Wow, the author has a pretty miserable company :(.
That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company.
I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the birds, etc., while working, is just about as happy as I can be while also working on stuff that doesn't really matter much.
As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion. They choose when and where they work as long as they can attend some important anchor meetings (and obviously be productive). And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal. 4 hours of intense serious work, plus a couple of hours of colleague social interaction, and the rest left to the individual to spend however they like, is the kind of situation I would have not even been able to dream of when I was younger.
And from a bean-counter owner perspective, do not underestimate the employee loyalty and overachievement motivation you can get by giving some nice free trips, nice free food, and quality equipment.
Big companies lack this freedom to treat their creative talent not because they cannot afford it but because the people in charge tend to not be creative thinkers. This is why most interesting things happen in smaller companies (and ultimately tend to get bought by the laggard big companies).
I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy. I'm currently full time remote (I'm on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.
Didn't feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.
Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom/conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms" so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.
Being full remote doesn't work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.
> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.
This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.
The company I work for actually suggested getting rid of our office and going 100% remote for our group. We actually voted on whether to keep leasing it after Covid or not. We voted to keep it as we generally like our office and it's nice to have a place to meet face to face sometimes. Since we voted to keep it corporate has told us we have to come in at least 3 days a week after Covid. So for us it's less an issue of trust and more an issue of we are paying for this place so you better use it.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.
I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can't imagine I'll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
Beliefs and dogma. Amazon's justification was "Amazon is an in-office culture." That ultimately boils down to circular reasoning; the key decision maker (whoever they are) has demonstrated an immense lack of critical reasoning. Continuing this practice is in the same realm as continuing other hostile workplace traditions, although it is one of the less serious ones.
In my opinion, it is wasting a lot of money in the form of productivity. Every employee who commutes to the office has an overwhelmingly high likelihood of having some of their mental resources drained. You're wasting a good hour or two of superior employee performance in the morning, and possibly some near the end of the day when employees start dreading the journey home.
> biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion
This is a very important point. One of the major ongoing reasons that women are passed over for promotions is that they are the traditional/dogmatic caregivers. Home-first equalizes this, much like paternal leave does. If a home is unable to afford child-care, then men have just as much responsibility and distraction during work hours.
Some people may struggle to afford commute, for example, people escaping homelessness. Being able to work from home would reduce the burden on these people.
In addition, those who cannot causally/physically complete their job offsite (doctors, construction workers, tellers, baristas) won't have roads and public transport congested with people who have no business traveling to work.
> Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms"
We need conference rooms as an API. I should be able to add (and be billed for) a physical room to a meeting request as easily as adding a Zoom/GMeet - for when in-person collaboration is really needed. WeWork was in the ideal position to do this, it's a pity they doubled down on big corporate clients instead of "gig economy rooms."
> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office
Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.
All companies and all people are different. There isn't a one size fits all. But it's not like there are no benefits to in person.
>I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.
1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.
2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.
Trust issues. While 80% of employees could be more productive remote, 18% could have serious issues with productivity and 2% might actually turn nefarious while remote (steal company IPR or something like that). Or I would imagine thats what the fear is.
> I have a hard time wrapping my head around why companies are mandating 100% return to office.
Only reasons I can think of is as follows.
- Someone in the CEO's direct reports is tasked with making a decision.
- They start a survey on how satisfied the managers are on the work performance.
- The survey does not go to individual employees.
- Rightfully, the survey results wildly support return-to-office.
- Decision is made.
Some other company may decide to be data driven, and use metrics which may or may not fully reflect the tradeoffs between work-from-home vs. office.
Or, the top leader makes the decision for the rest of the company. No questions allowed.
> Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy.
The top level policy is often butts-in-seats but supervisors typically just let people do what they want to do. The VPN is there, we all have laptops...no one is running around complaining about Bob or Jill working from home when they feel like it. This is my observation of many knowledge workers' departments in various companies.
a lot of the big tech use their footprints as political power. who wants to bet California goes less after big tech if they keep their hq in San Francisco fully staffed?
A few really need it; most don't. Their managers and executives put their own desires ahead of the best interests of the organization, and what they desire is to have their ego stroked.
> And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal.
As much as I appreciate (most of) my coworkers, on nights and weekends I want to close my computer and spend quality time with my family, not see and talk to the same people I am already forced to talk to 35-40h a week. They might be ideal to you, but you're assuming quite a lot about everyone's situations if you think they work for everyone.
GP post was referring to retreats for 100% remote workers, which would be work with a f2f element rather than merely socializing during your free time.
These could happen during the week or (depending on the retreat) the weekend, with weekends probably being given comp time in lieu.
If you think that a modicum of face time throughout the year for a remote team has no value to a group or team, I’ve got news for you.
If you think GP was referring to additional face time in addition to face time at a workplace, then I think you may be projecting and selective quoting a bit. Note that employees at this small company can work when and where they want.
I think it depends on how you view your colleagues, and also on your working conditions and location. My entire company is remote (albeit with a small office in a co-working space a few local people sometimes use), and we have two week-long on-sites every year (recent times notwithstanding). There is no pressure to attend, but the entire company is always there (unless they have scheduling conflicts etc) - that says a lot to me.
It helps that the most important aspect of our hiring process is about culture-fit - so much so that the final stage of the (pretty relaxed) hiring process is a presentation to everyone in the company who wishes to attend (regardless of role). Those presentations typically see 40% or more of the company attend. Crucially, every person in that presentation gets the opportunity to vote on whether the candidate is hired.
I cannot imagine telling my very busy, more stressed than me, top level exec wife that she was on her own for a week so I could bang out some code. She wants me to be successful but that's a little too much to ask.
In my remote experience, I definitely don't talk to my colleagues that much.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
I'm thrown by people working on a laptop. Do you have a battery powered second screen? Is there some workflow tips I should adopt to make it work better?
I'm quite jealous of people who can work on laptops.
I wonder the degree to which people enjoy WFH is the same as the degree to which they enjoy working on a laptop. Even the people I know with a dedicated room for work set up want to go back to the office if they prefer multiple monitors.
I much prefer a 4k monitor as my primary, and my laptop below it (open, as a small second screen).
Going outside, working just off the laptop, is a definite shift. It usually means less coding, but sometimes it pushes me to be productive in areas I normally neglect (documenting, planning, organizing).
To do real development, I am very dependent upon a big monitor. If I travel, I take one or rent one.
Honestly though, sometimes I just go for a walk. And often during that walk, with no screens, my brain magically sorts through some problems and gives me new insights.
If you work from home though, most people agree on dedicating some space and properly equipping it. Working always only on a laptop in a floater kind of way is something that I suspect most people cannot do with any real level of productivity.
Even the people I know with a dedicated room for work set up want to go back to the office if they prefer multiple monitors.
Well, allow me to be the first outlier. I typically use two monitors (tried three, didn't really add much to having two, for me); using two external monitors (attached to a laptop) right this second as I type this (and also a proper keyboard and mouse - the laptop to which they are all connected is under the desk, closed).
I am very happy indeed to continue using two monitors at home. A chap on my team uses four monitors on his setup and he's similarly happy to continue doing so from home.
Why do the people you know who like to use multiple monitors want to do so in the office rather than at home in a dedicated work room? Are they, at home, like, actually working ON the laptop? Typing on the little laptop keyboard, using the little laptop mousepad, staring at the little laptop screen?
> I wonder the degree to which people enjoy WFH is the same as the degree to which they enjoy working on a laptop.
I hate working on a laptop screen.
OTOH, I like the 34” ultrawide monitor I use at home attached to my dock better the twin 21” widescreens I had in the office, plus I get to use it, rather than a laptop, in the numerous meetings-with-computers, which were held in meeting rooms with in-person work.
I have an 34" 1440p ultrawide + vertical 24" 1080p at home. That setup > all setups I've ever managed to get at work, including that triple 24" I've had once. I can't stand working off a laptop my hands, neck and back inevitably start to hurt after slouching over and typing off the tiny keyboard and trackpad.
I used to hate laptops, and chafed when they were provisioned for my team. We all worked in the office, and docked them. We rarely needed to use them from home until COVID.
Yet the last year has changed my mind. I have a 15" MBP from 2015 that is fine. My home office has an iMac, so I really don't want a second monitor crowding my desk. I just use the laptop's display and keyboard. Less stuff to worry about finding space for, or keeping the cats from fucking with.
And best of all, when work is done, I log out of the VPN, and close the lid. Of course I have Teams/Outlook on my phone if there's an emergency, but there's also a clear delineation for my family to recognize; if the laptop is open, I'm still working. If it's closed, then they can talk/pester/joke with me without worrying about my work. And it also helps me remember to not overwork.
I have a minimalist approach to interfaces, and work on 1080p (both desktop and laptop). I don't have second monitors and I don't intend to add any.
I don't doubt that adding screen estate has value, but in the minimalistic spirit, anything added also subtracts something :) And in the same spirit, anything subtracted adds something else - in my case, the ability to work more efficiently.
Try to work on a single screen for a relatively long time (say, a few months). Over the time, you'll develop (because you're forced to) more efficient habits.
Having worked on multiple monitors for so long, I would find just having a tiny laptop screen too restrictive. Being able to glance at multiple windows to collate information without having to Alt+Tab is priceless.
I bought a 43" (4K 3840 x 2160) and put an older (rotated) 24" right next to it - the setup works perfectly contrary to my initial worry of the main display proving to be too big. Advantage of the 43" display over an ultra-wide is that I get plenty of vertical space as well in addition to the horizontal space. That means easily having 4 80-column tall IDE windows side by side for reduced scrolling. Another advantage is that videos play full screen without any black areas on the sides. The smaller monitor is split between Slack and email - both always visible but not too distracting due to being in the peripheral vision.
I like working on a small laptop even when there are multiple large monitors available - probably to do with being a very heavy virtual workspaces + tiling wm user. I also hate sitting at a desk and prefer to flop around whatever couch, recliner, or bit of lawn seems comfortable at the time, and it's harder to do that when you're dragging hardware around. For whatever reasons, I find it way easier to get in the zone working this way.
It depends on the kind of work. Having a nice virtual workspaces setup makes it possible to switch between applications accurately and quickly (not like alt-tab), and that makes it possible to do work where cross-referencing a lot of text isn't required.
I wonder the degree to which people enjoy WFH is the same as the degree to which they enjoy working on a laptop. Even the people I know with a dedicated room for work set up want to go back to the office if they prefer multiple monitors.
I can understand why people who are working from their kitchen table want to go back to the office, but for those that have a dedicated work area, wouldn't they set it up the way they want?
I have a multi-monitor setup at home that's better than what I have at work since I'm not limited to IT approved hardware. Related, I also have a loud clicky keyboard that I can't get away with using at work since everyone in the shared office area can hear it.
Depending on country, you’re not legally allowed to work on your laptop. You’re required to have a monitor, keyboard and mouse, you cannot be hunched over a laptop for 8 hours a day. The applies both to the office and when working from home.
Well, I enjoy WFH (mostly) but a laptop alone isn't great. At home I use a corner desk, two monitors, two phones and three laptops (one testing, one does light compiling and vpn duties).
There's no way I'd be allowed this much equipment and space in the office. I had a nice-ish 27' monitor there and a small desk crammed next to another developer.
As much as I miss the social aspects of an office, WFH has a lot of benefits. I realize this is not true for many, and a lot of my own money went into the office of my dreams here. But it's quite comfortable.
It depends on what I'm doing. I do video calls from my desktop as I have all the lighting, microphones, and good webcam set up. And I'll also use the multiple monitors if I need a lot of reference material. But if I'm just writing something or doing email, I'm perfectly happy just working on a laptop and probably do it more than using my desktop.
I was like you until July of last year. Started working exclusively on my laptop (I'm a c++ engineer) and I found that it forced me to be more organized. Vim + tmux lets me make full use of a smaller screen. My productivity has honestly improved as a result
I don't think it's that people in charge of big companies are not creative thinkers. I think their priorities are things other than employee satisfaction, or possibly even employee productivity. Both of those things are great, but maximizing shareholder value comes first. Big companies are applying creative thinking to marketing, sales relationships, mergers and acquisitions, strategic lobbying/lawsuits, cost cutting, etc.
In my younger days, I made the mistake of getting overly invested in the companies I worked for. Always put your long term goals first. If you don't have equity, it's not your company!
When you do retreats do keep in mind that not everyone will want to spend a week or weekend away from their family, and that retreats with a bunch of people who can be social nonstop for 12 hours can also be the worst nightmare for introverts. Keep it optional, make sure it's clear that it's optional, make sure junior employees don't feel pressured :)
I think it works fine as long as you're up-front about it when hiring e.g.
> We get the whole company together once a year for seven days so that Automatticians can create bonds that influence them all year long. So far we’ve done Grand Meetups in San Francisco, California; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec; Seaside, Florida; Budapest, Hungary; San Diego, California; Santa Cruz, California; Park City, Utah; Whistler, Canada; and Orlando, Florida.
> In addition to our all-company Grand Meetup, teams meet for five to seven days to brainstorm team-level strategy and bond in locales ranging from Boulder to Buenos Aires, Las Vegas to Lisbon, Montréal to Mexico City, and Vienna to Vietnam. If you join our merry band, expect to travel three to four weeks per year.
> As a distributed company we also know how to connect with each other from afar, and consider day-to-day social communication at least as important as breaking bread in person.
There's pretty much no such thing as optional if there's a team off-site unless it's "I can't" for some reason rather than "I don't want to." Multi-day off-sites are sometimes necessary but weekend is a no go.
For what it’s worth you have a yard, most of the people wanting to go back to the office live in a more cramped conditions. Not having something like a yard to fall back to has also make it way harder for those people in terms of mental well-being, seeing people around them instead of the same four walls would be like going back to normal for them.
This is true, and forgive me - I do forget this often. When I lived in one room of a shared apartment, I probably would have jumped off the balcony by now due to too much time with my roommate.
But! If remote is the new way, then we don't have to live in the city center. Especially in nice countries with good train systems, we can live in more distant places where rents are cheaper and we can have an entire place with yard to spare. I'm in NL, and I have about 150 square meters of indoor space plus a big yard for less than 800 eur. Previously I spent 700 for 35sq meters and no yard. The difference now is that I'm in a village 2.5 hours from Amsterdam. As long as there are trains, I can go to the office on occasion.
Unless that company is government owned, the owner is, in the US vernacular an "ass". Better facilities equals better hires equals better productivity equals more profit equals more money to invest in better facilities. It's a virtuous circle.
I work in London, and the lack of commuting by train, stuffed with a hundred other people, has been the equivalent of very hefty pay rise, and an improvement in my health, such that I haven't been ill, at all, since Xmas 2019.
I want to go back, but only for a couple of days a week if possible. I know I've signed a contract with my employer stating my place of employment and so on, so I'm resigned to the fact that it will likely be 3 or 4 days.
But I agree with only a few of the original author's sentiments. Not having to share an open plan office with a hundred other people has massively improved my productivity and health.
Big companies lack the freedom because they have to answer to institutional + activist investors, and institutional + activist investors want to see a sweat shop. They get nervous if they think people are having a chilled time at home.
This is a caste culture issue. It's orthogonal to productivity and real returns.
If you set up your chilled culture, you'd better stay bootstrapped. If you take VC money, most are going to push for a less liberal line.
This is a great (and refreshing) perspective on how to inspire employees by crafting a truly flexible work environment. We (especially the creative class) aren’t cogs to clock in 40 hours a week and leave. We want more from our employers.
The details of an ideal employee policy can be debated, but you’re right there with the 4 hours hard work, 2 hours social interaction, and the rest up to the employee. Especially a free trip with the staff every now and then to bond. Something you can’t really find at big companies anymore.
As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion
The only way to really give employees freedom to work from anywhere completely at their own discretion is to let them work full-time remote.
If you require any face time at the office at all, then they have to live within commuting distance, or at least within flying distance.
An employee may prefer to work from Bali, but if he has to go into the office twice a month, he can't (reasonably) do that.
I wonder if there's a strong correlation between big city/rural dwellers and the work from home joy. I live at the edge of the suburbs with a nice yard that looks out onto the woods. I have a large home with plenty of space. I love working from home. If I lived in a tiny efficiency apartment in a big city I would hate being there all day, even though I might enjoy the benefits afforded to me by living close to lots of live entertainment, etc.
If I had an open-office setting, that alone would get me to sign on to what the author is saying. With my private office, being closer to the hardware and coworkers can outweigh the benefits of working from home.
What kind of office was this person working in? Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal.
The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only distance him from those problems, but it can’t fix an inherently broken company that doesn’t care about employees. He should be searching for another remote job ASAP
> Having to breathe jet exhaust fumes while suffering through 85 degree indoor temperatures and drinking algae-filled water is nowhere near normal.
I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f).
Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.
Could you clearify “don’t care”? Because here you simply report the company anonymously. You even have a person among the staff, who is extremely difficult to fire, that can do the reporting for you.
Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.
Yeah, I understand the benefits of not having to commute, the peace and quite you get when working from home, but the complaint here is that the employer suck.
In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.
I worked at a building that was right next to the runway under the flight path for a major international airport. We could wave to people in the windows.
Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes.
Then they took our bottled water away.
While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.
Regrading the jet fumes, yeah if you're within 3-5 miles of a major airport, there's definitely jet fumes drifting around.
Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.
An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway.
If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust.
As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is.
The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock.
>Some of them are even health and safety violations.
They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles.
Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example.
When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.
> Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office.
Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable.
You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations.
When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.
I've been to offices in the middle of nowhere deep south that are far better than what you are describing. No, they don't have the free food, comfortable chairs, etc that nice companies in The Bay have, but they do have AC, heating, and drinkable water. What you're describing isn't because you're not in silicon valley, or even California. What you're describing isn't right anywhere. It isn't just life and you shouldn't stand for that kind of abuse.
I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but even so, it was really hard to get any coding done as my fingers were too cold.
There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.
Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.
My office building (the company owns it) is four stories. We have a backup diesel generator that is run every week during business hours for 1 hour. And every week the fumes waft upwards towards the air handlers on the roof. My first week I was shocked by how bad it smelled; kind of like a mown lawn that had rotted. After a few years, I stopped noticing it.
I believe they're describing a call center, and I agree vehemently: the title is broad and doesn't reflect the subject, someone on HN needs to hire this guy, not debate/agree with whether he needs to go back to the office
No, the solution to this isn’t “this guy seems cool so let’s hire him at our FAANG team.” (I mean, do what you want!) The solution to this is that OSHA or the appropriate counterpart needs to get involved.
The absolute best thing about WFH: naps whenever I need it. No more slogging through the post-lunch mid-afternoon slump. I take a 15 minute nap and am good to go for the rest of the afternoon. Also, early meetings at 6~7AM scheduled to work with European coworkers can be followed by a short nap afterwards as well. This has done wonders for my energy throughout the day.
As a WFH advocate, I totally support you having the option to work from the office. A lot of people really like the office and have been having a really bad time this past year and you should totally go back.
We just want the choice, too!
Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH. They just want the option to do what works best for themselves. The people pushing to return to the office, however, tend to want to force everyone back to the office. That’s what we’re complaining about.
"Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH."
*raises hand* the hybrid model of WFH is likely to revert to everyone back in the office as people realise that those that go into the office have an advantage over remote employees via side of desk conversations, building rapport with management and the general perception that those in the office are "working harder".
I like WFH. But I also feel like it would be nice to go in occasionally. Some things are just easier that way. But my commute is 40 minute bike ride, or 15 min car ride. Not like the hour commute I used to have in Los Angeles.
Oh, you're right. But when you have to cycle to get to work whether you want to or not, its easier to get that exercise in.
I'm not a leisure cyclist. I don't dress up in spandex and ride an expensive bike. In fact, I have difficulty containing my derision for leisure cyclists. I know that the equipment they use has utility, but it also signals: I don't have to ride a bike. I have an expensive SUV at home, and I didn't lose my drivers license to a DUI.
Yes, exactly; it's completely up to you. Having exercise as part of your commute means that you don't get to put it off because you're busy with work, or you've got chores to run, or you don't feel like it, and then a few days go by and you've lost the habit.
Exactly! You can go both ways with this: at my house, I have exercise equipment, up to and including a barbell and plates. If I feel like grinding out some sets real quick, I can. There is absolutely no comparison to working in an office.
Pandemic is the only thing preventing organized lunch with coworkers. Nothing about wfh prevents it - just agree on a place and time.
Internet is a problem, but a solvable one - assuming you are in the US, we need competition for ISPs. I had ATT fiber for a while and it was for all practical purposes as good as office (symmetric gigabit).
Cycling has been covered :)
Separation - door closed to the space I work in works great for me. When I didn’t have that, putting everything away and leaving the work space for a few hours did the trick - it’s all in mental discipline.
It would require a commute longer than that of going to the office. An average employee has already organized their life around the necessity of commuting to the office. Office is probably a central location.
Most workers will be found within a circle of the tolerable commute time (isotropy assumption). Let for simplicity assume that all workers live at the same distance R from the office, and are distributed uniformly along that circle. The angular distance between any two employees is distributed uniformly in [0, pi]. Chord length is R 2 sin (theta/2). Integrating, we calculate the average distance between two employees: 4R/pi > R.
Before the pandemic it was hard enough to get people to stick around for a few hours after work to grab a beer. I can't imagine having people drop what they are doing for over an hour just to have a half hour lunch in a central spot. Adult coworkers do not drop everything in front of them for a short good time like college friends would have.
But in practice it is will happen less frequently, and will be a longer commute for most. Not least because many people live in the suburbs, but work in places where places to eat are nearby.
On the plus, many more lunches with spouse and children.
For everyone that complains about interacting with colleagues. I feel that this can be addressed by having managers do periodic offsite meet-ups.
However there are those people that comes to the office to talk all day, and honestly, for everyone else's productivity, it's better they work from home.
My boss on a project roped me into hobby chat as I was taking a five minute break to stretch my legs. He turned it into 40 (!) minutes of non-work chit chat.
I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.
Regarding communication, I find I actually communicate with people more when remote than not. Walking over to someone's desk is pretty distracting, while firing a quick message and waiting for when they're free has nearly zero cost. Plus with video chat we can share both our screens at the same time so we can see what the other person sees, which is very valuable for diagnosing problems that only happen to one person. I can't videochat at the office because the noise will absolutely disturb my other colleagues, but it's trivial at home. It's almost like having infinite quiet isolated meeting rooms that you don't have to reserve in advance.
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily ride was sometimes a grind, in cold or wet weather. And it takes a lot of time
I too used to bike in to work, but since the pandemic, I've replaced that commute ride with riding on my own (which is nicer than the commute was since I can stick to off road paths and not ride the busy roads near work). But now that I'm full time remote, I have another option -- I have a spinning bike, so when the weather is bad, I can ride indoors.
A pattern I notice (not necessarily directly related to this article) is that the people who loudly exclaim “I don’t want to go back to the office ever again!” are usually older folks who:
> have a house
> have a family
As a 20-something who lives alone in an apartment, I don’t get the luxury of having a nice backyard to go work in (like someone mentioned doing in another comment thread here). I don’t get the luxury of having a bunch of space to set up an office. And for that reason alone I’m excited to go back to an office setting. It’s nice that older people who have their lives figured out are enjoying WFH, but let’s not discount how WFH disproportionately is worse for early in career people.
Parents with small children at home often prefer the office because it provides some context switching.
It’s really difficult to explain to a toddler why a parent is home but cannot play with them for half of the day.
That said, you’re not alone in preferring to work in an office. It’s actually very common outside of Internet forums for people to prefer working in an office. It’s just not a popular opinion online right now. To each their own, but let’s not pretend like one working style is inherently better than the other for everyone.
> It’s really difficult to explain to a toddler why a parent is home but cannot play with them for half of the day.
I've worked from home through 3 toddlers, and very rarely had a problem. But I've worked from home for their whole lives.
This is probably something harder to transition into. Kids only really know what you introduce to them. If you've worked from home their whole lives they don't know anything different. If they're used to mommy working from home and them not being able to play with her, then they pretty much accept it.
We never tried to explain, we just said: mommy is at work, you cannot play with her, you can see her at lunch/after work.
- I think 20-somethings gain more from in-person interactions given they have less experience so are regularly bumping into people with more experience. For the more experienced these interactions feel more like a tax/interruption, but for the person just starting out, they're often missed learning opportunities that add up over time.
- In-office amenities like free dinner are more valued by early-career folks who are less likely to have a family they need to go home to. Even the free drinks/snacks.
I'm a 30-something and married, so my situation isn't completely analogous to yours. But we have no kids and live in a pretty tiny 1br apartment with no backyard or other private outdoor space or even a balcony. Before covid we didn't really care, but covid makes us yearn for bigger, detached housing.
My home "office" is a corner of our tiny bedroom (that said, my home office setup is still vastly superior to my work office setup).
That said, I still vastly prefer WFH. I don't have to waste time on a miserable commute, and my office environment is just plain old dreary, depressing - probably the case for most offices for "old school" companies (vs. hot and hip Silicon Valley style tech companies). I've mentioned this in other posts, but I can imagine being happier at the office if the environment wasn't so depressing and dystopian.
Before covid we didn't really care, but covid makes us yearn for bigger, detached housing
Wouldn't full time WFH make that easier to do? Presumably you live in a small one bedroom apartment because it's within commute distance of work. If your employer stuck with WFH, then you could move to a house in a small town, probably for less money than you're paying for the apartment.
Doesn't relate with me. While not 20 anymore, I live in a solo apartment and Covid has killed all my social life. Still never want to work in an office ever again. And I'm not going to. Despite the commute, everything about offices feels and is restricting. At home, I can work however I want. Way more productive. Way more hours of the day to myself. Never understood people who have their social life at work. You work there all day, interactions are limited, polite, professionell, uninteresting. The fun starts afterwards with people of your choice.
I am a 20-something who lives alone in a small studio apartment. I work at a tiny desk and barely have room for all my work equipment. still, I love working from home and I hope never to go back to the office. as soon as I get the message that this situation can go on indefinitely, I will buy a bigger desk and possibly shop for a larger apartment when my lease is up.
your experience is valid, but don't assume you speak for everyone in our cohort. I hope once quarantine is over, you and I will both have the freedom to find the work environment that suits each of us best.
> WFH disproportionately is worse for early in career people
Based off working with a bunch of younger co-workers (the average age of my co-workers is in the early/mid 20's) I'd say it's worse for people whose primary source of social interaction is work. They didn't have social contacts they could lean on outside of work.
Without the office, they were alone.
Those with spouses, or friends outside of the office, all did pretty well, and aren't clamoring to go back to the office.
Personally, I have a spouse and a number of friends who I continued to interact with outside of the office. This saw me through the coronavirus better than any house or a yard could have.
Just to offer a counter example, I'm in my mid 30s and engaged. I'm an introvert, but my fiancee is an extrovert, so I have a big social circle and even during the pandemic, I've had more social commitments than I can handle.
Our office opened last week and I've been back in every day (and am sitting here now).
For me, going back into the office has nothing to do with my social life. Even prior to the pandemic, for the last 4 years, I've had the option to WFH as much as I wanted and I was still in office 3-4 days a week. I feel less productive at home and I miss having the division between work and home. My commute is my wind down time that allows me to turn my brain off work mode at the end of the day.
I think after COVID is gone, the name of the game will be flexibility. Treat people like adults and, as long as they're getting their work done and not negatively affecting the team, we should let them work where and when they want.
Nobody wants to force you to work from home. I think if you work better from the office you should work from the office, and if I work better from home I should work from home.
The execs advocating for work from office aren’t proposing this though: they are instead insisting everyone work from the office, regardless of preference. That’s what chafes people.
First, productivity concerns are (mostly) an excuse. The real important thing that is desired is to be able to exert managerial control over employees. This is more easily done when you have employees in the office under watchful eyes.
Second, in an ideal world the people that like the office will commute to the office, and the people that like WFH will WFH.
The prefer-WFH people don't lose out either way from such a setup. However the prefer-office people still lose out, if, for example, the majority of a team chooses prefer WFH. What happens to all the social and organizational benefits of working in the office if you're in a team of 10 and only 3 people choose to come to the office? Or worse - if you're the only one? So it becomes an all or nothing scenario.
Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?
Listen to Adam Savage [1] talk about his early career as a prop-maker. I just don't see how that sort of deep collaboration is possible remotely. As a recent graduate whose first full-time job has been full remote due to the pandemic, I'm terrified that this is going to kill my career progression, not only upwards but also laterally. I just don't have the same opportunities to 1) learn from people or 2) bump into new people as I would if we're all forced to be in the same place.
Sure. The company I work at has always been remote-only, and I've been at it for over 5 years.
We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.
Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.
We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
It's, honestly, kinda awesome.
Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.
> We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.
Thanks for sharing, I think the "no hidden discussions" idea is important. I had a few internships in the before times, and I learned the most by pulling up a chair to other engineers / researchers who were already talking about something, and just listening to how they talk through problems. In my remote job I don't really get a chance to eavesdrop on someone's zoom call.
I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!
If it's any consolation, I've spent most of my career working remote and I'd say probably the richest experiences I've learned from depended on who and what they were working on WAY more than them being there in person, and those richer experiences didn't really have a hell of a lot of zoom meeting and other distracting nonsense. The communication simply shifts to text based chat with a nice handy record of communication to look back on and consider over a longer period of time, where the information is more salient.
Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
I do get the issues with onboarding/mentorship (as well as social) especially right out of school. I suspect that many companies are just trying to do business as usual rather than adapting. It's also worth pointing out that we're talking about remote during a pandemic. In normal times, there's nothing to keep teams from traveling to a location for a week. (Yes, some people have travel issues for various reasons but in general the statement stands.)
> Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.
It's killing me slowly right now. I got hired in the middle of the pandemic and I think just 6 people even know I exist. I've spent more time talking with HR than my team members. Not for what you think, I respond to their emails and chats so we get along great. My team is mostly on DnD, no idea what their working on and emails take 24-48 hours to respond.
Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.
It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.
I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.
Start making 1-1 meetings just to get to know people better and the kind of things they do. Make sure you mostly work on projects where you can collaborate closely with 1-3 other people.
I feel you, it's been really tough on me too, for many of the same reasons. I don't feel like part of the team, and it's not really clear what my purpose is. When this is all over maybe I'll take a break from this lonely career and spend some time in a more human-facing role like teaching.
Thanks for sharing. Your company definitely needs some “how to WFH” training. Taking 24-48 hours to respond to an e-mail is totally, absurdly unacceptable, and if I (as a fairly senior guy) saw this regularly happening, I’d bring it to the offender’s attention and to their manager if they didn’t take corrective action. If someone is too busy to respond to their e-mail, they need to discuss their workload with their manager.
>Those of you who think that remote-work-by-default would be a good thing, can I ask how your companies are handling career progression and collaboration, as well as mentorship of junior developers?
Frankly, my employer sucks-ass at this anyway. So no real difference. I suspect there are a LOT of small-time employers that are like this.
I've worked at other companies where they do much better at collaboration and even have formal mentorship programs (Lockheed-Martin). Yes, I very much miss working for those companies, but given that I've relocated since then, it's really not an option.
This is a valid concern, but I don't think WFH affects it much. A company that values employee career progression and collaboration will do so regardless of work arrangement. most of the companies I've worked for haven't been very effective at managing any sort of career progression.
I'm working towards my promotion to Senior engineer right now. My manager and I have weekly video-call one on ones, discussing my progress.
I'm also mentoring a new hire, fresh from college. He's kicking ass and it's going really well. We mostly talk over slack, but we also do weekly video calls, or ad-hoc when he's stuck on something.
I'm not saying it's as good at this as it was in-person, but we find ways to make it work.
Remember, the goal is to find the best solution possible, not to discount any solution that doesn't have 100% coverage of the old solution. We may lose ground in some respects in order to gain it in many more.
We’ve had several onboarded some right out of college since quarantine started and they are all doing well.
Bumping into people is actually a problem, but career progression is less so, as there is a lot more time for 1-1 mentorship, pairing, etc.
The bumping into people part can be solved though, especially with occasional in person events. We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine. Being noticed is also fine - people still give presentations, do launch events, and connect with others through managers, pms, etc.
>We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine.
A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.
Your concerns are valid. I think this is really an opportunity to get intentional about networking and learning within your company. Everyone else is presumably in the same boat, so if I was early in my career I would focus on becoming the best remote networker and learner possible.
Most people will just go with the flow and not really adapt intentionally to the situation so in some ways you may be able to actually stand out more than normal with less effort.
I feel like making a career change to teaching as well. But the horror stories I hear about how hostile parents are towards teachers, and the fact that I'd take a pay-cut to about 1/3 of what I'm making have prevented me from considering it seriously.
While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions, I'm also in the boat of hoping I never have to go back to an office. Not having a commute, being able to spend more time with my kids, not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals, being able to spend my (lunch) breaks working in my garden... I never want to go back!
Don't mistake pandemic conditions for forever. There is no reason you need to stay permanently isolated and can't get social needs filled somewhere other than an office.
I am pretty much in the same boat, i cannot afford a house where i live, and probably will never be able to at least within the next couple of years. Unfortunately between the ongoing construction, and the fact our building is slowly renovating most of the units has hurt my productivity.
While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.
Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.
Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.
But isn't that the point? If your location doesn't matter you could live somewhere with a garden because you wouldn't be forced to live near the arbitrary location of the office.
While I'm sure there's some kernel of truth to the benefits of chit chatting about random stuff and coming up with better ideas through that, until I see some evidence that in-office work provides this to a substantial degree, I have a hard time believing it's as beneficial as it's made out to be. What it actually feels like is a hand wavy attempt for some old people in management to try to justify them holding onto their outdated ways.
> not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals
Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.)
Offices don't have to have terrible meal options. Nice homes can be chosen close to work, thereby negating commute. And co-workers don't have to be inept to the point of constantly interrupting your work flow.
There will always be a section of the population happier and more productive working from principally home. (Though for how long we can command a wage premium remains to be seen.) But I suspect, if offices were a bit more desirable and city center housing a bit more affordable, that slice would narrow quickly.
Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work. All homes in the South Bay that aren’t literally falling down are multi-million-dollar. I personally know people who bought a $2.5m home with a rat infestation.
Surely it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium, if the employer start including the cost of providing an office, especially in a premium area.
I work in a company where without a boring meeting you are not going to get absolutely anything from anybody, even if you have a simple question. Working remotely helped a lot as we were forced to use MS Teams then information suddenly started free flowing. Meetings and walkthroughs can be recorded with everyone's permissions and the knowledge builds up. I am not looking forward at going back to the office at all! I'm even considering taking a break and then finding something remote only even with a reduced compensation.
> While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions
While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.
You're cross polinating ideas right now! My company has been pushing yammer or some such garbage since it became available. There may finally be a use for it.
Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers. Especially the ones who are fresh out of college. They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer. Especially the kind of monkey-see-monkey-do experience you need to build confidence using tools such as git.
They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.
Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
It seems to me that the issues you raised could be addressed through simple technological solutions or better management, assuming your company actually wants to embrace remote work.
New hires afraid to ask for help? Make it clear that it's part of their job. Developers need to see another developer's screen? Screen share over Zoom. Multiple employees don't know how to use a tool? Provide a one-hour presentation. Rinse. Repeat.
If the senior developers are grumbling about not wanting to be in the same room as their coworkers, I wouldn't be surprised if the junior devs feel nervous about asking for a few minutes of their time.
It is the job of senior devs to make new employees feel like part of the team.
In addition to this, I can wholeheartedly recommend 'screen control sharing' (maybe there's a better name for the category of software I'm referring to?) such as Tuple or Drovio. Being able to pair program with two sets of input devices for the same screen is kind of revolutionary, actually, and has been a key part of collaborating remotely for our team.
They can be solved, but they often aren't. A lot of things that happen implicitly and organically in person need to be explicitly planned and scheduley in a virtual environment.
There should be no hesitation to ping via email. The recipient can respond as quickly as they're able. If they aren't busy that should ideally be within a couple minutes, and the response given will frequently be of higher quality than an off the cuff answer, since external resources can be consulted.
There are many situations in which synchronous feedback won't be possible, wfh or not. For example, when the coworker in question is in a meeting or on vacation. All developers must be able to handle this situation and avoid blockages by switching to another task or an unblocked portion of the same task. The sooner new devs learn to juggle their time and attention in this way, the better.
For sure. The job I had during March 2020 was difficult because my boss came off as unwelcoming to questions at points (even in the office I could see him open my slack messages and ignore them), which made working much more difficult when you're adapting to new systems. Thankfully, I had some great coworkers who were very welcoming and helped me a lot. If there is anything I learned from that, it's that being welcoming and open to questions from a coworker is extremely important. Sometimes it's easy to get frustrated with a coworker, but being able help them kindly is such a huge skill I will continue to appreciate and reciprocate.
Interesting...I'm not a fan of read receipts and typing indicators for messaging applications for reasons like this. If I need to craft a lengthy reply, it could take a day depending on the schedule. If someone never replies though when it is the de-facto-company messaging platform, that is highly problematic.
A coworker even mentioned how anxiety-inducing typing a lengthy reply is that involves some lengthier research.
I'm not exactly in that position, but I am in the more junior side of things
In my opinion, what helped me the most is: when an issue arises, like something during an on-call, have the person resolving the issue share their screen and talk through the workflow/debugging process, to whomever is being mentored. The tools/logic/reasoning they use during a live debugging session is invaluable knowledge for incoming engineers.
Honestly I don't see this (and I'm currently working in a large organization onboarding many newer developers every week). It feels easier to communicate knowledge and practices via Slack and Zoom shared screen sessions than it would be trekking around some cube-farm to find someone who probably isn't there because they're playing roller hockey in the parking lot.
> They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer.
What this sounds like to me is your organization isn't documenting things properly. I know, because I've run into this exact same problem on projects at my organization.
"Send me your coding standard."
"Uh, we don't have one."
"Okay, well what's your code review process for integrating changes?"
"It's not written down, I'll have to walk you through it."
"What's my tasking?"
"I'll need to sit down with you in person to discuss that."
The lack of communication skills in software people has never been more obvious than during the quarantines. It's a serious deficit that needs to be addressed. I mean, what happens when one of these people leave, either for greener pastures, something happens to them, or they just simply retire?
I think that this is something senior devs/admins need to try and influence. I've made it a goal to actively mentor the less experienced on my team (and even some senior admins) during COVID. Sometimes I phrase this as "Check out this stupid thing I did." That lowers everyone's guard, and then you can explain how you solved an issue, or how you dealt with a stakeholder in a professional manner. If us senior folks want to have WFH, then we have an obligation to other employees to help them adjust and learn.
> They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something.
My team's solution is for one developer to just ping another when needed and if they don't reply for a while, they are busy. Don't be afraid to ask, but don't take a lack of a quick reply personally.
With Slack, whether they are currently working on something is not important. If they are busy, the message can just sit there until they have time.
My $BIG_CO has access to third-party online training materials for things like Git. I've shamelessly used them to learn quickly about new topics, like GraphQL. They'd be a great tool to fill the gap for junior developers. Even for mid-level developers who want to brush up.
While those are useful. I've learned so much from watching more senior developers use their tools. The things you couldn't ask about because you didn't know it existed. Productivity hacks, IDE shortcuts, custom key mappings, codebase traversal, git commands/shortcuts.
It almost sounds like this has exposed flaws in co-working, where nothing gets written down, people are not inviting others to request help/collaboration, and training has to be done manually.
This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"
People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.
I agree that this seems to be an issue for new hires that I've seen.
But I think the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team. If a fresh out of college grad feels hesitant to ping a coworker then that coworker is doing something wrong. I'm seeing a lot of companies and teams seem to shift this blame to the WFH situation, where really it is a failure of the team to not integrate and work well together in a shifting situation.
Plenty of companies that are remote first have no issue mentoring junior engineers, so I don't see what the excuse is for companies that are not.
> the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team
It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.
There’s no shortage of git training available, go send them on a day or two. I guarantee that they’ll be much better teachers than your senior engineers.
> Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers
I'm seeing this across the board. Learning curves are shallower. Matt Levine commented on it with respect to the Goldman Sachs B.S.:
"...it's usually that 100 hours of work for a first year analyst is probably closer to 80 hours of work for a second year analyst. But first years aren't learning as quickly working remotely, so the time isn't being shaved down, it's just staying at 100 hours a week."
Something I've noticed without formal study is that people my age (college seniors and recent grads) don't like working from home. I was working at a new internship (8 months, starting January 2020) and the initial working from home was draining, unmotivating, and a bit depressing (that's partially due to being alone during the start of the pandemic).
I thought I was in the minority because all of HN and Reddit seemed to love working from home, but as I spoke more to my peers about it, it seems like they didn't like it for the most part either. I believe that people who have families are more likely to prefer working from home because they have more contact with their loved ones, where as a single new grad has less contact with the people they know.
Now, to be fair, I'm a lot more open to remote work now that the pandemic is more handled since I can at least get some human interaction outside of work. If anything, the thought of working remote when I graduate in May is a bit exciting since I'd be able to move every few months for a little while before deciding where to live.
What you're seeing is the demographics that are over-represented on different platforms.
Working people in their 20s mostly live in cheap apartments whereas a huge chunk of Reddit lives with their parents (if they're employed at all) and HN skews older and wealthier to the point where people have nice houses in nice suburbs or can justify a higher end apartment.
This seems lost on most people but is painfully clear if you read post histories. For instance, most of /r/childfree (an interesting topic no doubt) is a younger sister overexposed to her parents' excitement (because she's living at home) about older sister's kid. Most of /r/QAnonCasualties is the same sort of angst, directed at parents. Most city subs are the same way, edgy "right wing" guy turns out to live with his dad, who he's parroting. It's incredible that the site is taken any more seriously than 4Chan; there ought to be some great business studies on Reddit's "teflon" nature.
Totally relate to your experiences. I think WFH while living alone is super hard! You have to take a lot of responsibility for your life that you normally don't have to. I.e you won't see anyone in person unless intentionally plan to leave the house. Its surprising how big of an effect in person meetings can have!
I always wondered how much of the push towards open offices and that sort of working conditions was driven, or perhaps, enabled, by recent grads who were accustomed to hot-desking in the library and working in study groups.
Readit News
That said, I share most of the opinions even though I quite like the office environment of my company.
I abso-fking-love choosing where I work (and to some degree, when). Being able to take my laptop and go sit under a canopy in my back yard when the weather is nice, seeing my rabbits hopping around the yard, my cats avoiding the aggressive she-rabbit, hearing the birds, etc., while working, is just about as happy as I can be while also working on stuff that doesn't really matter much.
As I begin to form my own company, one of my priorities is to allow my employees to have at least some of their time completely at their own discretion. They choose when and where they work as long as they can attend some important anchor meetings (and obviously be productive). And for the social aspect, weekend or week-long dev retreats are ideal. 4 hours of intense serious work, plus a couple of hours of colleague social interaction, and the rest left to the individual to spend however they like, is the kind of situation I would have not even been able to dream of when I was younger.
And from a bean-counter owner perspective, do not underestimate the employee loyalty and overachievement motivation you can get by giving some nice free trips, nice free food, and quality equipment.
Big companies lack this freedom to treat their creative talent not because they cannot afford it but because the people in charge tend to not be creative thinkers. This is why most interesting things happen in smaller companies (and ultimately tend to get bought by the laggard big companies).
Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy. I'm currently full time remote (I'm on the East Coast working for a West Coast company). My previous company had its main office in my current city, but allowed a super flexible choose-where-you-work-from policy. It was the best.
Didn't feel like dealing with the commute or had a ton of heads down work to do? Stay at home. Wanted to go in to be present for meetings? Easy. Start the day at the office and go home to finish off the day and avoid the commute? Sure.
Of course they made it possible by actively managing it. No meetings before 11am ET (to accomodate those in different TZs). Every scheduled meeting required a Zoom/conference link. Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms" so remote people could call in. And of course, people all the way up the ladder worked from home at least some of the time.
Being full remote doesn't work for everyone. Providing a space for those who want it is such a huge quality of life bonus imo. But the biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion, despite your employees working preferences. This is the hardest thing to do, especially at scale.
Hot take: There's a whole way of communicating and handling team organization that grew up around 20th century business management culture, and it just doesn't work well with remote teams. Methods that do work well with remote teams, though, don't work well with traditional deeply hierarchical management structures. At best, they tend to make all those management layers somewhat superfluous.
This means getting people back into the office may be a matter of self-preservation for career managers, whether they realize it consciously or not.
I doubt it lasts, at least in software. Talented people are going to have lots of remote options making it harder to find good people willing to show up for daily cubicle warfare.
I was someone who preferred to be in the office every day prior to the pandemic. But after adjusting, I really, really like working from home. Truth is, I can't imagine I'll ever take another job that expects me to show up to an actual office everyday. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Beliefs and dogma. Amazon's justification was "Amazon is an in-office culture." That ultimately boils down to circular reasoning; the key decision maker (whoever they are) has demonstrated an immense lack of critical reasoning. Continuing this practice is in the same realm as continuing other hostile workplace traditions, although it is one of the less serious ones.
In my opinion, it is wasting a lot of money in the form of productivity. Every employee who commutes to the office has an overwhelmingly high likelihood of having some of their mental resources drained. You're wasting a good hour or two of superior employee performance in the morning, and possibly some near the end of the day when employees start dreading the journey home.
> biggest factor is creating a culture of inclusion
This is a very important point. One of the major ongoing reasons that women are passed over for promotions is that they are the traditional/dogmatic caregivers. Home-first equalizes this, much like paternal leave does. If a home is unable to afford child-care, then men have just as much responsibility and distraction during work hours.
Some people may struggle to afford commute, for example, people escaping homelessness. Being able to work from home would reduce the burden on these people.
In addition, those who cannot causally/physically complete their job offsite (doctors, construction workers, tellers, baristas) won't have roads and public transport congested with people who have no business traveling to work.
> Dedicated offices were set up as "conference rooms"
We need conference rooms as an API. I should be able to add (and be billed for) a physical room to a meeting request as easily as adding a Zoom/GMeet - for when in-person collaboration is really needed. WeWork was in the ideal position to do this, it's a pity they doubled down on big corporate clients instead of "gig economy rooms."
Informal communication, informal collaboration, a culture of apprenticeship. To the extent that the organization values these they are all served much better in person than remote.
All companies and all people are different. There isn't a one size fits all. But it's not like there are no benefits to in person.
Because most managers have a reactionary style of management. They are like IRQ handlers. Their state doesn't change until they receive an email from their boss or a phone call from a customer. At that point they react to it by running down the hall to find someone. Now, because they do not understand cooperative multitasking they preemptively interrupt YOU and now your day is f*cked.
1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.
2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.
Only reasons I can think of is as follows. - Someone in the CEO's direct reports is tasked with making a decision. - They start a survey on how satisfied the managers are on the work performance. - The survey does not go to individual employees. - Rightfully, the survey results wildly support return-to-office. - Decision is made.
Some other company may decide to be data driven, and use metrics which may or may not fully reflect the tradeoffs between work-from-home vs. office.
Or, the top leader makes the decision for the rest of the company. No questions allowed.
> Cost issues aside, I've always maintained that the absolute best experience is a hybrid/flexible schedule and location policy.
Agree. This should be the way.
Will they though? If some companies don't, that will be a major reason to change jobs for the better employers (who value your flexibility).
Dead Comment
As much as I appreciate (most of) my coworkers, on nights and weekends I want to close my computer and spend quality time with my family, not see and talk to the same people I am already forced to talk to 35-40h a week. They might be ideal to you, but you're assuming quite a lot about everyone's situations if you think they work for everyone.
These could happen during the week or (depending on the retreat) the weekend, with weekends probably being given comp time in lieu.
If you think that a modicum of face time throughout the year for a remote team has no value to a group or team, I’ve got news for you.
If you think GP was referring to additional face time in addition to face time at a workplace, then I think you may be projecting and selective quoting a bit. Note that employees at this small company can work when and where they want.
It helps that the most important aspect of our hiring process is about culture-fit - so much so that the final stage of the (pretty relaxed) hiring process is a presentation to everyone in the company who wishes to attend (regardless of role). Those presentations typically see 40% or more of the company attend. Crucially, every person in that presentation gets the opportunity to vote on whether the candidate is hired.
I've made friends for life at this company.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
I'm quite jealous of people who can work on laptops.
I wonder the degree to which people enjoy WFH is the same as the degree to which they enjoy working on a laptop. Even the people I know with a dedicated room for work set up want to go back to the office if they prefer multiple monitors.
Going outside, working just off the laptop, is a definite shift. It usually means less coding, but sometimes it pushes me to be productive in areas I normally neglect (documenting, planning, organizing).
To do real development, I am very dependent upon a big monitor. If I travel, I take one or rent one.
Honestly though, sometimes I just go for a walk. And often during that walk, with no screens, my brain magically sorts through some problems and gives me new insights.
If you work from home though, most people agree on dedicating some space and properly equipping it. Working always only on a laptop in a floater kind of way is something that I suspect most people cannot do with any real level of productivity.
Well, allow me to be the first outlier. I typically use two monitors (tried three, didn't really add much to having two, for me); using two external monitors (attached to a laptop) right this second as I type this (and also a proper keyboard and mouse - the laptop to which they are all connected is under the desk, closed).
I am very happy indeed to continue using two monitors at home. A chap on my team uses four monitors on his setup and he's similarly happy to continue doing so from home.
Why do the people you know who like to use multiple monitors want to do so in the office rather than at home in a dedicated work room? Are they, at home, like, actually working ON the laptop? Typing on the little laptop keyboard, using the little laptop mousepad, staring at the little laptop screen?
I hate working on a laptop screen.
OTOH, I like the 34” ultrawide monitor I use at home attached to my dock better the twin 21” widescreens I had in the office, plus I get to use it, rather than a laptop, in the numerous meetings-with-computers, which were held in meeting rooms with in-person work.
Yet the last year has changed my mind. I have a 15" MBP from 2015 that is fine. My home office has an iMac, so I really don't want a second monitor crowding my desk. I just use the laptop's display and keyboard. Less stuff to worry about finding space for, or keeping the cats from fucking with.
And best of all, when work is done, I log out of the VPN, and close the lid. Of course I have Teams/Outlook on my phone if there's an emergency, but there's also a clear delineation for my family to recognize; if the laptop is open, I'm still working. If it's closed, then they can talk/pester/joke with me without worrying about my work. And it also helps me remember to not overwork.
I don't doubt that adding screen estate has value, but in the minimalistic spirit, anything added also subtracts something :) And in the same spirit, anything subtracted adds something else - in my case, the ability to work more efficiently.
Try to work on a single screen for a relatively long time (say, a few months). Over the time, you'll develop (because you're forced to) more efficient habits.
I bought a 43" (4K 3840 x 2160) and put an older (rotated) 24" right next to it - the setup works perfectly contrary to my initial worry of the main display proving to be too big. Advantage of the 43" display over an ultra-wide is that I get plenty of vertical space as well in addition to the horizontal space. That means easily having 4 80-column tall IDE windows side by side for reduced scrolling. Another advantage is that videos play full screen without any black areas on the sides. The smaller monitor is split between Slack and email - both always visible but not too distracting due to being in the peripheral vision.
I can understand why people who are working from their kitchen table want to go back to the office, but for those that have a dedicated work area, wouldn't they set it up the way they want?
I have a multi-monitor setup at home that's better than what I have at work since I'm not limited to IT approved hardware. Related, I also have a loud clicky keyboard that I can't get away with using at work since everyone in the shared office area can hear it.
There's no way I'd be allowed this much equipment and space in the office. I had a nice-ish 27' monitor there and a small desk crammed next to another developer.
As much as I miss the social aspects of an office, WFH has a lot of benefits. I realize this is not true for many, and a lot of my own money went into the office of my dreams here. But it's quite comfortable.
https://www.asus.com/us/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ZenScreen...
When you do retreats do keep in mind that not everyone will want to spend a week or weekend away from their family, and that retreats with a bunch of people who can be social nonstop for 12 hours can also be the worst nightmare for introverts. Keep it optional, make sure it's clear that it's optional, make sure junior employees don't feel pressured :)
> We get the whole company together once a year for seven days so that Automatticians can create bonds that influence them all year long. So far we’ve done Grand Meetups in San Francisco, California; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec; Seaside, Florida; Budapest, Hungary; San Diego, California; Santa Cruz, California; Park City, Utah; Whistler, Canada; and Orlando, Florida.
> In addition to our all-company Grand Meetup, teams meet for five to seven days to brainstorm team-level strategy and bond in locales ranging from Boulder to Buenos Aires, Las Vegas to Lisbon, Montréal to Mexico City, and Vienna to Vietnam. If you join our merry band, expect to travel three to four weeks per year.
> As a distributed company we also know how to connect with each other from afar, and consider day-to-day social communication at least as important as breaking bread in person.
https://automattic.com/how-we-work/
But! If remote is the new way, then we don't have to live in the city center. Especially in nice countries with good train systems, we can live in more distant places where rents are cheaper and we can have an entire place with yard to spare. I'm in NL, and I have about 150 square meters of indoor space plus a big yard for less than 800 eur. Previously I spent 700 for 35sq meters and no yard. The difference now is that I'm in a village 2.5 hours from Amsterdam. As long as there are trains, I can go to the office on occasion.
I work in London, and the lack of commuting by train, stuffed with a hundred other people, has been the equivalent of very hefty pay rise, and an improvement in my health, such that I haven't been ill, at all, since Xmas 2019.
I want to go back, but only for a couple of days a week if possible. I know I've signed a contract with my employer stating my place of employment and so on, so I'm resigned to the fact that it will likely be 3 or 4 days.
But I agree with only a few of the original author's sentiments. Not having to share an open plan office with a hundred other people has massively improved my productivity and health.
This is a caste culture issue. It's orthogonal to productivity and real returns.
If you set up your chilled culture, you'd better stay bootstrapped. If you take VC money, most are going to push for a less liberal line.
The details of an ideal employee policy can be debated, but you’re right there with the 4 hours hard work, 2 hours social interaction, and the rest up to the employee. Especially a free trip with the staff every now and then to bond. Something you can’t really find at big companies anymore.
The only way to really give employees freedom to work from anywhere completely at their own discretion is to let them work full-time remote.
If you require any face time at the office at all, then they have to live within commuting distance, or at least within flying distance.
An employee may prefer to work from Bali, but if he has to go into the office twice a month, he can't (reasonably) do that.
The company he’s describing is severely broken if everything he’s describing is true. Most of what he describes are not normal office problems. Some of them are even health and safety violations. Working from home will only distance him from those problems, but it can’t fix an inherently broken company that doesn’t care about employees. He should be searching for another remote job ASAP
I was told to suck it up and do at least 50+ hours (35h paid) when working at temps over 42c (110f). Both are illegal here, they don't care, they will always find a poor sucker in a dire situation needing the job.
Companies will be fined for this kind of environment and the office will be closed if things aren’t improved. You can’t choose to not care.
I hope you left that shithole company and glassdoored their management hard.
In this case, and depending on the country, working at this office is illegal. The assumption that working from home is better is a little naive. It’s a result of a terribly company, who will manage to make working from home equally terrible in the long run.
Our AC went out (In las vegas - it gets to 120+ some days in summer) and they brought in portable A/C units that were louder than the planes.
Then they took our bottled water away.
While these issues aren't normal they are out there and they are replicated by employers who don't value the sanity of their workers. Yes I got out of there. Yes I'm working from home now and agree with practically everything on this list. Especially the bathroom.
Source: Helped someone one weekend re-roof their house that was probably 3 miles from Logan Airport in Boston. You'd get waves of fumes slowly drifting down from the big heavy jets taking off one after another after another.
An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway.
If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust.
As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is.
The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock.
>Some of them are even health and safety violations.
They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles.
Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example.
When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that what you’re describing is not “just life” in most developed countries. You’re not describing a normal office.
Offices like you describe continue to exist because employees put up with it. The tech job market is very hot right now. I would strongly encourage you to explore your options. What you’re describing is not normal or acceptable.
You don’t need to move to a Google type company with unlimited office budgets. Most companies are smart enough to know they need to address things like broken HVAC or not enough microwaves or unclean bathrooms by spending the relatively tiny amount of money to address the problem. It’s literally cheaper to address these issues than to lose good talent over such easily addressable frustrations.
When you move to a company that treats employees decently, you’ll find that you also get along with coworkers better because everyone is not already miserable and dreading their jobs.
There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.
That point was clearly about his home
"Working from home I:
...
• Breathe jet exhaust..."
Kidding aside, there's just not enough jobs in "not broken" offices for all the workers. I haven't seen an office which isn't broken in some way, even though I haven't seen many. And suggestion of looking for another job is just patronizing. If a person could done it easily, he would have done it long ago.
Nope, definitely not a call center. In fact only team leads and higher have phones.
> someone on HN needs to hire this guy,
I wish. GED + 15 years doing a job that doesn't translate to much of anything else doesn't help one's jobs prospects sadly.
- interacting with my colleagues, going out to lunch
- the very high-speed and reliability of being on the network wire
- dedicated work-space outside of my home where home-chores don't press on my mind while I'm trying to work
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily exercise was great
- a clearer separation of work and home life
Things I don't miss:
- interacting with my colleagues, when i don't want to (group office, oy)
- having my boss pop in over my shoulder (my bosses are great though)
- my commute: I cycled into work, and the daily ride was sometimes a grind, in cold or wet weather. And it takes a lot of time
- not having my work at home when I need to work late (I have a work laptop, but still)
- having the campus police officer give me the eye when they see me working at 2am
I'm considering coming in Thursday/Fridays.
In my office, nobody really bats an eye if someone decides that they're too sleepy to be productive and just takes a short nap.
We just want the choice, too!
Almost no WFH advocates are asking to force everyone to WFH. They just want the option to do what works best for themselves. The people pushing to return to the office, however, tend to want to force everyone back to the office. That’s what we’re complaining about.
*raises hand* the hybrid model of WFH is likely to revert to everyone back in the office as people realise that those that go into the office have an advantage over remote employees via side of desk conversations, building rapport with management and the general perception that those in the office are "working harder".
This one is not like the others, it's completely up to you to have a bike ride e.g. at lunch time around the block when you WFH.
I'm not a leisure cyclist. I don't dress up in spandex and ride an expensive bike. In fact, I have difficulty containing my derision for leisure cyclists. I know that the equipment they use has utility, but it also signals: I don't have to ride a bike. I have an expensive SUV at home, and I didn't lose my drivers license to a DUI.
Internet is a problem, but a solvable one - assuming you are in the US, we need competition for ISPs. I had ATT fiber for a while and it was for all practical purposes as good as office (symmetric gigabit).
Cycling has been covered :)
Separation - door closed to the space I work in works great for me. When I didn’t have that, putting everything away and leaving the work space for a few hours did the trick - it’s all in mental discipline.
It would require a commute longer than that of going to the office. An average employee has already organized their life around the necessity of commuting to the office. Office is probably a central location.
Most workers will be found within a circle of the tolerable commute time (isotropy assumption). Let for simplicity assume that all workers live at the same distance R from the office, and are distributed uniformly along that circle. The angular distance between any two employees is distributed uniformly in [0, pi]. Chord length is R 2 sin (theta/2). Integrating, we calculate the average distance between two employees: 4R/pi > R.
On the plus, many more lunches with spouse and children.
However there are those people that comes to the office to talk all day, and honestly, for everyone else's productivity, it's better they work from home.
I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.
I too used to bike in to work, but since the pandemic, I've replaced that commute ride with riding on my own (which is nicer than the commute was since I can stick to off road paths and not ride the busy roads near work). But now that I'm full time remote, I have another option -- I have a spinning bike, so when the weather is bad, I can ride indoors.
Dead Comment
As a 20-something who lives alone in an apartment, I don’t get the luxury of having a nice backyard to go work in (like someone mentioned doing in another comment thread here). I don’t get the luxury of having a bunch of space to set up an office. And for that reason alone I’m excited to go back to an office setting. It’s nice that older people who have their lives figured out are enjoying WFH, but let’s not discount how WFH disproportionately is worse for early in career people.
It’s really difficult to explain to a toddler why a parent is home but cannot play with them for half of the day.
That said, you’re not alone in preferring to work in an office. It’s actually very common outside of Internet forums for people to prefer working in an office. It’s just not a popular opinion online right now. To each their own, but let’s not pretend like one working style is inherently better than the other for everyone.
I've worked from home through 3 toddlers, and very rarely had a problem. But I've worked from home for their whole lives.
This is probably something harder to transition into. Kids only really know what you introduce to them. If you've worked from home their whole lives they don't know anything different. If they're used to mommy working from home and them not being able to play with her, then they pretty much accept it.
We never tried to explain, we just said: mommy is at work, you cannot play with her, you can see her at lunch/after work.
- I think 20-somethings gain more from in-person interactions given they have less experience so are regularly bumping into people with more experience. For the more experienced these interactions feel more like a tax/interruption, but for the person just starting out, they're often missed learning opportunities that add up over time.
- In-office amenities like free dinner are more valued by early-career folks who are less likely to have a family they need to go home to. Even the free drinks/snacks.
My home "office" is a corner of our tiny bedroom (that said, my home office setup is still vastly superior to my work office setup).
That said, I still vastly prefer WFH. I don't have to waste time on a miserable commute, and my office environment is just plain old dreary, depressing - probably the case for most offices for "old school" companies (vs. hot and hip Silicon Valley style tech companies). I've mentioned this in other posts, but I can imagine being happier at the office if the environment wasn't so depressing and dystopian.
Wouldn't full time WFH make that easier to do? Presumably you live in a small one bedroom apartment because it's within commute distance of work. If your employer stuck with WFH, then you could move to a house in a small town, probably for less money than you're paying for the apartment.
your experience is valid, but don't assume you speak for everyone in our cohort. I hope once quarantine is over, you and I will both have the freedom to find the work environment that suits each of us best.
Based off working with a bunch of younger co-workers (the average age of my co-workers is in the early/mid 20's) I'd say it's worse for people whose primary source of social interaction is work. They didn't have social contacts they could lean on outside of work.
Without the office, they were alone.
Those with spouses, or friends outside of the office, all did pretty well, and aren't clamoring to go back to the office.
Personally, I have a spouse and a number of friends who I continued to interact with outside of the office. This saw me through the coronavirus better than any house or a yard could have.
Our office opened last week and I've been back in every day (and am sitting here now).
For me, going back into the office has nothing to do with my social life. Even prior to the pandemic, for the last 4 years, I've had the option to WFH as much as I wanted and I was still in office 3-4 days a week. I feel less productive at home and I miss having the division between work and home. My commute is my wind down time that allows me to turn my brain off work mode at the end of the day.
I think after COVID is gone, the name of the game will be flexibility. Treat people like adults and, as long as they're getting their work done and not negatively affecting the team, we should let them work where and when they want.
The execs advocating for work from office aren’t proposing this though: they are instead insisting everyone work from the office, regardless of preference. That’s what chafes people.
First, productivity concerns are (mostly) an excuse. The real important thing that is desired is to be able to exert managerial control over employees. This is more easily done when you have employees in the office under watchful eyes.
Second, in an ideal world the people that like the office will commute to the office, and the people that like WFH will WFH.
The prefer-WFH people don't lose out either way from such a setup. However the prefer-office people still lose out, if, for example, the majority of a team chooses prefer WFH. What happens to all the social and organizational benefits of working in the office if you're in a team of 10 and only 3 people choose to come to the office? Or worse - if you're the only one? So it becomes an all or nothing scenario.
Listen to Adam Savage [1] talk about his early career as a prop-maker. I just don't see how that sort of deep collaboration is possible remotely. As a recent graduate whose first full-time job has been full remote due to the pandemic, I'm terrified that this is going to kill my career progression, not only upwards but also laterally. I just don't have the same opportunities to 1) learn from people or 2) bump into new people as I would if we're all forced to be in the same place.
[1]: https://youtu.be/qvU5PZgSowk?t=148
We pair new hires, regardless of ability, with a mentor. They have access to a full checklist of on-boarding tasks and an actively maintained Basecamp.
Perhaps the key point is that we do not have "hidden" discussions. Even the voice discussions have notes taken and recorded, and planning sessions are done via a recorded Miro board. Day-to-day project management is entirely in Basecamp and Slack. Anything in Slack that's worth noting is made into a Basecamp task for posterity.
We're a flat hierarchy, and we encourage team members to be vocal about what they want to work on. The entire team plans quarterly targets and goals.
It's, honestly, kinda awesome.
Edit: we're less than 50 people, and that makes it easier not to have a hierarchy since most features are built by one or two people.
To be quite sincere, I've heard this before. And it ALWAYS ends like Animal Farm. Some are "more equal" than others, especially if your company has the usual upper management.
I think there are a lot of "implicit" benefits of being in-person that remote companies need to make more "explicit" to be successful. It sounds like your company has the right idea!
Basically -- how do you think open source has been doing it since practically the 90s?
This! I don't get how HN, a community of hackers who can't but be aware of FLOSS, could claim with a straight face that "remote doesn't work" in the face of things like LKML.
Interns we've on-boarded, especially from non-CS background programs, all have had these kinds of issues.
It's been getting better, but I don't see how it's possible to have anything close to "real" mentor-ship schemes with full WFH. When I was interning most of learning happened not with my project but with interacting with the team and seeing/understanding what they did.
I have a sneaking feeling that the productivity boosts due to WFH mostly come from more senior devs w/ specific workstreams that are benefiting from more "head down" time, but without mentoring/training new ppl the quality hiring pool will go down over time.
Frankly, my employer sucks-ass at this anyway. So no real difference. I suspect there are a LOT of small-time employers that are like this.
I've worked at other companies where they do much better at collaboration and even have formal mentorship programs (Lockheed-Martin). Yes, I very much miss working for those companies, but given that I've relocated since then, it's really not an option.
I'm also mentoring a new hire, fresh from college. He's kicking ass and it's going really well. We mostly talk over slack, but we also do weekly video calls, or ad-hoc when he's stuck on something.
I'm not saying it's as good at this as it was in-person, but we find ways to make it work.
Remember, the goal is to find the best solution possible, not to discount any solution that doesn't have 100% coverage of the old solution. We may lose ground in some respects in order to gain it in many more.
Bumping into people is actually a problem, but career progression is less so, as there is a lot more time for 1-1 mentorship, pairing, etc.
The bumping into people part can be solved though, especially with occasional in person events. We’ve had whole teams not located within our area and have worked with them just fine. Being noticed is also fine - people still give presentations, do launch events, and connect with others through managers, pms, etc.
A lot of people look at in-office through the lens of entire companies or at least pretty much everyone they interact with being co-located. I, on the other hand, am on a broader team spread over about 9 time zones and, on a given day, I can be talking with people in 5 different offices plus remote/traveling. If I went into a local office pre-pandemic, there was a good chance I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.
Most people will just go with the flow and not really adapt intentionally to the situation so in some ways you may be able to actually stand out more than normal with less effort.
It's not the same for everyone.
While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.
Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.
Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.
Not to mention that a pandemic is not an accurate reflection of what real remote work looks like.
I've loved it so far, being able to be around family more and take care of them and just be around.
If full-time remote becomes more the norm, I hope people are able to take the opportunity to be closer to family and friends.
Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.)
Offices don't have to have terrible meal options. Nice homes can be chosen close to work, thereby negating commute. And co-workers don't have to be inept to the point of constantly interrupting your work flow.
There will always be a section of the population happier and more productive working from principally home. (Though for how long we can command a wage premium remains to be seen.) But I suspect, if offices were a bit more desirable and city center housing a bit more affordable, that slice would narrow quickly.
While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.
I don't think this needs to be lost. It just needs to be done more deliberately now if it is desired.
Remote work basically tosses out anything extra beyond your tasks as nothing happens naturally. You then get to craft what you want.
They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.
Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
New hires afraid to ask for help? Make it clear that it's part of their job. Developers need to see another developer's screen? Screen share over Zoom. Multiple employees don't know how to use a tool? Provide a one-hour presentation. Rinse. Repeat.
It is the job of senior devs to make new employees feel like part of the team.
There are many situations in which synchronous feedback won't be possible, wfh or not. For example, when the coworker in question is in a meeting or on vacation. All developers must be able to handle this situation and avoid blockages by switching to another task or an unblocked portion of the same task. The sooner new devs learn to juggle their time and attention in this way, the better.
In my opinion, what helped me the most is: when an issue arises, like something during an on-call, have the person resolving the issue share their screen and talk through the workflow/debugging process, to whomever is being mentored. The tools/logic/reasoning they use during a live debugging session is invaluable knowledge for incoming engineers.
What this sounds like to me is your organization isn't documenting things properly. I know, because I've run into this exact same problem on projects at my organization.
"Send me your coding standard."
"Uh, we don't have one."
"Okay, well what's your code review process for integrating changes?"
"It's not written down, I'll have to walk you through it."
"What's my tasking?"
"I'll need to sit down with you in person to discuss that."
The lack of communication skills in software people has never been more obvious than during the quarantines. It's a serious deficit that needs to be addressed. I mean, what happens when one of these people leave, either for greener pastures, something happens to them, or they just simply retire?
My team's solution is for one developer to just ping another when needed and if they don't reply for a while, they are busy. Don't be afraid to ask, but don't take a lack of a quick reply personally.
With Slack, whether they are currently working on something is not important. If they are busy, the message can just sit there until they have time.
build tutorials for things like git
allocate hours of their week to pairing
encourage juniors to ping seniors. and encourage seniors to respond promptly in efficient ways (written communication compounds over time)
etc
This is a big problem. More often than not "institutional knowledge" is short hand for "I'm too lazy to write this down, hope I don't get hit by a bus!"
People pretend like writing wasn't invented thousands of years ago.
But I think the blame for this lies in management and the seniors on the team. If a fresh out of college grad feels hesitant to ping a coworker then that coworker is doing something wrong. I'm seeing a lot of companies and teams seem to shift this blame to the WFH situation, where really it is a failure of the team to not integrate and work well together in a shifting situation.
Plenty of companies that are remote first have no issue mentoring junior engineers, so I don't see what the excuse is for companies that are not.
It absolutely does. Point is a lot of industries never formalized training, instead relying on osmosis across teams. That creates a--hopefully temporary--disadvantage for new hires. Again, in some fields.
I'm seeing this across the board. Learning curves are shallower. Matt Levine commented on it with respect to the Goldman Sachs B.S.:
"...it's usually that 100 hours of work for a first year analyst is probably closer to 80 hours of work for a second year analyst. But first years aren't learning as quickly working remotely, so the time isn't being shaved down, it's just staying at 100 hours a week."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-25/matt-l...
I thought I was in the minority because all of HN and Reddit seemed to love working from home, but as I spoke more to my peers about it, it seems like they didn't like it for the most part either. I believe that people who have families are more likely to prefer working from home because they have more contact with their loved ones, where as a single new grad has less contact with the people they know.
Now, to be fair, I'm a lot more open to remote work now that the pandemic is more handled since I can at least get some human interaction outside of work. If anything, the thought of working remote when I graduate in May is a bit exciting since I'd be able to move every few months for a little while before deciding where to live.
Working people in their 20s mostly live in cheap apartments whereas a huge chunk of Reddit lives with their parents (if they're employed at all) and HN skews older and wealthier to the point where people have nice houses in nice suburbs or can justify a higher end apartment.
This seems lost on most people but is painfully clear if you read post histories. For instance, most of /r/childfree (an interesting topic no doubt) is a younger sister overexposed to her parents' excitement (because she's living at home) about older sister's kid. Most of /r/QAnonCasualties is the same sort of angst, directed at parents. Most city subs are the same way, edgy "right wing" guy turns out to live with his dad, who he's parroting. It's incredible that the site is taken any more seriously than 4Chan; there ought to be some great business studies on Reddit's "teflon" nature.
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