there than it is to buy/rent a place with a home office in a more reasonably priced area.
When all expenses are considered, working in-office can (and often does) cost the employee way more money than remote.
You forget that the same 'investors' that own the companies, also own the buildings and all the companies that finance, build and service the buildings as well as the whole 'economy' fueled by employees commuting and lunching etc.
I think it's going to be both different for different people and different for different types of jobs. maybe making web apps is not affected at all by work from home where as some other jobs, say game dev, where you'd like to tweak something and hand the controller to your partner to test immediately "does it feel better than the last tweak from 15 seconds ago?" is more affected by work from home? In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat. Or back to games, I suspect adjust local-multiplayer gameplay is not something you can do without actually having multiple people in the same physical location.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
How is industry productivity not relevant to the point being made? It’s quite possible for there to be a direct correlation between work productivity and industry productivity.
You are also discounting many other benefits of remote work. While yes someone may be doing laundry when they should be filling out expense reports, they are also not spending time on a lengthy commute. As a result they are also spending less time at the gas station and for car maintenance bills. I’ll admit I do personal chores on the company’s dime, but the time and resources I save by working remote make up for it at the very least.
I guess your boss doesn't really care if you managed to do laundry during work hours. You personally might care since you saved yourself some time, but that is a very personal thing. OTOH, if family is at home, it is also very easy for them to grab you for something seemingly important. With the "right" demanding wife, your boss always looses.
With the wrong demanding coworker or (especially) midwit middle manager who wants to talk about sportsball or politics, your entire company loses, not sure what your (rather sexist) point is tbh.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
By focusing on the word "wife" and calling it sexism you miss the point of the comment entirely. I agree with your side of the conversation but nitpicking words and throwing in an attack doesn't help the conversation.
I absolutely did not miss the point of the comment entirely, and responded to it fully, pointing out that distractions are just likely to happen in the office as at home, given the wrong set of coworkers.
How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.
I think regardless of where you work there is an upper limit in time you actually are productive during a day and it is way way below 8 hours. Usually I do more in the first 2 hours of my shift than I do during the remaining 6 hours. Others might be more productive at different time of day depending on their own internal clock. We just can't be 100% focused on hour work and uninterrupted for so many hours.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
No I don't want to work if i never see human beings, i have no connection to my team and I'm deeply depressed because I am a young single person who doesn't have a family waiting for me at home
Your coworkers are not your friends and your company is not your family, and if your job is keeping you from having friends and family outside of work then you need to find a new job or place to live.
Your coworkers can 100% be your friends what the hell man. You must be very unpleasant to be around if you refuse to make friends with any of the people you spend most of your waking hours dealing with. The key is making friends with coworkers who are a similar level of seniority to you who you get along with. My job isn't preventing me from having friends or family outside work at all, but I choose not to be miserable and antisocial for the majority of my waking day. Most people make friends at work, school or at sports teams. It's not weird to like making friends at work. I dunno how my job could be preventing me from making friends elsewhere but yeah its hard to spontaneously make friends in other settings when you don't naturally see the same people regularly.
But my main point in the above comment was that I don't have the morale to do shitty work to make a corporation rich unless I have human connection with my team. I don't value any fucking corporation enough to lift a single finger for them. It's only having other humans around me that makes work feel at all bearable to do.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
We have a system where we clock in and out. This reduces the situation to "be clocked in when you work and clocked out otherwise" which is easy to handle psychologically.
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
This mirrors the issue I had with work from home to a tee. During the pandemic, as soon as it was safe, I went into a ghost town of an office right up until they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home. I was eventually able to find that coffee shops filled a similar function for me, and now spend a majority of my productive workday at one.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
> they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home
I do think about this. I think my current workplace office has enough people that this isn't likely, but if they did get rid of it, I guess I'd try to find some co-working facility and see how that feels. More likely though, I'd quit and find some other job that does have a local office.
To me this is almost like internal vs external locus of control stuff.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
Due to concepts like 'trust-based working hours' employees learn to monitor how much time they spend working. So when you get more time as an employee, you don't spend it on the company, which doesn't pay you more. Instead, you spend it somewhere else, like on your family.
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
Then your friends should reflect a bit. This study shows that there isn't a positive nor negative effect. If your friends are working additional hours each day when they work from home and they are representative of this study, then they are working more time to be as productive as they used to be.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
I think were at the point in capitalism (late stage corporatism?) that employees are more or less going to capture 'excess productivity' for themselves by doing chores and running errands. Same goes for the office, they will go around and gossip, several long trips to the break room and walks.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
I'm genuinely surprised that your typical exec isn't looking at things like this thinking: "We're spending this much a month on office space for our 500 staff at this location. Let's knock that down to 100 and push everyone to work from home". Give ourselves a big pat on the back and a nice bonus for saving a few million a year.
If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.
In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.
Startups DEFINITELY have been looking at it this way for the last decade, to the point where I only know of a few startups that still have physical offices out of the hundreds I interact with in various capacities.
Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...
In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.
They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.
Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).
The typical exec's tenure is shorter than the six year office leases so they'd never see any praise or bonus for making that change. As far as they're concerned, the option doesn't exist.
As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely.
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
This is the problem; for “focus” work, perhaps. But as a TPM, you know that not all work is “focus work”, and the “collaborative work” suffers when done remotely. You also know that even “focus” work doesn’t make up even one whole job that someone can do without any “collaboration”.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
I know I am more productive for sure. I started working remotely in 2017, but I wasn't allowed to jump right into it. I had an agreement with my manager and I started doing one day remote a week, then two, and eventually built up to fully remote, and eventually even working remotely from all over the world. But it wasn't overnight, I had to build that trust.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
WFH is an invention equal to washingmachine + dishwasher where 2h each day is not being lost anymore by unproductive activity. With plenty of externalities on top of the lost time.
If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.
This is something governments with an interest in protecting employee wellbeing could step in.
The employer pays for the time you're engaged in working AND trying to work by commuting. That 10-15h/week would, as you say, show up pretty quickly in reports.
But incentives are tricky. I can imagine companies would add the requirement that you live 10min from work because they only have budget for that much time spent on transportation costs. Like with RTO, that would backfire but I'm sure companies would insist on that instead of remote work.
People are different. For some it really increases productivity and wellbeing. For others the opposite. I'm not surprised it is about the same on average as measured by work output.
I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.
I will hopefully soon join an on-site only work place with the pre-2015 exception for the plumber visit. Don't really like being at home all the time, what do I talk to my wife about then?
Then again, I do choose jobs where I don't commute 3 hours into SF. More like 30 minutes, preferably by bike rather than car (location:Europe)
Working remote showed me how much I value direct interaction with people. For me, and I spoke to a lot of people for whom it's the same, the sweet spot is a hybrid model. Three days remote, two days on-site. Sometimes the other way round, depends on the tasks for the week.
If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks. That being said, I also will never work 100% on-site again, only if I can walk to work, which given my location, will not happen in the near future.
> If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks.
I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).
I'm completely opposite, so much energy wasted dealing with people. Just give me the requirements, only contact me for technical reasons please. I'm not a social animal, I work to collect my salary to pay bills, full stop. Less contacts means better work quality because I'm not wasting my energy somewhere else.
Based on my experience working in IT on complex projects, it is better to work together in the same room/office, if you have a team that is not all seniors and if you work on a greenfield project where you have a lot of structure to put in place.
Often with people that are doing something new to them, they might have a "mental barrier" of doing something new, because there are a lot of things to take into account, and discussing with somebody experienced in person helps more that having a video call.
Also making some architectural decisions might take a lot of time if there are multiple potential solutions, each with pros and cons (ex. which message broker / http client / log & metric aggregator / sql database to pick). Being in the same room, a few senior developers and possibly the infrastructure guy makes it easier.
When working on already launched projects, the architecture is already in place and doing maintenance or adding new features does not need a lot of communication/synchronization between team members, so doing that remotely is not an issue. However it might be if you are not familiar with the project, or don't have experience, or you have associates in the team and you need good performance from them.
I don't know if it's the same when working on simpler projects.
Depends from case to case. It might be a complex project, but the lead/architect already has the right answers and there will be smooth sailing.
On the contrary it might be a project with constantly changing requirements, new portions of tech stack for all the team, tight deadlines, some tool chosen for a task does not support something, bugs, estimations did not meet reality. In that case (a challenging project) I would prefer the team in the office.
Also if you are a begginer, I would recommend to search for work in office if it works for you.
I dislike commuting more than half an hour, however I would like the team to be together if it's something challenging.
I know it is hard to commute long time, especially if you have other responsibilities, but that does't change my opinion on what is the best for the team.
Please tell us how you’re so certain companies that have productivity affecting their $1T net worth are more concerned with their $5b real estate.
Please don’t let it be that a VP is manipulating productivity numbers so that their drop in the bucket action will move the price of their SFH they own.
FAANG are the best case scenario for your argument, with billion dollar real estate portfolios and more RTO-heavy. Just because this study reached a conclusion doesn’t mean that it’s the same conclusion other companies’ reach. Especially when those companies’ have their bottom line at stake, “skin in the game.”
Again, by what plausible incentive do you think non-FAANG companies, with tiny real estate assets, usually leases for a multi-billion company, would impact their productivity for tiny help in the overall real estate market?
I admit I was being a bit flippant. But there's a case to be made from the "same people owning all the companies" argument that the investors in all these tech companies are also invested in commercial real estate returns. So basically it's Larry Fink who wants you back in the office, and hey he owns your co so the board will listen to him (being flippant again here).
Larry Fink and BlackRock don’t own the 6% of Google managed by BlackRock index funds. Nor does Google or other co’s decide to make adverse decisions to their morale and productivity because of a very minority shareholder. What you’re describing is conspiracy theory.
Occam’s razor. These co’s came to the same conclusion co’s like OpenAI did, that in persons benefits outweighed the negatives. Only when the conclusions don’t agree with the preferences people like you have, that the cope, conspiracy, and rationalizing come out. Also, what may be good for the individual, doesn’t mean it’s good for the org.
FAANG as an amorphous blob of business doesn't care about commercial real estate. The very real people that make decisions at and for FAANG absolutely have concerns and interests outside of FAANG'S stock price in the decisions they make.
Be specific. I’ve already pointed out the absurdity of the case people try to make that someone with the intellect of a Google VP is fudging numbers in hopes of moving their SFH price. It’s pretty damning that there are many replies with no specifics, only vague insinuations. Ya, that’s about how well these criticisms have been thought out, of course.
Not at FAANG - but my company was scaling up and bought a much larger office space right before covid, so a lot of the push does seem to be "We just spent a bunch of money on this and need to justify it to investors, it looks bad when they come in and the office in 90% empty desks"
This is something that gets trotted out every time this topic comes up. It's got little to do with the actual conversation, and it only relevant to some companies.
Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.
If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.
If you own a big office building and companies don't need as much office space then you can't charge as much for rent, and the property loses value. Similar to how online shopping has led to a bunch of malls closing down
Do you mean that the landlord is instructing the employees of it's tenants to RTO so that he can keep his income and property value? How does that work?
"Hello CEO of Awesome Inc, it's me CEO of Rentalz Co. Your people have to return to office so that I can keep collecting the rent".
Does anyone have the link to the study? I'm tired of news articles referencing and summarizing their interpretation of a study, without giving me the option to validate the claims made.
Boring email jobs where people are on their computer most of the time anyway and meetings are simply status updates, there's no reason why remote work is any worse, and likely just boosts productivity because of the mental health benefits of no commute, better environment, no distractions, etc.
In terms of jobs which require more creativity and collaborative rigor, I imagine remote work is where that element suffers.
How is productivity measured in the kinds of jobs that can be done from home?
For manufacturing it's easy - just measure the output per day and number of working hours spent.
But how is it done for finance, marketing, software development, creative work and such where the output is either limited (you don't need more financial reporting than last month) or is entirely different in scope and complexity every time?
If productivity could be objectively measured it seems to me it would be easy to determine objectively whether WFH is better or worse, but the discussion seems to be mostly based on personal opinions. Some feel that workers must be slacking off at home, some feel that they get much more done from home.
Depends, did you get a sweet tax deal for locating your HQ with the implicit understanding that putting the HQ there would drive tax revenue back to the city? Did you tell your friends and top investors of this decision and did they purchase real estate in the area with the implicit understanding that they'd be landlords for your new HQ?
Work from home is a cost savings companies so it would seem they'd be motivated to downsize office space, but this isn't what's happening. In a world where costs are always the highest priority, I'm not buying the culture/work ethic argument.
I recently went RTO in a major metro, the post tax hit was between 10-15k USD, I was fortunate to already own a home near enough to my office. The majority of which comes from parking, and lunch.
Pre-pandemic you didn’t really notice these things, but it adds up fast.
Work is not only getting a task done. It also involves helping struggling or new colleagues. How does "learning on the job" even look like with remote work? When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler. This does not happen with remote work and there is nothing to compensate for this.
> When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler.
I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.
If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.
Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.
> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.
I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.
In my opinion is that the decision to be on-site or remote should be made at the team level. A team, that can't perform well onsite won't do any better remotely and vice versa.
# How I know if a team member will perform well remotely:
- They take initiative. They take ownership. They learn how to effectively use different communication tools, and then they use them. They ask questions with the goal of solving problems. They get things done.
# How I know if a team member will perform poorly remotely:
- They wait for others to tell them what to do. They tend to disappear. They don't communicate.
- Turns out that these are shitty traits to have for onsite team members as well.
# How I know if a manager will perform well remotely:
- They would perform well as a remote team member (see above), and have a team capable of working remotely.
- They lead by example, know how to build trust, understand how to set achievable short-term goals that lead up to big longterm successes.
- When questioned during meetings, they build trust, confidence and alignment.
# Some signs that a manager will perform poorly with a remote team:
- They prefer a command and control approach to management.
- They lack respect for their team members' time, experience, capabilities and / or intelligence.
- They are unable to explain problems such the team can help solve them.
- This leads them to micromanage.
- They perceive questions during meetings as a challenge to their authority, which makes look insecure.
A micromanager will see more success from poor performing team members if they're all onsite or, as is often the case, frequently on all day conference calls. A micromanager will also quickly lose their best team members.
Does it matter? If the company wants you in the office just don't work there, the people who want to work in the office can work at those companies and the people who want remote can work remote companies. Then we're all happy.
Only causes issues when remote people demand to be able to do it at companies that value in person working. Studies are irrelevant because at the end of the day you'll never change peoples minds.
Of course, I'm just saying this is how the problem was born: remote workers were going to remote companies, than the remote companies flipped over and messed up remote workers lives. As a remote worker you should go to a remote company
lets take this at face value and assume productivity is equal no matter if in-office or remotely.
now thinking in business terms. you can run a (remote compatible) company without having an office at all, which may reduce cost very significantly, giving you an economic advantage. being a remote company also forces everyone to exchange thoughts/data/documents digitally one way or the other, making automation ideas with AI tools more feasible, which would then be another economic advantage that still needs to be realized in the future but its there.
now add ontop that people don't waste their time and pollute the environment by commuting, that employees can live wherever they want (probably: way cheaper and with higher QoL) than in commute distance, so they have more money left each month to spend (instead of it going to insane rent/...), which stimulates the economy in theory.
not going into the discussion that some people actually like to be in the office with others, basically forcing everyone else to do the same indirectly or directly. just the pure economic advantages. did I miss something that counters my points?
I am fully remote and have been for a long time but I don't trust productivity studies, especially if they just find what everyone wants to hear anyway.
If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.
I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity."
Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.
To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.
If that were the case, it seems like it wouldnt have taken covid to tip the balance so much, and it would have tipped back much more quickly. I've never worked at a company that would come anywhere being classed as optimizing for productivity, there has always been a huge amount of wasted time and resources.
Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.
It's a shell game to increase property value to pump the nominal asset holdings of the company. "See, this office is in demand and worth $50 mil" (WFH price: $5 mil)
Yeah, measuring productivity is a complex topic. You probably don't even know the productivity yourself, or by story points or whatever.
But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.
That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.
I’ve said this before, but if productivity isn’t lost, it’s at the expense of a very overworked manager, in companies that weren’t built remote-first, and don’t operate primarily remotely.
This is a more complex issue than simply measuring work output of one person and comparing it to their work output in different locations.
For my wife, it is objectively false to claim that remote work is better for her teams, in her specific situation.
I really do not understand what could possibly be hard about it for the manager here. People have tickets in some issue tracker, they move them into whatever status they're in, and the manager just sends out some messages to check in on the status if there haven't been new updates in a few days. Yeah, you also have 1-1s, status meetings, performance reviews, etc but these are all things you'd have anyway. My managers have done basically nothing different for me while I was remote and everything seemed to be fine.
And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place? How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group? How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it? And god forbid somewhere have a job that isn’t software engineering…
Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
> And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place?
I mean depends on the team but approximately:
1. Discuss high level initiative
2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions
3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)
4. Prioritize work and assign tasks
> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?
Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.
> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?
Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.
> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).
Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
>Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).
> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two :
- working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money
- working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO.
Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies.
Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
Sometimes the optimal solution involves failure and cancelation. Im not saying the cancelations you experienced were correct, but unless you have a crystal ball, some strategy change and failure is expected. Of course that isn't an excuse for frivolous strategy, but the line is finer than most ICs understand.
Depends on your definition of meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that public school teaching, working in a nursing home, working as a social worker is meaningful, but I wouldn’t find any of those to be interesting.
Working on a startup pursuing your topic / field of interest might do the trick.
There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.
Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.
> or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.
I think there are lots of jobs that are meaningful in a macro sense, but tedious in a micro sense. Most teachers I know like having the identity of a teacher, feel like they are meaningfully contributing to society, but really don't enjoy 90% of the actual work they do.
The only thing I've ever had issues with doing it remote is writing compliance policy, operational guidelines, and organizational standards. My boss wanted them re-written once every year into a different format and it destroyed my soul. What we had worked fine and didn't need to be re-written in my opinion.
I am not sure, but I have always pursued this kind of work by default and aggressively. Of course there will always be ups and downs, but when it stops feeling interesting, meaningful, and challenging for a prolonged period of time, I generally move on (or switch teams/projects!). But while it remains overall interesting and meaningful, I stay and hold on to it for as long as I possibly can. This has meant that I haven't job-hopped very much to climb the salary ladder, but have been very engaged and interested in every position. It's been a worthwhile tradeoff.
I think any given job is neither interesting nor boring- it the attitude that makes it so. For example I am the person who don't like doing the stuff if I know how to do it - it boring for me, while my colleague is happily dingo stuff that is clean while skipping obscured tasks. Following this you cannot give someone interesting task, you can only guide person to choose the right perspective
There is a lot of boring and low "meaning" work that needs to be done. To give a trite example, washing your dishes and keeping your house clean. Or brushing your teeth and flossing. Or making revenue dashboards tracking income and making sure that data reporting is accurate.
Doing the dishes is boring but it's offset by the satisfaction you feel from having a clean kitchen. Some tasks are both boring and make you feel useless after because all you're left with is a report that will rot in a middle management storage cabinet. I think a few 19th century German philosophers wrote about that extensively :)
I would also raise the point that actually having relationships with your colleagues and team can make work a lot more meaningful and make you more motivated. It is impossible to do that if you don't meet them. The idea that corporate work can be motivating at all when you exist in a vaccuum in your bedroom is idiotic. Almost no work is ineherently interesting.
Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom. If workers are screwing around when there is work that needs to be done, that is indicative of an environment that doesn't provide the proper failsafes.
That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.
> Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom.
For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.
Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.
I feel like you are wearing some very strong rose colored glasses; I personally think it’s naive to believe that remote workers are always highly engaged. People optimize their work productivity around different personal goals.. and I have worked with many who seem to try to do as little work as possible to not get fired. Which often involves a lot of loathing and procrastination.
It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.
Or it's just boring work. I'm employed as software engineer with no reports as a team of 4 engineers. The project has entered maintenance mode and we just investigate bugs, chase teams we're dependent on, confirm a change works on 4 different versions.. my productivity has tanked.
I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.
Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches.
The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
I started managing a team with the “no meetings, let people do good work” philosophy and I can just say that I’m glad I was given the space as a new manager to find my feet, because I didn’t find that it worked well when taken to an extreme.
Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.
The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.
Everyone replying seems to be assuming this time is all for standups and status meetings, but in practice it’s probably about half an hour a week for status updates for us to. The rest of the time is a mix of reserved time for synchronous technical collaboration (e.g. reserved time for pairing, time to talk about technical architecture at a higher level and for people to opt in to presenting some of their work for feedback)
My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.
For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.
I'd blow my brains out if I has to sit through 6 hours of useless meetings a week.
I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.
They are doing far better now than with fewer meetings, and they’ve consistently agreed that the additional meetings are valuable, so yeah, I think they are.
The important thing is to identify what the outputs (of meetings etc) should _be_ and then work backwards from that to how to accomplish the task _remotely_ and _asynchronously_.
I started work in a new company December 2023 and they did exactly what you said and boy, am I feeling great about this workplace! I do focus on my work, I achieve results, I make sure they are visible (some documentation and internal knowledge base management are involved but I don't detest it; it becomes the way to gauge my performance and I am not against it) and everyone is happy.
It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.
Seriously. As an engineer and engineering leader, I cannot maintain focus to code, sit in meetings, and a variety of other tasks for more than 2-3 hours without a break. It is good to get up, move around, catch up on the news, etc. Taking appropriate breaks and conducting self care gives my mind an opportunity to decompress, allowing me to come back to work more focused and productive. Very long sessions (5+ hours) without a break tend to run into a wall - I may still be doing work, but the quality drops precipitously. Sometimes, I can raise my productivity by distracting myself with home chores (e.g. laundry). Sometimes, I find a quick dip into the news or a catchup on our friend group's discord server productive. This may not be the same for all of us, but studies have repeatedly shown breaks improve productivity for most individuals. Being outside the office, I find it much more convenient to take a productive break without having other coworkers distracting me. Looking over studies and suggestions, it seems interesting to me that tasks like meditation, power naps, small chores, snacks, listening to music, and interacting with pets are much more easily conducted in the comfort of our homes.
Or you can be in the office and speak to people. I've never been in an office for a professional job where chatting, popping down to the canteen, stepping outside for a bit etc are not completely normal things to do and not frowned upon. For young people without families and pets, having a thriving office where we can take social breaks sometimes is important. Otherwise I literally just sit in my room and want to die. This is why I'm glad my company has 3 days compulsory.
Not only creative work, but manual work too. It's been over 100 years that Frederick Taylor showed regular breaks reduces fatigue and increases productivity. [1]
Taylor would, correctly, have knowledge workers filling out very detailed timesheets of their daily activities in order to optimize overall efficiency.
Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.
Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.
Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.
As margins slim in our industry, which they will, would you rather have management understand the true costs of things or would you rather have over-hiring followed by mass firing?
I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.
This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.
Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.
This if course needs to:
1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and
2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.
Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.
Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.
They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.
Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.
That’s very industry-dependent. I worked in a tech company that acquired a creative production company, and the tech leadership attempted to impose a metrics-based approach to what was a traditional creative process. That process had obvious signs of waste, including a high failure rate, excess travel expenses, etc., when compared to averages.
The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.
A semi-relevant anecdote: over the Christmas break (which was > 2 weeks for me), I was pouring 12-14 hours a day into my personal hobby project and didn’t feel tired or bored at all. I literally couldn’t stop working on it.
Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.
People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.
It’s not completely wrong though. To be clear, I think basically any role can be meaningful to someone, depending on their views and upbringing.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
>>As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
The payment is a pretty big part of it. If you offered people the option to be paid the same amount for doing nothing, how many people do you think would stay doing their exact same current job vs leaving and perusing a hobby?
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Mark Twain
This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.
I enjoy software development. I would develop with or without a paycheck. The pay is a bid to make me give a shit about what my employer wants me to develop, a bid they need to keep higher than every other person who has money but no ability to make the things they want.
TBF, I think the balance shifts when you're at home.
At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.
This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.
I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was obvious to say "Good morning, what's up" and have him tell me.
This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.
This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.
Our Ruby guild is ~6 ppl and counting. We are all remote, and not a single one is in the same geo.
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
That doesn't work for me. I want a conversation, not an announcement. My experience in chat is I post something "BTW ... " and it's crickets. Quite often no response. I feel unappreciated and like I wasted everyone's time. (maybe I did? but my experience at all previous work-from-office companies was I was well liked)
Even if there is a response it may be hours later which is not what I'm looking for. It's the conversation that sparks ideas and understanding for me.
My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.
This is just the truth. And the responses I get when pointing this out are either along the lines of “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” and “technically you can have those same conversations in the slack #random if you wanted.”
Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
> Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.
> Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).
> “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”
This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.
While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.
Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.
Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.
Great response. Also not everyone is working on exciting GPU related projects.
Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.
Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.
Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in. I've never had that experience. People are always somewhat intersting and like to actually talk. There are some off days but it's never like that. And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working. I've had people never turn their cameras on. And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable. The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
For every positive that I can possibly read about in office work. Not one can combat my horrible situation of working next to a colleague with post nasal drip. Imagine every 60s hearing the sound of phlegm being sucked through a throat.
I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.
That's an insanely specific situation that could be remedied by getting your seat moved. Loads of offices have hot desks these days anyway. What I'm talking about - young people having no chance to build a network of peers because the end of their university years were ruined by COVID and now they are expected to work from home without interacting with humans ever, leading to severely negative mental health outcomes - is ubiquitous to all remote working situations. the only solution to it is some level of compulsory office attendance. it is only since i move to an office with 3 days semi-compulsory that I have started to talk to people regularly again and regained the ability to work efficiently and not want to die.
Yes, your story is an isolated and minor anecdote and my story is a massive social ill that I am furious that older people want to overlook and then wonder why younger peoples mental health and productivity is getting constantly worse. So I don't appreciate you bringing up your anecdote as if it has any relevance to what I'm saying.
p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.
You're lack of appreciation maybe related to your fury.
Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.
In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!
Nah mate, you pulled that one out of nowhere. It's pretty widely understood our mental health issues are due to lonliness and social isolation and social media (fake virtual socialising) mate.
There is a distinction to be made between loneliness and solitude though.
One can feel hopelessly lonely in a crowd, one can also find great solace in solitude.
In fact, another great cause of mental health issues is the apparently growing inability for people to stay still, instead constantly vying for interaction (and often resorting to that quick virtual dopamine hit loop, sometimes even when face to face)
There's balance to be had, both ways, but not everyone have the same needs.
I'm very aware you can be lonely in a crowd and find solace in solitude. I've done both. I'm talking about my real-life experience here not a hypothetical. Working 100% remotely as a young person trying to find your place in the world is crushingly lonely. Choosing sometimes to spend my weekend just doing my solo hobbies while other people are going out, without giving into fomo, is solace in solitude.
I agree, not everyone has the same needs. But I think on average the majority of people would benefit from or would be able to handle a mandatory hybrid situation. If a few fully remote jobs remained that may satisfy the few unusual people who are actually that disturbed by social interaction, or live in such odd locations that it's not possible for them, that would be great. And I am absolutely sure those opportunities will remain. But I think it is bad for humans to aim for a mainly remote working world, both for our mental health and for the dynamism of our collaborative work. I really believe that people who genuinely thrive significantly better in 100% remote vs a couple days in the office are less than 10% of the population. We are social animals and we increase our risk of dementia the less we socialise, it's just our biology.
They don’t think about what it’s like for young people to onboard.
You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.
It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.
Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.
Yeah asking questions on slack or sth feels so much more like you're imposing on people than just saying sth out loud or shadowing someone a bit organically in person.
1) I'm not a robot. Humans exist in physical space and it is necessary for our mental health to see other people in person. We cannot get our social battery filled by virtual interaction alone. 2) Otther people don't participate in these things very often when I try to suggest them. People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces. Therefore, the solution is the office.
1) heavily depends on the person (you seem the extraverted type who seem to suffer the most; for instance I can go weeks without much f2f interaction and not be disturbed by it).
And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...
Don't worry I moved to a company where people have to come in 2-3 times a week and the culture is great and I'm not depressed any more. It works much better than any other setup I've tried.
My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.
> My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme.
I like that and the description that follows because it shows how much the whole thing is neither monochromatic nor even linear. Even when talking inside an {ex,in}troversion model there are all sorts of subtle mechanisms and processes at play, and that's not even beginning to talk about other aspects, from varying shades of ADHD, Asperger, or autistic traits, to delayed sleep disorder syndrome.
> Humans exist in physical space and it is necessary for our mental health to see other people in person.
It does not follow that the deep social interaction that is beneficial to mental health has to happen at work.
One can WFH and see people outside of work. Some people enjoy deep social ties with coworkers, others prefer keeping work at a distance from their personal life.
> People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces.
That is incorrect. Some people do, some others don't.
> Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in.
There are loads of places like this. The irony is that in such context people enjoy the watercooler talk as an escape from the hellscape that is their 9-5 shitty job, doing everything they can instead of their job to make their experience less miserable.
> I've never had that experience.
Lucky you.
> And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working.
This has happened all the time for me (could be zoom, could be Slack). From scheduled informal chats with teammates to regular chats with close people to members of non-work or work channels of interest to random ones via Donut with yet unknown people, it's lively and on everyone's own terms.
> I've had people never turn their cameras on.
Ever since I have been remote they all did. If they don't it's either one of the odd low bandwidth situation and they save it for an acceptable audio experience, they're on the move - and open about it, with either an apology about possible noise when speaking thus unmuted or setting expectations about their ability to talk or follow - and audio only "phone mode" is more practical, or they're at home and privacy respecting of their SO or otherwise guest.
> And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable.
I am genuinely empathetic to your situation and am glad to hear from a nearby comment that it has resolved - at least to an extent - and you found an environment where you can be happier.
I say so because I realised long ago that people can come from all ways of life and be wildly different in their needs, and having been through similar suffering for something in the order of three decades - only from a symmetrical end - I can relate.
And I say "end" and not "side" because it's a continuum, there are no sides, there's no team A vs team B, and it's not a zero sum game.
> The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
By and large "pro WFH people" are not arguing that everyone-and-their-dog must WFH, instead that WFH does make sense and is a true net positive for many, and that the recent pro-office-for-everyone discourse that it is inherently more productive because humans is at best loaded with prejudice that fails to take into account a good chunk of actual humans, some raising their voice, others staying silent, and at worst has hidden agenda.
The pendulum was mostly stuck one way for aeons, then it progressively moved with the rise of the Internet, and swung full-force with COVID. Now it's swinging back hard the other way. Change is hard, old habits die harder, but I'm hopeful that someday we'll find balance, but for that we need understanding of each other.
I enjoy water cooler conversation because it is refreshing and revitalising for me to have social interaction breaks throughout my workday, not because I want to do anything but my job all the time. People are not productive all day and that's fine. Also all jobs are work and are not really that fun. I don't enjoy working that much even if it's a good job. So I'd rather have other people and things to focus on sometimes. When I'm at home I feel like all I have to think about is work, and my breaks involve doomscrolling on my phone, or trying to force myself to take a short lonely walk for my mental health.
I have had shitty office experiences don't get me wrong, but since becoming a software engineering professional, I find that I am in enough demand to actually choose a decent place to work. Since entering this field, I had one horrifying remote job where I never learnt what my colleagues looked like and felt miserable and demotivated all the time, and I've worked two other places where I've been more in the office. When working in the office, I've never had horrible experiences like I did when I worked shitty non-professional jobs. Being a software engineer is cushy as hell and I find it weird how some people complain about their tech workplaces as if they're not some of the chillest places to work in person that you could possibly be lucky enough to work in.
Thank you for your empathy for my past situation. However, the problem when pro-wfh people say "we want you to have a choice" is that my shitty remote job was technically hybrid. I could go into the office. People even tried to organise a single office day a week. And because it wasn't mandatory, half the time I tried going in the place was a ghost town. I don't want that, ever. So yeah I LOVE that my job has (semi)MANDATORY days otherwise there would be so many colleagues of mine I would never have met and I am great friends with them (By semi mandatory I mean we have a 3 day target average. So you're not penalised for missing a week or sth its just the mode of your weeks should be 3 days. Which is a great system)
Basically, for me to have a choice to live the way I want there HAS to be companies with MANDATORY office days. And the pro-wfh people demonise that SO MUCH.
90-minute lunches, extended ping-pong table visits, "attending" meetings one doesn't contribute to are various ways to waste time at the office, but no one is eager to banish those. It appears it's only a problem when people slack at home; on the flip-side, no one is offering bonuses for those when they work until 7 or 8 pm because WFH can blur division between work and not-work life.
"Productivity" is just the flimsy fig leaf for RTO, a bunch of people have openly admitted that it's all about the "energy" they get from being around many people at the office, even of those people are slacking. It's not surprisingly that such personalities are overrepresented in leadership roles.
I’ve worked in an office for over 25 years. I’ve never chatted with anyone at the water cooler (those, these days it is a water dispenser machine that can dispense cold or hot still water or sparkling water). I assume this water cooler chat thing must be from farther back in time.
Water cooler chat doesn’t need to involve a literal water cooler. It’s an expression for the casual chit-chat that occurs when you encounter someone in the hallway.
Yes, but even 20+ years ago when I worked for a large Silicon Valley company: most of the people I interacted with were in different buildings so it was easier to email them than to go find them. Then we acquired a team in another country. When I went remote in 1999 one of the reasons I could justify that was that when I drove to the office every day I usually spent each day communicating by email and phone with colleagues.
If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is
Usually my employers haven’t let me buy as much equity as I’ve wanted to, they severely constrain the employee equity pool allocation and dole it out as occasional rewards and reserve most for non-worker investors and owners or executive roles.
For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc
Maybe you should consider working for publicly listed companies then, there is no mechanism where they can limit how much equity you own.
The one customer owned cooperative I have worked for did limit equity to one share per shareholder, in addition to being the most pathologically corporate and political company I have ever worked for or known off. Maybe worker owned cooperatives work better.
I don't need to work at public companies to buy their equity. I work in earlier stages to gain access to pre-growth equity.
I would certainly not want to work at a non-worker-owned cooperative. That's not an incentive alignment for me as a worker, and it's a hierarchy placed above workers. Customer-owned coops are only meant to be good for the customer, it’s standard hierarchical wage labor bs for workers.
Not that worker-owned ones are able to avoid politics though - all social relations have varying degrees of success and conflict.
If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.
The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.
Productivity is one factor. You also have to consider getting away from people at home, joining people because you live alone, sexual pursuits, and other topics that people are dishonest about yet are largely motivated by to work in office. People think RTO is about real estate, but it's really about executives looking for extramarital affairs.
This is not what I want to happen, but I have to think the American tech worker gets screwed in the world where remote work is the norm. If you make the labor market global, there's a lot of really smart Europeans who will work for half or a third of what American devs will. Can anyone refute this line of thinking? I'd love to be wrong.
This topic keeps coming up when remote work is discussed and I think a lot of commenters are showing their age.
Off Shoring is not new. I managed a team of 7 Indains (6 dev, 2 QA) in Hyderabad as contract workers (not company employees) in 2007, 17 years ago! Before zoom, slack, meet, teams.
They were great at what they did, they were cheaper than 8 US employees, but the relationship definitely had pros/cons that are not easily understood.
The biggest pro was actually the timezone, I could ask for fixes/features and when I came into the office in the morning they'd be done. The cons were many, including quality of work and efficiency.
Totally understand offshoring went out of fashion prior to remote work and Covid. I'd be curious to know how management is evaluating that post Covid. I have to imagine many of them didn't learn their lesson, and I also imagine the quality of software engineers outside the US has risen in the meantime.
1. Labor law is local. This adds (on a per-country basis) legal risk and compliance costs, as well as operational costs (e.g., you might need to have specific policies that apply to employees in specific countries).
2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.
3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.
When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.
I work for a small tech company in the US (~25 employees) and a few of them are in Europe. My boss didn't seem to have any issue hiring them and he wears a lot of hats, and we didn't hire them due to cost but to their very specific expertise.
No, sorry. These are all defeated by hiring contractors.
The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.
The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.
Consider this situation: you hire a contractor. They work for you for several years, and then you fire them. The contractor goes to the labor court in their country and files a claim stating that, yes, their contract says that they are an independent contractor, but no, since you've employed them "full-time" for several years continuously, they are a defacto/de jure employee. (Which is a valid argument under the labor laws of certain countries)
What will you do:
- Spend the time and money refuting their claim? (You need to find a good lawyer in that foreign country; lawyers are expensive; and someone on your side needs to spend their time coordinating with them)
- Ignore the claim? (Not a good idea if you ever want to visit that country in the future)
The claim itself might be nonsense; that's immaterial. You're faced with a Hobson's choice if said contractor drags you to court.
(Addendum: this is why I made the point that labor law is local. When you hire a national of a foreign country, in general, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the courts of that country for labor related disputes.
I am not sure if a clause in an employment contract stating that the agreement is governed by U.S. law would be accepted by a local court; and even if it did, in litigation, you'd most likely have to represent yourself before the local court to make that objection.)
You don’t fire contractors, their contract just ends. Additionally, the contract is often with the company, not the individual, so their employees aren’t in any legal sense working “for” you. If an employee wants to litigate, they’re opposing the contracting company, not you.
This comes with some downsides of its own, but generally this circumvents most labor issues. And of course anyone can sue for any reason, but if the argument is that the individual will pester you with lawsuits, can’t anyone do that to anyone else about anything?
Fair enough, yes. If you're contracting with a third-party company that takes up the risk of hiring the employee, that does circumvent these issues.
Re: the lawsuits—yes, the barrier to initiate litigation is low (in most countries); but in my experience, most folks only start litigation when they feel significantly wronged.
Problem is, given the difference in cultures (something you pointed out earlier), an act by the company that is perfectly standard in the U.S. might be interpreted very differently by someone from another country.
One consideration that helps local workers is the time zone; a remote company may yet choose to hire locally to reduce the time zone span.
Another is communication; companies want to hire people that can communicate fluently in a shared language.
But the best solution is to just become better at your job. The best programmers are all in the US, so it is easier to learn from them and join their ranks. If you are no better than the competition, then a company is justified in hiring in the cheaper labor.
In a vacuum, both of those first two considerations are easily resolved by hiring even more remote workers from an area with low pay (and low cost of living), and who share similar timezones and primary language.
But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.
(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)
We started down this path before COVID, it's just accelerating now.
I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.
[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.
If it could smoothen the inequalities between countries (and even within a country) in term of income, real estate/education/healthcare prices, I am all for it.
If working from home for all the jobs that do not require physical presence (building a building on a location for example) was a right by law, I can imagine centralisation in big cities reversing and a lot of interesting smaller communities starting to flourish more. Which in my opinion is a great thing.
People advocating for on site work are people without an inner voice. They need to constantly externalise thinking.
Anyway working from home does increase productivity for the individual, improves the economy due to more disposable income, benefits the mental health of those with an inner voice, and stimulates family life.
And we all knew this from the day one, it’s just middle management feeling the need to have someone around to breathe around their shoulders and boss them around, and the C-level pushed by the commercial landlords because it’s all about their benefit.
I've been working remote for 5 years, so this is anecdotal.
But it's also incredibly obvious and intuitive. It relies on the right company values, the right processes and the right incentives. But when done right, this will always hold true IMO.
My company did it's own research and found it was sales professionals who could not be trusted with WFH, but engineers for the most part were just as productive ..However, they found they their teamwork and multi-departmental collaboration suffered immensely and were not willing to make technology investments when people could just go into HQ or the many other offices we have.
I don't know about productivity but the quality of my work is better, and I am a much more sociable person when I am happy and awake than when I am draggy my ass, still sleepy to an office.
I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.
And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.
And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?
Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?
Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?
And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.
But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.
Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.
(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?
Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.
having worked in two countries and several companies in my relatively short career, i personally find that fully remote work has a lot of limitations.
even when hybrid work is implemented, you require a strong communication culture. this is not a given for all companies, however. when you sit with your team across the desk, simple things like asking about a small detail takes orders of magnitude less time and effort than the digital alternative.
regardless of your opinions on taking breaks with your colleagues, i found off-work conversations happen much less often when everyone is doing remote. i am not arguing that everyone hates their coworkers (or maybe mine hated me and only stood to talk to me when in person), but despite post-pandemic era, this pattern still seems to hold up.
i would love to hear how others have done things differently in this context. the point remains that there are some things that need to be in place before you could fully make the most of remote-only teams.
With the entire commute debate being what it is I will just point out that in Austria there has been somewhat of a solution to this for a long time now - it's called the "Pendlerpauschale" (commuter's flat rate).
If you live far enough away from your employee (20km+) you are entitled to an added monthly bonus to your salary - depending on your estimated commute time.
I'm ok with hybrid work schedule now that my company make th mandate. But, I think we are really dumb for scheduling meetings in the early hours while others commuting to work. Plus, once in the office everyone finds a corner and dial into zoom. Isn't that dumb you think?
It really does, I find it close to imposible to concentrate in an office, having to blast music through the earphones so I stop hearing everyone and every movement they do.
It mostly has to do with ADHD (without the H really), but it's a valid effect.
Bloomberg doesn't even bother to link to the study that they're writing an article about? Makes me really want to believe them when they hide their source so I can't actually read what it says for myself ...
The one thing I see companies demanding onsite work never do is… commute time paid as any other work hour… sure some pay commute costs or km costs, but those are nothing worth compared to your hourly wage…
Can we just acknowledge the complete an utter failure of managegment around this debate (I am management, btw) such that we can't settle this one fair and square.
We all have expectations and results from individuals. It doesn't take a Fed study to answer the question around an employees productivity. Either it's better, the same, or worse.
I'm all for remote and hybrid work. Manage by results and what's the issue? Super strange. Get together every so often to catchup, do the human thing.
I've had anecdotal evidence of firms falling behind because so many talented employees tell them where to go when flexibility isn't an option.
My hypothesis is that the debate is difficult because of some mix of difficulty in precisely measuring productivity (which everyone can see) and in the mix of most tasks which work 100% fine remotely and some tasks that work better in-person ("the human thing").
Agreed. It's just so clear to me that role(s) flex between those set of tasks as need be ... and that should be clear to both manager and managed ...
The manager shouldn't be a control freak about being in the office 5 days a week ... and the managed shouldn't be a whiny baby when asked to come do some human stuff ... somewhere in the middle is the promised land and it should't be that hard to find.
Having said that ... I had an experience with a colleague recently that reminded that not much of this is based on reason.
> The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.
To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.
Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.
> The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.
They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.
Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.
Actually, this does not apply to good economics papers. Good economics papers have much stronger ways to identify both the independent and dependent variables using microdata from public and private sources.
Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch.
Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.
I thought this would be obvious, but making up some assumptions about industry-level adoption of remote work based on the composition of employees and then seeing if those industries broke from their pre-pandemic trends requires companies to mechanically adopt WFH policies regardless of whether they are good or not (somewhat reasonable during the peak of covid, but not really for much long after, and also requires the timing of those shocks to line up) and then also needs that shock to be so big that you can see it at the industry level, separate from the general covid shock, and then also risks finding incorrect impacts because covid unsurprisingly had industry-specific effects.
Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.
This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.
I'm not surprised. Of course people are going to say that working remotely helps them be more productive. Working remotely is nice. They're going to say whatever bullshit they can to keep doing it. Instead of arguing about whether it's' productive or not let's just call it what it is: a really nice perk.
These discussions always miss the main point. Remote work gives you the opportunity to decide what suits your life best. It enhances the possibilities a company offers. The main conflict is people trying to convince other people that their way is the right way and vice-versa. Find out what works for you and if you are better off, everyone will be better off around you too including your employer. That is why I mostly ignore these findings. I know what works for me and no study can convince me otherwise. And I know some colleagues like the office more and I'm glad they can go there.
Offshoring has been a thing for a few decades now. So has the technology that facilitates remote work. So I don't think this is some new push for offshoring.
In fairness, there does seem to be a lot of concern amongst the management class around keeping their jobs if they don't get back into the office.
Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.
My two cents on that last bit: I have a team of people working in the US, more than half of them from India, and another team actually in India. Culturally there's a fair amount of overlap, but the real ball buster is the timezone difference. There's no way to both get regular face time and have everyone work normal hours.
On the other hands this is interesting for sys/cloud admins/ops workers.
With colleagues in different timezones you can say goodbye to on-call shifts and being woken up in the middle of the night for issues. An indian or euro colleague can do maintenance stuff on infra used by US developers and customers and the US ones can do the same for indian/euro facing ones. All this without the fatigue and risk of mistakes that comes with working very late into the night or early in the morning.
I've worked in a team with indian, euro and us workers and we could find a way to get meetings because indian people do not usually know how to say No. So they tend to stay later than us euro guys and we would have most of our meetings in a short window in early evening (India) / afternoon (Europe) / morning (USA). Actually that was a good thing because it meant most of our calls would be concentrated in that same time window so you could focus on actual work the rest of the day instead of having calls spread out over a full day of work and lots of interruptions / context switches.
Counterpoint, we have a team where 1 person is in India. 100% of our oncall issues happen during US hours. This person is not on the oncall rotation because of the timzone issue.
I'm in one of these offshoring countries (South Africa). All I've seen lately is a ton of remote jobs are now limiting themselves to remote within the country or region, not even timezone-aligned. Hard to find EU/UK remote work that doesn't lock me out. I see the same with US-only remote work.
The result is also that local salaries have started going down again, in spite of the high inflation. There's no pressure anymore to pay better, when the foreign companies with real money aren't buying your employees anymore.
Not saying it's all completely dead and no companies are hiring abroad to here, but right this second, the remote dream seems to be shrinking. If anything the offshoring will be more traditional with setting up office in the locale and paying local salaries.
