+1 — cut my teeth on learning C in middle school by hacking up a DikuMUD derivative. So many great memories of that period.
And not just C but Linux (Slackware!), sockets, even kludging the single-player DOS port to be two-player by playing over a serial cable to another PC. And annoying my future Dropbox teammates by including an extra space after/before parens in function calls (and if/for/switch statements), putting { on its own line, etc as was the convention in that code base IIRC.
Qlora + axolotl + good foundation model (llama/mistral/etc, usually instruction fine tuned) + runpod works great.
A single A100 or H100 with 80GB VRAM can fine tune 70B open models (and obviously scaling out to many nodes/GPUs is faster, or can use much cheaper GPUs for fine tuning smaller models.)
This strikes me as a good place to start, both for founders who are running something for the first time and also for more experienced execs as a good review of the fundamentals. In other words, I wish I had seen something like this when I was starting Dropbox in that a lot of our scaling problems would have been prevented by doing these basic things properly and consistently.
Mind sharing some of the lessons that you thought would have been the most valuable to know from the beginning, instead of having to learn the hard way?
To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something.
At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have.
It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)
>They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
Well, this makes sense, since IBM is effectively a consulting firm now. This is how all consulting firms operate -- there are tons of these all over the place in DC.
I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.
I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).
The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess).
Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company
You can buy this precise thing from Citrix/VMware (I used it with a password, other people used it with smart cards). It’s extremely common in healthcare.
Or from Amazon — their offering is called Amazon WorkSpaces. (I say this to point out that “cloud workstations” aren’t just a legacy offering for legacy companies; the vertical is healthy and growing.)
The issue is, these solutions are frequently retrofits of a local-first graphical environment: whatever you think about the actual X protocol, I think a display-server model that can be distributed across a corporate network in arbitary ways would make an amazing difference: You want to show something to a coworker? Send them a "window invitation" and, when they accept, an arbitrary window is mirrored to their display. Pairing? Everyone has a common "virtual desktop", and you just have two people's desktops temporarily merge. Instead we have nonsense like Wayland that is retreating from the mantra that "the network is the computer" (Amazon WorkSpaces is particularly disappointing here: there is no way, afaict, to have two screens logged into the same desktop: something that's trivial with tmux+ssh. My ideal is "tmux, but for GUIs")
To actually answer your question — these coworking spaces do have IT staff. They’re mostly responsible for maintaining the shared infrastructure, but they’ll help you out with your needs as well, if you ask. If you reserve a cube for months at a time, you can certainly bring in a full workstation setup, and they’ll help you to wire it up. (Not that you’d need much help; both power and Ethernet drops are right there for the taking.)
It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.
I'm a bit ignorant of IBMs business model given how many times they've changed businesses. What you're saying is that IBM has a business that generates revenue, but that business continues to exist (and generate revenue) despite people not actively being at a desk, not that IBM has somehow managed to find a way to make money from empty desks, right?
WeWork makes more money from an oversubscription model, and thus could also make money from desks being unused. (Have 10 desks, rent out "13", and hope that all 13 people don't need desks at the same time).
What I don't understand is the multiples at which WeWork was trading.
I could definitely understand the business model (it's cloud computing for real-estate!) and especially cool for remote/business travelers since from what I understand it was rather easy for a WeWork user to use any of their facilities.
It's more that they bill by the capacity used and it's possible to cancel at any time.
Same way a WeWork is more expensive than renting your own real estate but it's probably simpler than getting into a long term lease. Plus if your startup has to scale up WeWork can accommodate, unlike your typical office rental.
I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons.
1. They prefer a predictable schedule.
2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues)
3. They are good at or enjoy office politics.
4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.
As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.
The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.
We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
> It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels
I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
As some one currently doing an internship this is wait I don't like what COVID-19 has done the workplace. It's much harder for me to build relationships with my coworkers, over hear conversations (in a good way) and have informal extemporaneous interactions when me and my coworkers aren't in the same physical place.
I'd say on top of that, remote work comes with some of the same communication problems as social media platforms. Without facetime, the assumption of goodwill starts to wear way.
The quickest way to resolve political standoffs in remote companies is to fly people out to an office and stick them in a conference room for a day.
The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.
This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.
== People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.==
The usage stats for our MS Teams instance shows this. Before COVID hardly any messages, after a massive increase as you'd expect, but private messages outnumber public messages 10:1 or more. Several times I've found out that there are multiple private chat groups all for the same P1 or Project instead of using Channels that all staff can see.
I saw the same thing with Slack stats at a company. Plotted over time, private messages started at like 10%, but eventually reached something like 80% after a couple of years.
I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.
MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:
- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)
- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)
MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.
>As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.
5. don't like the barrier to communication, isolation, and distraction that WFH brings.
It's not for everyone, don't act like WFH is some sort of amazing thing that only people in bad situations or who are incompetent dislike.
1. is straight up incorrect anyway, my schedule has gotten more consistent since working from home. It's entirely based on your own ability to start and stop your workday.
Yeah, I'm 7 months into being forced to WFH and I still hate it. I like the work/life separation going into the office brings. I actually liked my commute since I took the bus, so it was time to read and decompress. I like seeing and talking to my coworkers. I like having the variety of simply being out of the house. I like not having work stuff at home, so when I'm home, I don't have the temptation to do work. I'm glad WFH works for so many people, but it sure does not work for me.
Same, been in semi-forced WFH since late March, and don't like it. It'd probably be fine if I could go to a cafe or had a proper office. As it stands I barely leave the house except to occasionally grab food, and that's not nearly enough. Honestly the last time I felt this bad was my summers in high school where I didn't have a way to go anywhere, or money to do anything with.
WFH is fine for me. WFH without my usual extensive travel and without the ability to otherwise mix up my schedule is tiresome. And I have a good home setup and have been working remote to greater or lesser degrees for around 15 years or so.
Yeah, I think the combination of not being able to realistically take breaks or travel is having the larger effect. My home setup would be fine if I had the room to put my desk somewhere not in my bedroom (it's arguably more comfortable than my office) but the routine of: roll out of bed, make coffee, desk, make lunch, desk, make dinner, couch/desk, desk, roll into bed sucks a lot.
I’ve just started nuking entire two-hour blocks of time out of the day, which is always pre-filled with back-to-back half hour crap meetings, so that I can go out on a bike trail. Most of the time people don’t seem to care, but on occasion when someone asks me why I wasn’t at their precious half-hour crap meeting, I respond that I had some kind of “carers” issue, and if there is anything relevant they need from me to send me an email about it, and I will reply with the info. Amazingly, that seems to effectively address whatever issue the crap half-hour meeting was for.
I'm fortunate to have a forest/river trail I can walk to. So long as the weather is halfway decent I do at least a mile or two (and can do up to about seven) every day. And there's basically never anyone on it.
Yes and I did for a while earlier this summer. But I fell out of the habit and it's getting cold now here in Minnesota. It was nice to just have it part of my daily routine.
"...looking over shoulders and taking attendence."
Being micromanaged remotely isn't much fun either. Like having a stalker. I'd get voice calls within minutes of a Skype status update. "Ah, no, everything's ok. Just grabbing lunch. Thanks for checking."
These are truly the worst. I remember management being very upset when they switched from hipchat to slack as they no longer had such fine grain controls over visibility. Its somewhat inconceivable to me that, by now, they haven't realized it will only backfire.
Introverts have never been the majority, even in tech. I'd also argue that with the rise of social media masquerading as development tools (gitlab/github), extroverts are now more over-represented today than even just a few years ago.
Has anyone else noticed that the typical IT introvert turns into an extravert when talking to other IT introverts about the things that they’re passionate about?
> 2. They don't like being at home (family or workspace issues)
Wanting to work somewhere other than your home does not mean you don't like being at home, nor that you have family or workspace issues. I would assume that some of us have a newfound appreciation for the energy and architecture of the modern cities and offices. I love my home but it's just not the same kind of space.
Or, their home is not a place of work, its a home. I dont want my home to be anywhere near my place of work, or anything like my place of work. There should be a clear segregation of these two places.
Like you, I am genuinely baffled by "WFH 4 days a week" arrangements (as compared to "WFH when you have errands that make it necessary", which is pretty common). If I have to come into the office 1 day a week, then I still have to foot the bill for a home office within driving range of the office, which sucks.
I think at once a quarter you're starting to look at the ability to live on the other side of the country and fly in when necessary, which I think is much more price efficient.
I think coming in to the office 1x / week would let you live quite a bit further away than coming in 5x / week. At least for me, I could do a 60-90-minute drive to work 1 day per week, but would not want to 5 days.
I had a job for a bit over a year where I commuted 90+ minutes door to door many days. Even though I could take the train if I wanted to (after driving to the station), it still got old and I wouldn't have wanted to do it long term. I'm about the same to go into my company's Boston office now--I'm technically out of our suburban office and in practice I've been remote for a few years--and it makes for a long day but one day a week would be pretty doable.
But for what benefit? Will the office be full sized (forfeiting the cost savings to the business), or will teams have to negotiate which days they’re supposed to come in (forfeiting a large amount of the team building benefits).
It just seems like a lot more work and hassle than being fully colocated or fully remote.
Teams schedule conference rooms. Even fully remote, teams will presumably get together physically a few times a year. Whether you're "fully remote" (and maybe have to fly to a get-together) or schedule weekly/biweekly office time will be a function of how a team/company wants to operate.
There’s a huge difference between a few times a year and once every 1-2 weeks, both on the company and the employee. At once a quarter we can just rent a coworking space and fly in, but at once a week everyone needs to live within ~90min of the office and the company needs to maintain some level of excess office capacity in order to seat these workers 1x a week.
To my eye remote 4x a week forfeits most of the benefits of full remote purely for the sake of a vestigial habit. It seems superior to me that either the team either goes full remote, or reverts to a “remote work when errands require it” arrangement.
I don't necessarily disagree and, in fact, you're describing the way that my broader group is organized albeit with some subset of people normally going into an office.
That said, there are plenty of people who want to go into an office semi-regularly and, if you tell them they're going to be 100% remote--even if financial arrangements are made to subsidize a co-working space in some manner--they're probably not going to like it and will probably leave for a more office-friendly company.
If your office is in SF, WFH 4 days a week doesn't let you live in ultra-low-cost rural Iowa but it could let you at least work in slightly-lower-cost Modesto or even Redding. Not ideal but better than a $4K/mo SF apartment. I think I'd be willing to live with a 4 hour commute once a week (or get your private pilot's license and you're about 1.5 hours away). Not convenient but do-able.
The idea of flying to work is fun, and I have seen it pop up in a lot of these WFH discussions. But even if you have your GA license, you'll need to rent or own the plane, pay directly or indirectly for hangar space and fuel, and deal with the air traffic congestion that would arise from more than just a handful of people trying this trick. In my opinion these barriers make private flying too dissimilar to driving a car to make it a feasible commute comparison.
I was looking into it for commuting from Pueblo, CO to Denver. The place I was interviewing was a short walk and bus ride from an air field, and Pueblo is about 20-40% the cost of a similar commutable home in Denver, the flight (which I have done a dozen times in MSFS) is only 55 minutes. So round trip with commuting to and from the airports/fields, doing preflight, and parking, was only 3 hours which is about the time it takes one way by car assuming normal traffic.
Totally agree. I've got my ticket and I wouldn't do it unless I actually lived on an airpark with a hangar at my house, and I'd have to get my instrument rating to be able to rely on it for commuting.
It's like when you were in college, and you do assignments at home, and then get together with your study group, your TA, your professor, or your project buddies, in the computer clusters...
A home office sounds a lot cheaper then a place close enough to the office to reasonably commute every day to me. Spending an hour or two commuting 1 or 2 times a week is manageable, but 5 times is not.
Hypothetical question: What if it was WFH 4 days a week but the company foots (a) the difference between your rent and the median rent for the square footage of your living space in the country you live in, upto some reasonable limit, AND (b) all of your home office equipment and furniture?
I feel like tying work to the cost of your apartment is a distressing step towards company towns and company stores. Let labor and capital negotiate for rates based off what the cost of the labor is and the value it provides the company rather than coming up with Byzantine formulas that imply that a workers housing cost is the business of the company.
I wonder why a landlord would even entertain such an offer. It's not uncommon for leases to be ~15 years. That is a hell of a risky move to think that you'll be ahead by offering a buyout with the hope of finding new tenants.
(it's a 15 year lease, with the cost increasing from $45 million/year to $68 million/years over the 15 years. Hope there's some option to re-negotiate in there)
"Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture"
This is stated as fact everywhere but I've not seen supporting evidence anywhere.
I spend about as much time in my day speaking to other people as I would have done productively and by choice before. The only difference now is that I'm more able to avoid extraneous meetings and other drags on my time that don't benefit from my participation (because they're largely irrelevant to my work and vice versa).
In any case kudos for taking this step which I'm sure is not an easy decision to make given that it's a fairly seismic shift to how most companies approach work and employment.
That can be a good thing for non-charismatic types. I know that I've hurt my career at times in past due to in-person failures like being visibly angry or raising voice over dumb statements/power-positioning by leader-types. Being remote has helped me throttle those reactions and not be so public about my feelings.
Well if you've hurt your career with in-person failures, wait until you experience the context-free over-reaction that come from a faux pas made in a faceless medium that keeps record of your transgression forever. Getting mad at someone in-person also provides an opportunity to build a relationship that allows for a more intimate sharing of emotions; try getting that with email and slack.
If you're used to communicating online, this is no issue. As an anti-social type myself, I'm more comfortable with communicating online and I'm confident in my ability to not commit a faux-pas that easily compared to in-person.
I think you underestimate how much WFH helps people with social issues.
While I agree with this, I also think this is to a large extent because videoconferencing is currently pretty bad. It used not to be a critical necessity, so companies treated it as such. There's a lot of improvement that could be made to alleviate the disconnect somewhat, but of course not eliminate it.
> Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture
The people who say this are the people you never see doing any work. They use the office as a social gathering place. They seemingly have no real job, despite a lofty title and high salary. They are the bane of existence for high functioning employees.
This is one of the few hills I will die on. I've never heard of a productive critical employee complaining about not being in an office. Every single one loves remote work because they can actually get work done.
It clearly doesn’t apply to OP because Dropbox are shifting to WFH, but so many of the arguments I’ve seen for offices returning are a variant of “I miss the social aspect”.
Fine, say that, I often miss it myself too, but realise you’re also arguing to compel people in the near term into a situation that could lead to them contracting a disease that could kill them.
Even beyond that, while many people might miss the meetings, I guarantee there are at least some people in that room getting stressed out because it’s actively blocking them from doing their job for no reason.
This is anecdotal too but I’ve worked on new projects, with new people, since this started. I’ve not met any of these people face-to-face, but we get along great thanks to being able to video/audio call whenever we want or need to. Every conversation I now have contains exclusively willing pariticipants. It’s great.
Well you have now heard of a critical productive employee complaining about not being in an office. I am one of those guys who delivers faster than anyone and to a high quality standard, and I hate WFH permanently. While I enjoy no commute, I miss being around colleagues.
I prefer some combination of WFH and working in-office.
I spend about as much time talking to people, but I talk to less people. I don't like it. I've come back to office recently and so much more bandwidth to exchange information IME.
Anecdotal evidence like everybody else here, but after having worked from home 100% for several months, we're finally back in the office 50% and it has been great. You don't notice how much the team spirit and culture is affected until you actually get back to the office.
> which is problematic for building teams and culture;
Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".
If you are genuinely asking, there are people, myself included, who don't think virtual interactions are a substitute for building relationships. It's the same reason I want to transition to meeting someone in person after talking to them on a dating app. I can totally understand that everyone is different and may not think the same. For instance, if the only advantage of in-person interactions at work you can think of is goofing around, I suspect you are better suited for remote work.
The reason to transition to in-person for a dating app is because the relationship is supposed to become physical. Not so in an office - I don't think the analogy makes sense, because they types of relationships are so different.
My first month of work, I inadvertently got pulled into a playing soccer with a few coworkers. I didn't know many of them but by the end of the day I felt close enough to a lot of them that I was a lot more confident talking to them whether it's for help with a product, general programming questions, or in some cases personal stuff.
I'm sure I could have cultivated those relationships over the course of working there much longer but I don't think there would be any virtual substitute for that one soccer game.
That was my exactly my experience. Many of those soccer team mates became the closest colleagues ive had largely BECAUSE of the time we spent winning and losing!
The best friends I've made in my career were from remote only teams. I guess you could say full remote is problematic in the sense that so is in-office for building relationships/teams. It's a trade off and I suspect the winning strategy is the one that is invested into the most, rather than one being inherently better than the other.
We've been doing a couple of things now that everyone is wfh. We have these mixer meetings on Friday where you meet with people you never work with normally, in small groups, and talk about what you're working on. We also have online trivia contests and other games sometimes it just shoot the breeze (as sanctioned, boss scheduled meetings).
As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out.
I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
> ... which is problematic for building teams and culture;
Maybe I am alone in this, but I care very little for culture. Perhaps it's because I am a freelancer. I work for a company to bring results and I just try to communicate clearly. When there's doubts we have a chat over Skype, since sometimes direct communication is just more efficient than using chat.
I believe people can work well as teams while WFH and some kind of company culture (whatever that means) isn't really necessary for people to be effective.
For the past 1.5 years I've been working for an Australian company. I do mobile dev from Thailand. There's an Indian team doing some BLE-related mobile dev from India. There's a guy in Vietnam also doing mobile dev. We have a guy in Taiwan doing low-level hardware programming. A guy in Japan doing hardware design. A Russian guy in Georgia who's doing we web-related stuff. And the leadership is in Australia. Everyone seems to be able to get along pretty well and without much misunderstanding. Perhaps it's also the nature of our work, the product we work on.
Why do people feel it's important to build some company culture? What does a company culture even mean?
REI I believe is moving to a model, after having just sold their massive new HQ to Facebook, where they will establish a handful of micro-offices around the country where their now distributed team can meet.
Plenty of kinks to work out I’m sure, but feels like the future of work to me.
That's the way it should be IMO. It's idiotic to have to drag oneself to the office to do work which can be done just as well, if not better, without getting out of bed. It's also bad to not be able to get teams together from time to time, to brainstorm, discuss things, and just plain get to know each other. I hope companies find a happy middle ground at some point, and I also hope managers can figure out how to manage people effectively in such circumstances. Currently nobody at the previously "butts in chairs" companies knows how to do that, and my manager friends at places like Google, FB and MS are unsure if they're "holding it right".
Am curious what sort of metrics and studies that Dropbox HR plans to do to assess this change. The current COVID-mandated WFH atmosphere is a lot different than how things were pre-COVID. In particular, there's the impact of children at home, and for ICs there's a special stigma (due to COVID) to support isolation. However, Dropbox's culture has always been uniquely supportive of IC independence during pre-COVID times despite the fancy office, "Michelin Star" cafeteria, etc. Curious to see how the change is assessed, even if the detailed hypotheses supporting it are never fully explained.
Thanks for highlighting the set of challenges (and also right near the top of the blog post).
Do you or the EIU intend to make the study results more broadly available? (There was a good discussion of Nick Bloom’s recent surveys yesterday, and this would be a nice addition to that body of work)
Edit 2: the survey writeup is great (and I’ve submitted it separately if people want to discuss that; Dropbox itself moving to remote allowed w/ studios is its own discussion)
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
Doesn't this also have the problem with neither flexibility nor community, especially for once a quarter? More importantly, this means that people now have to maintain their own home offices but still have to live close to a big city and pay the stupidly high costs associated with that.
Most big cities, if you drive 1-2 hours, you can get to much cheaper housing and that's a pretty doable commute if you only do it every week or two. And for once a quarter, you get on a plane--which is pretty much what my broader team did pre-pandemic.
>Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely
Not necessarily. I work in a group that's very distributed and we get together (normally) a couple of times a year plus another once or twice with a larger group.
Of course, that doesn't work if it's more like getting together in person every week or two.
In any case, I agree it makes sense to collaborate. If you wander into the office and no one you know and work with is there, it doesn't make much sense to come in.
I work at a 100% remote company, and we do this as well (before covid). We're a smaller company, so I'd be curious to hear how it scales, but at least for us I've found it to work pretty well.
I think it scales because, at a larger company, everyone isn't realistically going to get together anyway. So you get together in groups of various sizes. (And there are usually opportunities to get together with an even larger cross-section at things like user conferences.)
I will take 4K video and audio that doesn't drop off and a world where there is universal fiber/good connectivity. Then after that, we can talk about VR.
>This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better)
Give 'screen control sharing' (for lack of better name?) software a try, two variants I've used are USE Together and Tuple. Being able to have two sets of input devices for the same screen is actually fantastic for collaboration - the pair-programming experience is arguably better than being there in person.
Definitely agree with the idea of a scheduled in office time. I work ~400 miles from my company's office and get there several times a year. I enjoy WFH, but would prefer being close enough to go to the office more often.
I'm sure you have talked to your exec team at length about the pluses and minuses of that type of structure. That structure feels like a great trade-off that gives employees enough flexibility to reduce their housing costs, while also keeping the culture in place.
Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts your team had while you explored the options available? It feels like such a good move IMHO, I'm very interested in learning how you got there.
Yeah so not really a new concept; in NL we've had this for a while with names like "het nieuwe werken" (the new working) or "flexwerken" (flexible working), which in practice means open spaces, no fixed desk, clean desk policy, etc.
I personally prefer having my own fixed workspace, tyvm. I'm just glad I was able to make it work in the various assignments I've had over the year (e.g. a fixed workspace).
predominant WFH w/ ability to get together at the office seems like an excellent mixture of flexibility and adequate face time. Strict mode on either ends of the spectrum is non-ideal for most people I would assume.
> ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office
Can you explain what you mean by WFH when you feel like it reducing flexibility?
IMO this post has some good points but makes the executive sound like a passive referee, ultimately misunderstanding what High Output Management (also one of my favorite books!) is about. (Admittedly adding my own editorial here from my experience founding a startup and now running it as a ~3,000-person public company.)
The basic principle of HOM is that the fundamental job of an executive is to deliver results ("output"), and that the measure of an executive is the output of their organization. Importantly, there is no one right way to deliver results -- successful CEOs can have very different styles and techniques.
That said, for every effective way to deliver results there are vastly more that are ineffective. Complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty are not your friends. Time is not your friend. Everything is situationally dependent. There are many skills to develop and principles that can help but there's no formula.
This also partially explains why the median CEO or exec is perceived as ineffective, often because they are. It's a hard job, otherwise everyone would do it well and there would be a surplus of good (and cheap) execs.
Contrary to what the post suggests, HOM does not say not that the job of an executive is to wave some kind of magic culture or "values" wand and rubber-stamp whatever emergent strategy and behavior results from that. CEOs and executives absolutely do (and must) make important decisions of all kinds, break ties, and set general direction. Occasionally they need to give commands but more typically you work collaboratively with and (as the post correctly suggests) empower your team and avoid doing too much as an individual contributor.
If you're curious about what execs do and how to be a good one, HOM is an incredible book. The Effective Executive by Drucker is another favorite.
Thanks for refuting this blatant distortion of Andy Grove's thinking.
Unintentionally or willfully, the OP sought the credibility of a seminal book to support a soft-headed presupposition. The kind that engineer nurtures when real leadership is invisible (or undetectable) to their work in the weeds.
Thank you. When I read the OP article I though “this isn’t the book I read”. I remember it as you described - a managers output is the output of their organisation.
It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!
I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!
Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable because it was voted to the top.
Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?
I also think people might overlook BrandonM's follow-up reply to dhouston's reply on April 6th - "All of your feedback was well-thought-out and appreciated; I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!"
I think the biggest issue with people is a lack of introspection, and this example shows the issue here. Most interactions are too meaningless and therefore difficult to self improve on.
I don't know what's the best system to make people reconsider their actions, however. After all, giving a single upvote and walking away is incredibly easy. Coming back to recognize your mistakes is hard.
I see you getting some flak here but for what it's worth, I read it as a very grounded discussion and feedback. I appreciate the fact that you conceded the points that seemed reasonable post Drew's comment.
To be honest I like seeing some posts like that where the entire concept of the idea is being challenged from the ground up, especially if the creator has to step in and defend it. Oftentimes I get more perspective into a product from the defense of its perceived shortcomings than I do from any marketing material.
3rd point (viral): The dropbox solution was great, of users getting more dropbox when they brought in another user. By rewarding with more dropbox (instead of money), only people who genuinely value dropbox would spread it. These aligned interests can't be gamed.
I thought dropbox was a great idea from the very beginning... but I've been repeatedly amazed at the scale of the opportunity. People working cross-mobile/desktop must be a big part of it.
> but I've been repeatedly amazed at the scale of the opportunity. People working cross-mobile/desktop must be a big part of it.
Or just multiple computers. Also don't forget file sharing and collaboration.
I'm a long-time Dropbox user, and my first use cases were, in order:
- shared folders with friends at university, when we were working on projects together
- shared folder for myself between personal computer and a station at work
Nowadays I use it mostly as a way to sync up my time/task tracking (in Emacs/org-mode) between multiple machines and mobile devices.
OTOH, my SO regularly uses Dropbox at work to exchange bundles of 200+MB files with other companies, and it's telling - there really is no better, safer solution for a regular user to send someone larger files when they no longer fit in an e-mail.
Your comment was one of a handful that lead to me registering for an account on HN instead of just lurking, I love that this got closure in my mind. Thank you for responding to this
Your original HN comment perfectly captures the quintessential HN user at the time. I feel like every “Show HN” thread has those types of responses of like trivially explaining away all the hard work with just a few “simple” hacks.
I think the typical HN user has morphed a bit at this point(re: crypto) but it’s great to be able to reference the totally aloof engineer that existed at that time.
I came to Hacker News through Paul Graham's essays. I learned about Paul Graham because we used ANSI Common Lisp in an elective Common Lisp class. His essays were specifically suggesting that many college-aged techies would benefit from starting a startup instead of going into the traditional workplace.
I bet that describes a lot of the early HN (originally: Startup News) users. I don't think it was really "totally aloof engineers", but instead young geeks without much perspective on the world. Most of us weren't even engineers at that point, by any reasonable definition of the term.
I just looked it up -- The first iPhone was officially released 3 days after Dropbox received their YC check (June 29th, 2007 vs. June 26th). Astounding.
I also spent about 2 years working remotely and traveling with my wife, living in different places in Europe, Asia, and the US for anywhere from a few days to a few months. We have a travel blog and twitter account (all thanks to my wife) that I'm happy to share via email with anyone who's interested.
I'd love to follow along - my beautiful wife and I are planning to hit the road as remote workers, so always keen to learn from others who have done it as couples / families.
I think you were still very right in your intentions. I despise Dropbox, personally, and wish it would die. This is what Operating Systems are for.
However, the fact it has not died and is in fact 'a success' from the capitalist side of things, means what I think about filesharing being an OS service, doesn't really matter. Microsoft and Apple and all the other vendors are asleep at the wheel - but it has to be said that its just a distro upgrade away from being the end of Dropbox for a lot of people.
That web interface is soooooo much easier to understand and use. Makes me sad how unnecessarily complex modern UI is, not just on dropbox, but across the whole web.
Hell, even the menu bar UI on OS X is still terrible; they 'broke' it maybe 5 years ago and it's been the same mess ever since. It used to tell you what % of your dropbox was used, it used to tell you syncing status, it used to tell you all kinds of things. Now it's some weird changelog that looks nothing like anything else in OS X (or Windows, for that matter) from a UX perspective.
I mean, I guess I'm glad they didn't pull a Google and break it in new and exciting ways every 6 months, but really, it should have been changed back a week after they screwed it up.
Big congrats to the Dropbox team, though -- I use their product personally because it Just Works. Interviewed there back in 2011 when the office was (next to?) the old Fry's in Palo Alto.
It still does tell you those things (they've just moved around a bit).
The % used is seen when you click on the settings. I think because, honestly, they're trying to abstract the idea that you need to do that (the average user just cares that it works not the %).
Get where you're coming from tho - it's not the most clear or clean UI.
The response when he shared the file on his messenger was "why are you sending me this crap" :)) so funny if this was part of the original presentation of what would become dropbox.
Seems like BrandonM's quote comes up all the time, but Joel Spolsky wrote in 2008:
“Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn’t that exactly what Hailstorm [2001] was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It’s a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
I think it's interesting to go back to that thread, look at what the author (BrandonM) has done since then and learn some important lessons about being able to step outside of your own head to see the bigger picture.
Looks like he's still working for another company and has an unfinished blog (http://shebang.brandonmintern.com) but he seems like a really smart guy. The takeaway I got from the thread is "Don't be afraid to try something and finish it".
You guys had a lot of courage and perseverance to take an idea that people trivialized, have a working implementation, build a company around it and then IPO.
Looking at his LinkedIn profile, it seems like he was still in college then. He was wrong, of course, but I think his errors were pretty reasonable given his situation.
It's very easy for tech people to say, "But it's totally easy, you just [long string of steps that they've learned over the course of years]." It takes time to learn that no, easy things for you can be hard for others. If you want them to use the thing, you have to make it dead easy. I note that Apple made a shit-ton of money because so many tech companies (e.g., MP3 player makers) refused to really learn this lesson.
His second point, that USB sticks were still necessary, wasn't bad, just not forward-looking enough. He wrote it before the introduction of the iPhone, after all. But back then, high-quality connectivity was much less common. Then, Dropbox would have worked better for some than others.
And his third point was correct. Charging cash money is important.
So really, it's not a bad comment for a CS student. And it reminds me that I'm very thankful that most of my youthful opinion-spouting happened in offline and pre-web contexts.
As an engineer, "But it's totally easy, you just..." is my least favorite phrase. "Just" in particular. You can obscure so much effort with 4 simple letters.
if every Brandon out there was able to see the big picture, Dropbox would have had A LOT more competition, when Dropbox was still in the early stages. It would have made it a lot harder for Dropbox to succeed, right?
So in a way, the fact that the millions of Brandon's out there who think curlftpfs is the best, and are not capable of seeing the true value of Dropbox--perhaps that was a positive thing for Dropbox, right? Otherwise they might have tried to make a similar product and competed with you years ago :)
Next up AirBnb and perhaps Stripe (speculation). Those early YC investments are really paying off huge returns.
Unlike investing in the stock market, where you want to hit lots of singles, angel/startup investing is all about hitting home runs as the vast majority of the time you are going to strikeout.
One of the highlights of my MIT experience was going to your ~yearly tech talks that you did at the beginning of the fall semester. I’m excited to see Dropbox continue to grow as a company. :)
I think you handled BrandonM's critiques pretty well, and not immediately getting defensive around the products shortcomings was well played. Congrats to you and your team.
On point 1, he failed to understand that 99.9% of population is not IT savvy, not to mention how much time such setup would take and then maintain to run smoothly with all security patches, etc.
2. He misunderstood initial description of Drop; that the files will reside locally even if you lose internet connection you still can access those.
3. He was wrong about "viral" but right about inability to "make money off of this" :)
Every time someone here responds when their name is mentioned, I think of this scene from "Annie Hall":
Alvy Singer: [the man behind him in line is talking loudly] What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it!
Alvy Singer: [to audience] Whaddya do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?
Man in Theatre Line: Wait a minute, why can't I give my opinion? It's a free country!
Alvy Singer: He can give it... do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall
McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan!
Man in Theatre Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called "TV, Media and Culture." So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me...
[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]
Alvy Singer: come over here for a second... tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
This is what is said LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE TIME a company is acquired -- right along with "nothing is changing" and we'll "continue to operate with the vision that made us attractive to $acquirer in the first place"
Without a more clear rationale for why things won't change, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the product is at risk no matter what you say. The fact is, almost regardless of your intentions, your organization is going to put its thumbprint on the product.
What that means is unclear to external customers, and is also often unclear internally. If you do know what your plans are for it internally, you're still probably not going to say (though I'd love to be wrong).
Are you sure you're being LITERAL? I certainly remember some google acquisitions where it was stated straight up that the product would be discontinued in the initial press release.
It's not actually the case that every single acquisition in the world involves public platitudes about the continuance of management, the product, culture, office location, or lunch room perks.
Here's my chief gripe with using hyperbole and "literally" - If the word "literally" can be used non-literally, in a hyperbole or a metaphor, then it stops serving its purpose of marking a sentence as being literal. Then, when a sentence permits metaphoric and literal interpretations and you stick "literally" in it, nothing changes - it can still be either metaphoric or literal. The only solution I see is using "really literally" to mean that your sentence isn't metaphoric. Until people start using "really literally" in a metaphoric way. I virtually really literally actually in fact don't want to see that happen.
Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary already accept the use of "literally" to mean "virtually" in informal contexts. It's a losing battle.
Now if you were to acquire 49% of Mailbox, I might believe that. But you must understand our doubts -- it feels like every single time a giant company acquires a useful little startup, the users eventually (and often sooner than later) get burned by it.
I'm open to your Mailbox acquisition being the exception to this trend, but I hope you understand my healthy skepticism.
That doesn't really strike me as relevant? Many "businesses" are one or two people. Obviously "giant" is subjective but considering the largest companies are a few orders of magnitude bigger, I maintain what I said earlier: Only people who are immersed in the startup world consider Dropbox a "giant" company.
Just to add some objectivity to the debate, in France, between 250 and 4999 employees a company is considered to be an "intermediate size company" (as long as the revenue is below 1.5 G€).
I don't know the American standard, but I'd be surprised if it isn't similar.
Totally unrelated request - you posted your YC application a few years ago, but the link 404s. If this is intentional, you can forget it, but if not, I'd really would like to see it,
And not just C but Linux (Slackware!), sockets, even kludging the single-player DOS port to be two-player by playing over a serial cable to another PC. And annoying my future Dropbox teammates by including an extra space after/before parens in function calls (and if/for/switch statements), putting { on its own line, etc as was the convention in that code base IIRC.