I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, carrying the same flaws as doing performance reviews based on lines of code.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
> Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem.
People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to!
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner.
My QoL is insanely improved.
If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them.
For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.
I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.
tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.
> My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week. I'm an (highly functioning) introvert and even I hate video onboarding. I've done it twice during pandemic and it sucks big time if the team is not ready for online lifestyle/workstyle. Several months in and I still don't feel like I belong, it's just all the people busying away on their own, like in a univerity groupwork. I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.
Feels like some companies think that remote work is exactly like onsite, just virtually. Well, it's not. Dynamics is different, workflow is different, everybody has to adapt. I genuinely want to work remote, I don't think I'll be back to office anymore, but I still need the team that knows how to actually be a team online.
Agreed. I don’t if it’s for everyone, but i love it. No commute, healthier food, access to a bed for a quick nap, and a nice office. 10/10 would do again.
Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Commuting is different in different places. For me it is 15 minute drive to the office from a neighboring smaller city where property prices are 5x lower.
I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
I live in an apartment complex so the super has the keys to do whatever work needs to be done without my presence. I could take my deliveries at the office (and I often did since I saw clear improvement on delivery dates when they delivered to a business instead of residential address). Doctor visits were never an issue, because remote work was always an option and many people did work a day or two every week remotely.
If past experience is anything to go by I will get flooded with people saying that I should just do better and be better remote worker (like I probably shouldn't be writting this on company time) instead of acknowledging that different people are different and working at the office fits me and my life style better and that I've optimized for that lifestyle long before the pandemic hit. I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
> I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
What about all the people who already knew spending 2 hours commuting was a terrible use of our time before the pandemic, regardless of how much of a bigger house we could get?
So we lived in dense cities, in walkable neighborhoods, where the office was a 15 minute walk away but so were restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and theaters?
But part of the exchange we made was that our houses/apartments were small, and were for LIVING not for working. We don't have a spare bedroom to turn into a segregated office, so instead the work/home life has been an overlapping mess for 2 years.
As a young person without children, I much prefer the office - I intentionally live close enough to the office that my commute is a 20 minute walk or a <10 minute bike ride, so my commute is actually pleasant, and not having the forcing function of a commute to get me outside is actually worse for my mental health.
I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.
My question is: how did people not realize this before the pandemic?
The workers of Silicon Valley (and other urban centres) literally created and sustained this problem all by themselves: "You have to get to Silicon Valley!"
An interesting note on this is the main reason any urban areas are overpriced is because of max desired commute to a high paying job. If more remote options become available for this, we will likely see a decline in pricing for real estate in those areas as well as a decline in gentrification ect.
The only thing that is (kinda) better IRL is impromptu debug sessions, or that initial couple of days when you are bootstrapping a new project, so it's nice to sit with person(s) who are working on this.
Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.
> Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired.
All great for you ... but hey lets think of the little people like the shareholders of google... 257 billion in profit in 2021 (share price closed 2800), from 89 billion in 2019 (share price closed 1350).
Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.
I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on.
I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".
Every single thread I see on this has this exact same comment. It's like a bot wrote it. Is it that hard to imagine that an onboarding experience remotely can actually be done well, or that you could actually make friends with people existing solely on zoom? I think people are making that assumption, just because it feels right or maybe because their own org is just throwing juniors by the wayside and hoping covid will end rather than thinking about how to train people electronically from the ground up.
Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.
There's a 95% chance that this is a disguised RIF.
People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.
I'm not sure there is good evidence that tech was that productive the past couple of years by any work they were doing. Rather, they were the only game left in town.
> I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term.
And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?
Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.
Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.
I joined a new org earlier this year, fully remote, and my last gig was only a week in person before the pandemic started. I have also onboarded half a dozen juniors in the last few months, again all remote. Your comment is completely out of touch.
>works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up.
I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.
There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.
> It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.
Clearly you have no idea how much churn is common in SV. At google after a 2-year tenure your "percent" (what percent of SWE is newer than you) reaches 50%. What personal relationships do all those who were hired remote and never saw the inside of the office have?
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack..
Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold.
Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.
That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.
If you're in a position of some power that's maybe what you'd prefer. I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.
Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.
I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.
I get the need to have uninterrupted time, but if others are depending on you to get their job done, it's kinda dickish to complain about people being "allowed to disturb you".
People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.
This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.
Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.
Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
Software developers are not completely subservient slaves. But some of them are certainly obnoxious prima donnas and like throwing tantrums about their oh so terrible working conditions.
What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment
Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.
You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.
it seem that "completely subservient slave" caused some controversy. it wasn't my intention to demean real slavery, like the factory workers sub-contracted by google and apple.
perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)
"I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily"
Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code.
That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
wut?
2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.
The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. They’re specifying their preference for in-person communication even though it may affect individual productivity.
I 100% agree with them.
I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all.
In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve:
1. locating colleague 1
2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk
3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is
4. deciding to check again later
5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk
6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk
7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes
8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes
9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch
> 1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2
Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.
I read these and wonder what folks think about all the distributed teams in companies. Is the view that they are just generally less effective?
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.).
> where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.)
I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.
It really depends how you measure productivity. Does it make the team close their JIRA tickets faster and pump out more lines of code? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also resulted in more defects, worse designs, more tech debt, and more failed projects.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.
Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective.
As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily.
If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.
I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works. To what degree it fits/supports peoples’ subjective state of mind is up for argument, but most professions got by just as they did prior to the pandemic. Heck, I’m a trial attorney and I never thought remote work would be feasible. After doing multiple 3+ day trials entirely by WebEx I never want to go back to a courtroom. I can skip security, use multiple monitors, seldom drive, cook my own lunches, pet my dogs on breaks… everything for my job is easier remotely. It’s a dream come true.
> I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works.
It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity.
Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations
B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input
C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
Record earnings aren't entirely fake news (people are spending more time online post-pandemic, and that's not going to roll back even if things go fully "back to normal" [1]) but the stock appreciation has a lot to do with the fake-news-ification of the dollar. The CPI has always undercounted inflation, but now the divergence is worsening. Real inflation's probably 11-12% right now.
Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).
If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.
----
[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.
I hate to be the "correlation is not necessarily causation" guy, but come on!
Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).
What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.
I don't understand how you could think the rise in stock price is related to anything specific people at Google did vs massive spending increases by companies in google ads since it was one of the only ways to advertise with the lock-downs.
Two years is a short sample for "all society". We've all been in emergency mode. Let's see how it shakes out for a generation.
There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.
Have you ever walked between buildings to catch a meeting? I remember this from my Google days and I hated it. Ironically at some point they were cool with video calling in from another building!!
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.
You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you?
We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack
That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.
It doesn't matter how many engineers there are as long as the teams are colocated. Yes you will need to have zoom meetings with other teams but interaction within the team can be almost fully in person.
My experience of returning to the office a few times already? The same old thing.
People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen.
People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms.
People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on.
Same awful 60min+ commute on a train.
Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions.
I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...
Note: just an typical enterprise dev take, not in the Bay Area/part of the FAAMNG environment
A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.
Our office is 100% hoteling now no fixed seats. No personal stuff unless you want to carry it in everyday you go in. Been a few months since I went in.
"Allowing remote work has been proven to be better."
Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not."
I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is.
Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.
> I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.
If companies are truly serious about inclusion and diversity, then embracing remote is a must! In just a few weeks of the initial pandemic lockdowns, I was really taken aback by how meeting dynamics changed - people less comfortable speaking up in crowded rooms or taking on challenging discussion suddenly found their voice. They were speaking up on video conferencing, in the meeting chats, raising hands and sending emoji reactions.
In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.
I have found working remotely 98% of the time during covid has MASSIVELY improved my output.
1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too.
2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves.
3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule.
I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work.
(PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)
Yeah well, i don't want to be interrupted by a guy who thinks he can just come over tap me on the shoulder and I have to give him the attention he wants because he's too self-absorbed to understand other people might have a different way of working and have to accommodate to that guy's needs before their own.
"We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it."
No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.
I had a collegue who would literary tap me on the shoulder. It was a loud open office so I had noise cancelling headphones.
It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision.
I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ...
Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough.
I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.
Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.
> Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?
I know from my perspective preferring all remote all the time, I often feel like I have to advocate and sell remote work at every opportunity, not because I feel that it is best for everyone but because I feel it is not the default, and that the group that is more in favor of it is the executive and management cast which have more influence over these decisions. So I oversell remote work sometimes because I feel that it is constantly at risk of being taken away from me if I don't advocate for it to the best of my ability. In contrast those that want back in office seem like the deck is stacked in their favor.
For me, I'm just not comfortable sitting in an office. It's cold, the air is dry, the windows are tinted a horrible deep blue and don't let in any natural light. Everybody else is fine with these conditions, but I'm not. There is just no way to have the exact same conditions fit everyone, which is one of the problems with offices - everyone stuck together in the same room with little to no power over their surroundings.
Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.
The only people really comfortable in offices are the ones who are in it for the politics. Ditto everything you have said here including the taking a break. I learnt to code in bedroom 20yrs ago, and now im an architect at a global company working fully remote. our company has fully committed with Work Life Balance and now that means fully flexible - if u want to be an office, be in it, if u want to WFH, WFH. We are remote first, so there is always a video call for any meeting.
I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict.
Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves.
No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.
I'm in a similar situation: the pandemic destroyed my ability to be comfortable in the office.
I like keeping the windows in my flat open, and two years of working from home made me extremely uncomfortable breathing the bad air of an hermetically sealed office.
Some people also don't consider their day job to be their life mission and don't care if an issue is resolved in 5 minutes or 30 minutes if it means saving 1 hour of commute and spending more time with their family / hobbies / life in general.
It leads to me wanting to kill myself more often and needing to invest more time in therapy, commutes, and recovery. And over half the engineers I've spoken with, who drop their facade, feel the same.
Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life.
Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.
Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.
There are no firm answers. Consider health effects.
Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.
I get paired programming is cool, but honestly you can do it perfectly on zoom thanks to screen sharing with multiple participants. Its easier to have their screen on your screen right next to your screen thats on their screen than to huddle together clumsily with two laptops. Sometimes I'll have "office hours" on zoom, where I will just sit in my zoom room and work on my stuff and if people want to hop in and 'tap me on the shoulder' so to speak they can do it, or I could go and hop to someone elses or send a message and see if they are free.
In my experience I find pair programming with collaborative tools like VSCode's "Liveshare" [], paired with audio-only call (Slack huddle, Google meet, what have you), far superior than in person pair programming.
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging?
I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.
I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work, but if I'm being honest with myself, the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.
> the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.
>idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. What you're describing sounds like a low performance interrupt driven nightmare.
This has been the reality for many of us for many years already.
I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!"
Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located.
Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.
> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive.
I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.
My company is going hybrid in the spring (2 days in office, 3 days WFH), which I think is a good approach. There is definitely something to be gained from face to face time with co-workers. There is also something to be said of the improved productivity of working at home and not dealing with a long commute or random distractions.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)
Do you literally want to be tapped on the shoulder? Because this seems to be an extremely common figure of speech, but literally, I would not enjoy that.
Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.
I mean people normally wave in your line of sight then actually touch you but yes.... It's a super quick way to resolve an issue and get everyone back on track. Especially as I've gotten more and more senior over my career and a lot of your work output is making sure the rest of the team can function effectively.
Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.
And I prefer never going into a loud open office again where I am constantly interrupted. I traveled to my departments headquarters for an internal conference and I stayed two days after. The first half day I went into the office before the meeting, I could get nothing done because of all of the noise.
The second day I just worked from the hotel.
Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.
> "I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity"
First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder.
Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself.
I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.
>>> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email
For me the mixed model works best, some days at the office, some at home.
I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time.
On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting.
So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)
That "individual preference" has a massive effect on the team just one remote person is a massive drain on efficiency. You can't frame it as "individual" when work is an inherently collaborative process.
This obvious libertarian slant is drawing a really really really long bow. Silicon Valley big tech employees are furthest away from being “forced” to do anything. There are people at Google who are tasked with making calls relating to worker productivity, and evidently this is one of those calls. Where does this ideology end? What if they tell you what language or tooling to use? If you don’t like your employer telling you what to do, employment probably isn’t for you?
Having worked in large buildings in fortune 500 companies, I love the ability to be able to find a bathroom stall that is unoccupied without having to walk around for 40 minutes.
In my experience productivity is up and people get their work done. What I do see is a lot of extrovert getting depressed because they no longer have access to the smorgasbord of interactions at the office. Certain managers also seem worried by this move to remote, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics.
My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.
I’ve onboarded around a couple of companies remotely and it can be done really well, if people put thought and a process into remote onboarding it works really well.
Some things:
- make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this)
- document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access
- setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped
- setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other
I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.
But is a job just an exchange of labor for payment? I view it as so much more. Even if we look at it from a job perspective, its also an opportunity to build personal connections between team members; "I owe you one" - goes a long way. Yes you can absolutely build these personal connections online, and it may be easier for introverted people, but I would say for most people a handshake or a smile passing down the hallway or a 'cool jacket', or someone fixing a bug and rushing to tell their co-workers, and other organic interactions are very hard to replicate online.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack.
Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office.
Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.
It's not about the tech-companies, it's about their employees: many of them simply don't want to come back to the office!
What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products.
I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.
I do wonder what the critical percentage of people refusing to return to the office is for companies to offer remote as standard? I quit my old job over a return to the office policy and fully intend to never return because I deeply despise commuting, open offices, the interruption-driven culture of in-person work, and urban existence in general. I realise I'm probably a bit of an extremist in this respect though, I'd love to see a breakdown of what employees attitudes are globally.
Companies have been operating remotely and/or distributed for much longer than 2 years. Pretty much every company I worked for from 2010 onwards had at least half the team separate from the "sales office" that owned the relationship. Most often this was having dev teams in South America or Eastern Europe, but pretty frequently we just had multiple offices in the US working together. And frequently with clients that were in a third location. Slack, Zoom, JIRA. That's all you need.
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily
That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting.
I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc...
It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?
All of your concerns die away in a hybrid enviroment.
And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.
The past two years has not been real remote work. When you work remote for real you get together in the office every month or so and your relationships stay high bandwidth. The past two years has been forced separation. Forced virtual, and NOT remote work.
Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
Personally I'll never go back to the office except for the occasional meeting. The benefit I get to my health and well being from not commuting, is far too great. I also think that offices are just a power trip by the company leaders. They get off by walking through an office full of people. Its just another crappy part of being an employee, suffering through the command and control structure of business.
How can you say they're wrong when that is their experience. I certainly do think working remote has been better for me and for my teams. It is proven in the productivity and happiness of those that I work with.
We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive.
If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack
If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.
I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
I have worked at a couple of FAANG. When I wanted to get things done, I would hide in a meeting room, or I would work from home.
The office is the most unproductive environment (at least for me). People will interrupt you all the time, for random things, chit chat, coffee and what not. Having head phones all the time did not make any difference.
You're living in the past. The places where people tapped shoulders were the disruptive inefficient places I've worked at. Slack and Zoom have worked great remotely. The only thing I miss is in-room whiteboards, but I'm in the minority. Maybe you haven't worked for well-managed remote companies, and maybe Alphabet isn't one.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.
In software Engineering there is no evidence that working from home is less productive. Personally it is quite the opposite with open offices still being the norm in most companies.
However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter.
And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.
It's not that common IME for there to actually be a real debate but rather simply some sort of power play/expression of desire for personal benefit.
If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired.
It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient.
You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.
as a board member or shareholder I think I would ask the inverse question.
Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries
I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.
Your last paragraph sounds a lot like "any problem I may have now or in the future by definition is always more important than whatever the other person is doing at that particular point in time." That may be unintentional, so it's just an observation.
Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden
Survival is enough. I think living is more important than working. Working exists so that you don't die. We should do the work necessary that everyone thrives, otherwise our choices should maximize living.
It's like every study that "proves" that 4 day weeks are better.
They never seem to extend any further than the initial honeymoon period before the novelty wears off
My company implemented 36hr weeks (done at noon Friday) about 6mo ago and it continues to be super popular/effective. It’s consistently the benefit we discuss/list as a favorite and our company is onboarding more users than ever (important for our growth).
Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.
I am the complete opposite. My work productivity has went way up because I do not have people tapping me on the shoulder. I agree that working remotely isn't for everyone.
I think these generally framed studies don't prove anything, there are so many variables that may vary between projects and individuals; However they like to come up with some number and claim that it is the gospel truth.
What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.
Reminds me of feature flags. They seem sub optimal at a code level but highly beneficial at the System level.
But why force people one way or the other ? Let them make their choices. Why not give optionality and then optimize.
I don’t know much about SV traffic but in Bangalore people were routinely spending 4-5 hours in traffic everyday pre covid. I don’t see how this can be beneficial for anyone at an individual level and for the company as a whole.
Hasn't basically every bit of the industry seen massive growth and profits since the start of COVID?
I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.
There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability.
We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.
I can tell you that remote work sucks. Not for me, personally, because I like it, but: managing team remotely is very difficult. Over the course of 2 years I had at least two people who were clearly fraud - their work performance was abysmal, probably because they were working two jobs at once. It's hard do motivate, and to control people if you never even met them.
If they’ve got Google amenities I can see it but have you seen the side by side desks in open spaces sharing floors with salespeople that reflects most programmers work environments? Some places won’t even provide an ergonomic setup, and they have to compete against a setup developed at home over 2 years that works out much much better.
Yes and other things haven't been proven either...
Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand.
Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...
Yes! You are hinting at something fairly important which is, the whole != sum(parts).
Most of these studies show individual productivity is higher when remote. That doesn't mean overall productivity is.
Individual productivity only matters in the big picture, if everyone is 100% aligned and focused.
Which, will never happen.
I was in the camp of remote is always better even after being aware of 'never say never' and 'no silver bullet'.
Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.
Not crashing and burning has a lot to do with development momentum from before the pandemic. It will take all of 22 and ‘23 to be able to compare the output of pre pandemic versions of big tech. This is especially true for hardware companies and products that have annual release cadence.
>I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site.
me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.
Most of the studies I've seen that evaluate productivity are based on surveys given directly to the employees. I imagine workers have a lot of bias when asked to evaluate their own productivity, especially when there are significant personal benefits from working at home.
When someone tapped my shoulder in the office, they often started to whine about their problem without providing any actionable information, wasted a lot of my time this way, then I tell them to send me an email with a description of the problem - that ends up actionable.
If you work at Google, even if everyone is "on-site", they're not at your site, and you still need to treat them as if they're remote. Once a company reaches a certain size, and has offices in multiple locations (and timezones, and potentially multiple countries), it's necessary to treat most people as if they're remote, because effectively, they are.
Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems.
I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.
I know that corporate meeting room A/V is often an issue, but Google has pretty much solved that in their own offices. Their internal deployment of Meet works very well.
My teams are spread around the world and I’ve seen much better collaboration since Teams and the camera-on-culture became standard. I guess in-person is nice but it geo-restricts your network.
> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.
Remote is neither better nor worse. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt if it is timed wrong.
We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.
The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...
We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites.
We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning".
If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.
I have been fully remote my entire career (several decades), in fact in 30+ years have never been on site anywhere for more than 2 weeks total. Wouldn't have it any other way.
But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
> I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Please also keep in mind that we didn't just shift from in-person to remote work. Among other things, many parents completely lost child care in March 2020. It was slow to return. Where I live, it wasn't until August 2021 that the public schools were back to (almost) normal from a child care perspective: students there for the full school day every day, and at-school after care programs available. Speaking from personal experience, 2020 was horrible for my productivity, and I noped out of the workforce in early 2021 and am finally looking for a job now. I don't feel it was due to the shift to remote work.
I think it's true that some people will "try to get away with absolutely everything they can", but I'm not sure about "an awful lot of people". There are other reasons that productivity and availability tanked.
edit: and let's imagine that I didn't have the finances to quit despite other demands preventing me from putting in a full workday (and me not feeling up to one anyway). I probably would have kept plugging along, sort of working, as best as I could. We could debate the morality of that, and maybe remote work makes it more possible to get away with that, but I wouldn't say remote work is the underlying reason people aren't putting in a full day's work. Maybe for many, "get away absolutely everything they can" should read "get away with absolutely everything they have to" or "do only what they can".
You're right that there are many reasons people might seem to be underperforming in remote work, but unfortunately it doesn't really improve the situation for managers or coworkers. If many employees are spending their time in childcare instead of their job, it increases the burden on other employees who have to work extra hard to pick up the slack. It's a miserable situation, and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
Oh, these people never did useful work on-site either. When staring at a screen means work maybe their bosses thought they did. Real contributors do well remote too.
In the UK a lot of people during the pandemic suddenly found themselves having to look after their children full time because the schools were closed and there was no childcare, while also having to work, possibly coming down with Covid, and during the first lockdown at least having to queue for hours every time they went to the supermarket. Even when the lockdowns we're relaxes my colleagues with kids would frequently find themselves back working from home because their children were sent home because one if their classmates had Covid, which immediately reduces productivity. A lot of people also didn't have suitable places to work at home. Lots of my colleagues were working on their kitchen tables next to their partners and children, or sat on their beds. It's easy to be smug about remote working and critical if those who suddenly found themselves having to do it at no notice if you're already set up for it, have no caring responsibilities, have space, and aren't in the middle if a pandemic. Less so if the above applies.
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office
My suspicion is those people probably don't do anything while at the office either but they are good at making themselves very visible and appearing to be productive when in an office situation.
Yeh exactly. Same thing happened in office, seems easier to hide with lots of water cooler chat. Covid provided the cover for slackers to get even slacker.
My company was very empathetic to covid needs including reinstating forced leave due to sickness/family reasons.
> disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time
How is this not an immediately fireable offense? At least at the point of reestablishing contact where a doctor’s note or equivalent excuse can’t be furnished…
I absolutely agree - and if it was upto me, they would be gone already - but when the manager is also one of those 'do as little as I can' types of people, they don't really want to open that particular can of worms.
seriously. If I'm not even messaging a manager for over 24 hours to say hi, it better be because I got hit by a bus and am in a coma. Participation is the bare bones minimum if someone is paying you to do work.
Speaking for myself, I need the structure and am currently getting very little done. A lot of us aren’t trying to scam the remote work system, we’re just hanging on by our fingernails until the office opens back up.
It seems that being able to work remotely is just a skill unto itself, and one that takes time and patience to cultivate. A lot of it is good written communication, especially when it comes to reading other people's communication, and a lot of it is just being good enough at your job to do the work without feeling like someone is watching you. Makes sense that these things would be hard for people.
If you look at OSS maintainers, a lot of times their written communication is excellent, and they obviously manage their time really well. These are people who by the very nature of what they maintain are distributed.
A lot of OSS software is also of excellent quality, because they don't have the luxury of being able to be in an offer, fire people, etc...
I would argue to the people who complain about not getting stuff done or that they need structure... don't take those feelings as a sign that you need to automatically return to what you know. You can also take it as a sign that you have an opportunity to grow, but it's just hard... which is totally ok and normal. If you can overcome this, you will become an excellent engineer as a result.
> Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce
In my experience, a majority of the workforce requires some degree of regular supervision or things will go off the rails quickly. Hell, I am full-time remote (pre-covid) and I don't think I should be left alone on something for more than 2 weeks.
> I have been fully remote my entire career (several decades), in fact in 30+ years have never been on site anywhere for more than 2 weeks total. Wouldn't have it any other way.
Same, I've been remote for 10 years with another decade+ on-site prior to that as a SE.
I have no issues with remote work. When I need people I can easily schedule calls, send them an instant message, email them, etc.
Every single thing I do is timestamped and logged in a database somewhere at some point. If anyone wants to know what I was working on at 2:13 in the afternoon they can query for it. Reports can be run on what issues I've resolved, what code I've checked in against them, who I was on a meeting with, when I connected to remote machines, what time I started/ended at, etc. at any given time.
I have not noticed any productivity declines, but have noticed huge QoL improvements.
You SHOULD be putting the smallest amount of effort/time into work and try to get away with as much as possible. Worshiping the line going up and to the right so an executive/founder can write themselves a bigger bonus is fruitless. Putting any of your personality/self worth into work is a personal fault you should improve on as well.
I applaud all shirkers, they are the winners in your story.
I completely agree with you. Unfortunately I’ve seen a decent amount of adverse selection in the people I work with who’ve chosen to try to go fully remote (more in the try to hide from work than the people who would be just as/more successful being remote).
I have feeling that in 5 years companies will mostly revert back to only hiring new employees on site but grandfather in previously remote employees who have proven to be able to handle it. In 10 years, it will be almost entirely back to how it was before the pandemic. Not saying this to be a contrarian, and I think there will always be a place for fully remote teams/companies or exceptions in large companies (just as there was in the before times). But it’s really hard to see someone be unproductive or not work much and not attribute that to them being remote - and being remote will be even more likely to be blamed when a large portion of employees aren’t remote already.
Do you really think in 10 years it will be like it was 5 years ago? REALLY? We still aint past the GFC, 14yrs later. In my lifetime, i doubt i will see 7% again. Definately not the 30% that my parents payed.
As much as life is cyclic, in 10yrs time we AR/VR will be worked out and there will be even less reason to be in a physical space with someone.
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
Same experience here.
Of course, management shares some of the blame. People will push the boundaries of remote and flex time until someone tells them they’ve gone too far. If nobody in management is doing anything about the abuse, or if someone is openly breaking the rules without any consequences, the bad behavior will only get worse.
I don't know about disappearing for days and weeks, but as a manager I can say that in practice, performance problems are often subtle and hard to detect.
I don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be at your desk to get work done, and I do my own best work usually hiding away somewhere quiet. However, with the middle- to low-performers, I admit it's disquieting to suspect that some people are working only an hour a day, but I have no way to confirm.
Even if what you're saying is true, I don't see the problem with everyone working less in the remote world. If everyone secretly wants to work less maybe we should all just work less. If we collectively need an excuse like remote work to do what we all actually want to do, then so be it. Everyone wins...
I was at the office yesterday and was shocked by how little got done. Hanging out, grabbing snacks, going for lunch, commute. I got much less long stretches of time of freedom where I do most of my productive work. Everyone sees that you were there doing stuff so I also felt less pressure than wfh where I felt bad if I didn’t get what I talked about in the standup done
> But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
It happens if your company, originally on site, suddenly become remote. Nobody knows how to do remote works.
My manager is one of them. I am slacking because there is literally no tasks (no tasks given from him). Also same when in the office, but he has a habit of initiating small talk and assign / proceed tasks there, which isn't possible in remote world.
Changing at how you work remote is crucial at maintaining productivity.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own.
It's not that they're trying to "get away with absolutely anything". It's that their survival incentive is not to get fired, and they've been operating in that mode for years if not decades. The less you do, the less likely you are to inadvertently piss someone off and lose your job. Overperformers get fired faster than underperformers, who can usually kick around in the system for years.
Take a risk and win, and your boss makes more money. Take a risk and lose, and your income drops by 100%. The incentive structure rewards doing as little as possible, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing, because there are organizational situations in which it's better for people to be underutilized than overtaxed and therefore unpredictable.
Capitalism is an abusive system, but there's no escape because the legal system is on the abuser's side. How do you survive an abuser, if you can't get away? You become meek, reactive, and passive.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
They weren't getting much done in the office, either. In fact, in the office regime, the problem employees were interfering with other people's productivity. In the WFH world, they do less damage.
I promise you, there's lots of people out there that used to be great co-workers in the office that are now struggling and not getting much done remotely.
Maybe they're in a blind spot for you, but I guarantee you they exist, and they're probably the majority.
The environment that you work in has an effect on how well you can do the work.
I’ve been mostly remote for my entire career, about 20 years. I don’t think I’ve seen significant productivity issues with newly remote colleagues. I’ve just seen and felt a whole lot more stress. Not all because of being remote, a lot of it has come from mismanagement. In my experience people are mostly doing as well as you could expect given a dreadful situation. I don’t expect they’ll perform better under arbitrary scrutiny.
> I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated
Why does that matter? We should probably start asking how much does it actually correlate with productivity, before assigning it importance.
I have a hunch that even if there even is such a thing as self-motivation, and even if there is a correlation with production, the effect size is probably not high and is conflated with other factors which explain a much higher proportion of the variability.
An employer which cares about their workers will (a) grant them the freedom to work from home, and (b) provide them with the structure to do so effectively. In the absence of such structure I can see how motivation could replace it and make up the productivity, however that should not be the worker’s responsibility. The loss in productivity is 100% on management for failing to provide to structure to keep the workers productivity while remote.
self motivation seems to me to be a poor excuse to shift the responsibility of management to the worker.
I don't believe you are describing even 5% of remote software engineers. And those 5% would find ways to not do anything even in the office, but then they could also distract others so they are better off at home.
an interesting phrase is working as little as possible. This is an organizational issue more so than a motivation one. I work remote and am assigned all my work on a monday that is due by the end of the day friday. If I don't do it, there will be questions asked. Because of the way our company is organized, working as little as possible means working exactly as expected.
You have an interesting setup, where both tasks and time allocation are given to you ("implement X, you have 5 days"). Do you have any say in how long something is supposed to take?
I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.
But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.
I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
Lonely is an incredibly accurate way to describe working at Google. Everyone says the office perks are there to trick you to stay, but our work area was quieter than a library and no one hung around. If people were talking they'd legit catch themselves and be like, we should grab a conference room. Incredibly polite but also an uncomfortably quiet environment.
I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours and get home to their families. I love pool but never played with anyone on the table one floor down because it just wasn't a make-friends environment. I think I shot the shit with someone when I got into work a handful of times in the more-than-a-year that I worked there. Huge reason I left.
This isn't even coming from a social person. I prefer WFH. I don't particularly like going out. However, if I'm gonna be forced to be around people I'd at least like it to be pleasant.
That sounds amazing, I dearly wish for "library rules" on the floor. The office has plenty of social and collaborative spaces that aren't where my keyboard/monitor/charger are, and switching to one of those spaces when you're going to have a conversation is a good norm.
I've attended the weddings of multiple friends from my first job. I'm still in touch with 4-5 people from my second job. I haven't spoken to anyone from my team at Google since the day I left. I had good, cordial relationships with all of them, but it was also incredibly impersonal. I don't even recall learning anything about anyone's spouse, for instance.
Depends heavily on team. Almost all of my teams have been quite social, with a lot of office banter and regular lunches and social activities together. I was in today, with about half of my team, and we had plenty of non-work conversations and a nice lunch break at Backyard Barbecue (now open as of this week!).
This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.
The irony, of course, that working conditions at Google, of all places, are truly atrocious. For years our desks were in hallways (KIR-C, KIR-D). When I left big G, there were desks literally in staircases (KIR-D). I have no idea how they passed fire inspections.
I worked at Google in KIR for the past 5 years. You calling the working conditions "atrocious" is hilarious. This is why people call Googlers entitled.
> I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
> it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.
Yes, there is a great deal of flexibility and patience. I worked from home a couple days a week.
In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.
> This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.
> But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk.
This is a solid point; I work for a company that had four key buildings in two cities at the start of the pandemic; in reality, we were a "remote company" who were just rubbish at remote practises. The pandemic forced us to be remote-first, which fed back into being better organised for day-to-day.
I suspect most companies have this sort of mixed-model, and are just shitty at remote work.
(I will also note, as always, that there is a rich irony that big tech firms who push cloud-everything, remote collaboration tools and so on, won't eat their own dogfood. How much of Google watching Zoom walk away with the video calling market was due to their intransigence on this?)
> I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.
I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.
Indeed - I pair program for much of the day with different people on the same team, and there is only (recently) one city which has two people in it. The notion that pairing need take place physically in the same room is just not correct.
I worked on a Silicon Valley campus in 1999 and it was just the same: most of the people I interacted with _were_ on campus but it was seldom worth schlepping to whatever building they were in so we mostly used netnews and email.
I tried pairing in an open office environment, and I'd go work at McDonald's for minimum wage before returning to that environment again. It was pure hell for me.
I've never tried it but I feel the same way. If people saw the sort of work I did to test/PoC ideas I think they'd either a) flip their shit or b) stop me in my tracks so they could do it their way.
It sounds like an absolutely terrible way to learn and grow as a developer.
When you work at a startup, VC means venture capital: the lifeblood ever-requisite next-stage of your constant struggle to survive and grow as an early business.
When you work at Google, it means technology for avoiding a walk.
I doubt that this is something everyone has to follow. More likely they'll just keep the option for everyone to apply for approval and then they'll negotiate that with the employees they think don't have leverage. People who have options would quit if forced to be back in office, you can boomerang at Google so it's not like they risk much.
I work for a large tech company based on the east coast. My partner works for another large tech company. We are both mid-level managers at companies that seem to be taking a pretty dramatically different approach.
My company:
- Started with a strong in-office culture
- Communicated to managers that all employees now have a choice between being fully remote, hybrid, or in-office; there’s never a mandate to be in person
- All new roles can be based anywhere in the country of the roles’ origin
- All salaries are being standardized to one city per country (NYC for the US.)
By contrast, my partner’s company:
- Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote (and they don’t seem to be making that easy for existing employees)
- Significant, growing attrition problem causing serious concern among leadership
- Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues
If I had to put money on which company will thrive and which one will seriously regret it’s decision a year from now… the answer seems very clear.
>Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote
This is what bugs me about the hybrid set up. If the company onboarded a lot of permanent remotes and also doesn't have people sync up the in office days, then there is no point of going into the office. It's the worst of both worlds.
Speaking only for myself, if I had a company office in my city I would go to it three-four days a week — even if my colleagues were all working elsewhere. (Assuming I can define my hours and commute by public transit or cheap taxi.)
I was remote for 13 years and I definitely missed the option of the office, though not the mandate of it.
So in my biased opinion the hybrid model is to keep people like me happy. And my bet is these will eventually become the new senior management, comfortable with remote but happy in the office, just like the current managers who set up the hybrid thing for similar reasons for themselves.
Doesn’t help people like me who can’t do the jobs they want in the cities they want without being remote, but I think we’re a pretty small minority.
Eh, it's really not that hard. It basically means for most weeks you work remote Mon and Fri, while just about everyone is in the office Tues-Thurs. Bay area already feels like most people work remote on Fridays anyways.
Yes there's variance but it's being left intentionally vague for teams to set their own cadences.
The first one is HubSpot for anyone wondering (and yes we are hiring).
I do think that companies that allow remote are going to see an influx of workers as people leave other companies with in-office mandates. So many people have adjusted to remote working that it seems somewhat crazy to me to try and walk that back. There’s a clear preference based on what we’ve seen for some level of remote work among existing in-office workers who probably aren’t going to put up with a shift back, especially when tech jobs are in such high demand.
These two companies sound the same... Your company allows remote, hybrid or fulltime in-office. Partner's company allows hybrid (3 days minimum), fulltime (people going above the minimum) or "transitioned to remote".
My company allows whatever you want. Partners company allows hybrid, not full remote unless that was something you negotiated at the start or got them to change. Those are two very different things.
I once flew in to the Bay Area from Europe for several meetings, but the most important one was with a team at Google. We were trying to finalize a deal and they really needed to be on board.
I arrived, checked in and was shown to a meeting room. A few minutes after the meeting was supposed to start the receptionist came scurrying in and connected me to the meeting via that cube looking meeting machine they had in every office. Everyone appeared on the screen from various different offices, some at home, and one person in the same building as me.
When I worked as contractor I was flown out to an office in London. They paid for all the tickets and hotels for two weeks. They said it was critical to have us in the office. After the first 1 hour introduction meeting I never saw them again. Massive waste of money on their end but I had a great time experiencing a new country and even took a weekend trip to Brussels which was awesome.
When we had an acquisition of a major European company we had multiple people from our team flying to Paris, Budapest, and some city in Switzerland multiple times per month for the better part of a year. What a time to be alive.
You should've budgeted some time to see the sights on the weekend, at least! My company is usually fine with letting me stay somewhere over a weekend or two on business trips.
this is only for those who have opted to not be fully remote.
those folks have a reserved physical desk / office space at which they will be required to go 3 days per week starting apr 4th. They may switch to fully remote but cannot keep a dedicated physical spot if they do so.
Microsoft is doing something similar where you can choose hybrid work or fully remote. Personally, I think, with hybrid work, fully remote workers will go back to being second class citizens at those companies if most people choose to go back to the office (even part time).
Indeed. Be warned, remote devs. Ideally only be remote on a fully remote team. You don't want to be the one person excluded from the meeting in the hall.
Perhaps even less than half. At my last job, only three of the ten people on my team were going into the office, and yet the rest of us were still perennially out of the loop.
That said, I don't think it has to be that way. Companies and teams do have the ability to choose their cultures and communication styles in an intentional way. It's just that very few actually do. And this is a situation where you absolutely do not want to accept the default configuration.
That's interesting because an outsourced recruiter contacted me recently about a Google role and very clearly needed to confirm that I would be able to return to an office one day a week.
I was confused why 1/5 was so much more powerful than 0/5. I sorta get 3/5 if you have a commitment to in-person culture. Anyway, the 1 per week doesn't at all line up with your more credible 3 per week.
From what I’ve been told it’s been pretty easy for some to negotiate no salary adjustment when going remote. It’s against HR “policy” but I know deals happened when someone was deemed a crucial contributor.
I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
> I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
FWIW, I found synchronous interruptions to be more of a problem when remote. Too many people used Slack messages or video calls for everything because it was only a click away, as opposed to having to get up and walk over to someone’s desk
> Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting…
Slack is terrible for documenting. It needs to be reserved for ephemeral communication.
Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
Someone messaging on Slack can be ignored quite easily, without it being rude. If someone is starting a video call with you without arranging a time with you first then I agree you need to get in physical proximity with that person, but only to smack them.
Slack is not usefully searchable, true, but its purpose for documentation is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. If you have a link to the conversation you have the whole conversation; that can be useful to share context. Likewise meetings; being able to record them is HUGE. But either way, you mention Slack should only be used for ephemeral communication...all in person communication is ephemeral. Slack at least has it saved, even if it's a pain to find; in person does not. I can share a Slack link; if you missed it, forgot it, or disagree about what was said, you're out of luck with in person.
Especially once you get big enough to require a retention policy and have to delete your years of knowledge repository! Better off documenting separately from the start.
>>Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
>Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
The OP was comparing it with someone walking over to his desk to tell him something, which if you are busy and eager to get back to what you were doing, is easy to forget. At least Slack has a record while vibrations in the air have none. He also said Slack or tickets, so you weren't even attempting to refute his actual argument.
Treat your slack messages as a queue, something asynchronous you respond to when you are free. If management forces you to immediately respond to every slack message, then you have a dysfunctional culture that will of course clash with WFH. They should be using something like pagerduty if it's urgent.
It's way more than just interruptions, travel, etc.
I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it.
It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly hire less than full time employed engineering staff at a reduced comp rate with low stress / low pressure work. Say, 10-20 hours a week, choose your own hours. You might be able to grab a few MANGA/FAANG folks and get them to work on your project instead of their "110% time" pet project at the giantcorp. It might be an operational advantage.
Plenty of people work more than one job. As long as someone does the work that's expected of them and performs their job duties well, it isn't any employer's business what someone does in their time off.
> I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
I feel the same way.
I have been remote for over 10 years but prior to that, it was another 10 in an office.
That included an hour commute each way, random downtime and interruptions.
I honestly have no doubt I am more productive now, given that was "leave at 7 AM get home at 7 PM".
There is no way in any given day I am getting less work done in 12 hours than I was then.
I will never again go back to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the expressway again, even if we end up in a race-to-the-bottom on salaries. QoL is more important to me now.
>Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
Not exactly.
Some organizations have limits to how long historical chats are stored.
From my visits to Google's offices in Manhattan, I don't expect many who reside within the city, to resist this change. People will accept leaving their small city apartments and visiting the vast offices, with a plethora of services available as a welcome alternative after two years. It's those who've moved on from that lifestyle, and may have physically relocated, who will resist this change. They will be inclined to make an argument for working remotely, or work elsewhere, whatever works.
It is vastly different in the bay area where public transit is a horrible mess and the freeways are all at 300% capacity. A friend who is a Googler is looking at a 30 minute commute to a GBus stop for a 90 minute ride each way. Going to the office is cutting productivity basically in half.
I personally am really happy to go back to the office, but people who have physically relocated have an easy option to simply apply for permanent remote work. It's really not a big argument that needs to be made—the process is very simple.
Readit News
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.
I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach.
Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem.
People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to!
> I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily.
I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting.
Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner.
My QoL is insanely improved.
If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them.
And so on and so forth. WfH rocks.
For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.
I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.
tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.
It works when the team is used to and knows how to connect with each other online and to keep those connections going through the day/week. I'm an (highly functioning) introvert and even I hate video onboarding. I've done it twice during pandemic and it sucks big time if the team is not ready for online lifestyle/workstyle. Several months in and I still don't feel like I belong, it's just all the people busying away on their own, like in a univerity groupwork. I miss my old work when the chat was actually a place for smalltalk, instead of a place for just sharing technical knowledge or updating progress.
Feels like some companies think that remote work is exactly like onsite, just virtually. Well, it's not. Dynamics is different, workflow is different, everybody has to adapt. I genuinely want to work remote, I don't think I'll be back to office anymore, but I still need the team that knows how to actually be a team online.
Some team members output has severely dropped. I've seen people playing video games during work hours for example. Also work and free time has mixed to a point where people just randomly take hour or two to go skiing or for a walk and routinely just quit at the normal time.
Commuting is different in different places. For me it is 15 minute drive to the office from a neighboring smaller city where property prices are 5x lower.
I've never eaten more takeout in my life than during past 2 years. At the office I had access to healthy "home style" cooking with variety of diet. Now I have access to pizza, poor quality Chinese, and decent Indian food. Of course I could cook for myself, but I don't like cooking and I don't want to spend the time.
I'd argue my Quality of Life has gotten significantly worse especially since they closed gyms. Yes, they are now open, but there is also like a meter of snow outside so I probably won't get to the gym until spring actually starts.
I live in an apartment complex so the super has the keys to do whatever work needs to be done without my presence. I could take my deliveries at the office (and I often did since I saw clear improvement on delivery dates when they delivered to a business instead of residential address). Doctor visits were never an issue, because remote work was always an option and many people did work a day or two every week remotely.
If past experience is anything to go by I will get flooded with people saying that I should just do better and be better remote worker (like I probably shouldn't be writting this on company time) instead of acknowledging that different people are different and working at the office fits me and my life style better and that I've optimized for that lifestyle long before the pandemic hit. I personally can't wait for life to go back to normal. I'm sure we will lose some people since they want to be 100% remote and that's fine.
What about all the people who already knew spending 2 hours commuting was a terrible use of our time before the pandemic, regardless of how much of a bigger house we could get?
So we lived in dense cities, in walkable neighborhoods, where the office was a 15 minute walk away but so were restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and theaters?
But part of the exchange we made was that our houses/apartments were small, and were for LIVING not for working. We don't have a spare bedroom to turn into a segregated office, so instead the work/home life has been an overlapping mess for 2 years.
I love my solo lunchbreak walk just to empty my head or just think instead of having to talk or interact with team members.
> I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be.
You have somebody else come over to cut your cat‘s claws?
I can still work from home when I have errands to run or medical appointments, but I much prefer being in the office.
My question is: how did people not realize this before the pandemic?
The workers of Silicon Valley (and other urban centres) literally created and sustained this problem all by themselves: "You have to get to Silicon Valley!"
Even those are easily matched in quality with zoom/slack and draw on screen features.
Just so you know, this is not legal. I hate it.
Hey look it works for them too, everyone is a winner!
Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote.
I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on.
I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".
What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this.
Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)
Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.
People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.
This sentence amuses me a bit. Does that also mean that American Democracy has only been proven to work for up to 245 years? :-)
And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?
Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.
Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.
I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.
There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.
Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold.
Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.
Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.
I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.
This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.
Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.
Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
This.. this is exactly what Google did - everyone had the option to go fully remote.
Are we still talking about Google?
Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.
You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.
Neither of which have an appreciable business use in the near to mid term & are therefore totally irrelevant to an employer.
perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)
Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code.
That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.
wut?
2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.
I 100% agree with them.
I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.
It’s just not my preference.
I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.
Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all.
In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve:
1. locating colleague 1
2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk
3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is
4. deciding to check again later
5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk
6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk
7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes
8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes
9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch
repeat again after lunch
Now with WfH:
1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2
2. problem solved after 5 minutes
1. Ask in Slack/chat if colleague 1 and 2 are avail
2. Colleague 1 is avail, colleague 2 no answer
3. Start call with C1, share the screen... something crash or C1 has network issues
4. C2 is still MIA
5. C2 joins, we work together for 5 minutes, than C1 doorbell rings, they have to leave
6. C1 is back, we work for 10 minutes but now C2 has to go to a meeting
7. you get it..
So, every rose has its thorns...
Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person
I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.).
> where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity
There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.)
I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.
As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily.
If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.
It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity.
Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.
B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input
C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).
If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.
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[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.
Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).
What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.
There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.
You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you?
We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.
That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.
People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen.
People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms.
People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on.
Same awful 60min+ commute on a train.
Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions.
I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...
A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.
"Allowing remote work has been proven to be better."
Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things.
I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not."
I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is.
Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.
100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.
In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.
1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too.
2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves.
3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule.
I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work.
(PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)
"We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it."
No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.
The tap on the shoulder is the most annoying thing working on site. There's no respect for the urgent & critical tasks.
You would want others to spend 2 hours commuting, wasting time on parking, food & fuel just to be able to physically speak to them.
What a waste of our current technological advantages.
Why bother working in tech, when you don't use it to better yourself and others?
It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision.
I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ...
Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough.
I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.
Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.
Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.
One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.
I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?
Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.
I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict.
Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves.
No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.
I like keeping the windows in my flat open, and two years of working from home made me extremely uncomfortable breathing the bad air of an hermetically sealed office.
This productivity fetishisation is so weird
Personally I think I’m right! We should do it my way.
Being stuck in a chair all day with people watching you is not a good life. Being forced to adhere to arbitrary social convention instead of speaking sincerely and expressing yourself is not a good life.
Choosing to lay in bed, work in the sun, recline on the couch, say hi to your cat, be your most authentic self, is a better life. Personally not dealing with the anxiety and body pain makes me more productive. But maybe everyone is right and we can get more productivity out of people by gutting their personalities and self-appreciation; but if that's the cost, I sincerely do not care. I'd rather everyone enjoy their short lives than spend them colorlessly and regret their choices on their deathbeds.
Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.
[] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/
Do you experience Zoom fatigue? The sensation that, while this technology is convenient and useful, you're missing something important?
I think this whole debate is really about whether people have this sensation or not.
Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging?
I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.
The situation is much more symmetric.
And I'm one of those managers who kept extra mouthwash and altoids at my desk too...
And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.
I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.
I did this, but now its just slipped into actually just checking slack at 10am then going back to sleep till 11:30.
Have you considered bars?
There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...
I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!"
Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located.
Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive.
I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.
I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)
Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.
Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.
The second day I just worked from the hotel.
Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.
First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder.
Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself.
I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.
And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email
I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time.
On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting.
So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)
If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person.
If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.
My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.
I suspect this is the real reason for a push to return to the office.
Some things:
- make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this) - document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access - setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped - setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other
I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.
I’m an in-house video producer for a tech start up. I absolutely do not need to be in the office most days, let alone every day.
Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office.
Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.
On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.
What company did you work for in-person where any issue could be resolved quickly?
What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products.
I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.
That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting.
I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc...
It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.
It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?
And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.
Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive.
If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site.
You made a bunch of baseless claims.
If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.
I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
I wish companies would understand this.
Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.
However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter.
And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.
If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired.
It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient.
You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.
Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries
I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.
Not everybody at Google is in one location to begin with.
It's "proven" better for me and I'm, never going back and that's all that matters to me. I feel like this is a trend.
Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden
Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.
What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?
This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.
I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.
There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability.
We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.
Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand. Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...
Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.
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me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.
The open office is the absolute worst possible environment for being productive. I could probably be more productive in the middle of a highway.
Google's stock looks the exact opposite of crash and burn, it doubled during these last 2 years of pandemic and remote work.
Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems.
I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.
This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.
You stated your preferences. There are many (probably most in programming roles) who don't, so they'll go elsewhere.
It's better for me. That's the part that I care about.
What is really hard, is being a remote newcomer to an otherwise mostly on-site company.
--
Bless your heart.
:P
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We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.
The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...
We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites.
We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning".
If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.
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Pretty obvious from the rest of your comment.
But as a counter-point, seeing a whole bunch of people who were never remote before, how little work they are actually doing, it is no surprise to me that a lot of employers are going to start forcing - to the extent possible - employees back into the office.
I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a time, constantly miss deadlines etc - and as a manager, that is very hard to manage underperformers with a remote work force.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
Let's hope they don't ruin it for the rest of us.
Please also keep in mind that we didn't just shift from in-person to remote work. Among other things, many parents completely lost child care in March 2020. It was slow to return. Where I live, it wasn't until August 2021 that the public schools were back to (almost) normal from a child care perspective: students there for the full school day every day, and at-school after care programs available. Speaking from personal experience, 2020 was horrible for my productivity, and I noped out of the workforce in early 2021 and am finally looking for a job now. I don't feel it was due to the shift to remote work.
I think it's true that some people will "try to get away with absolutely everything they can", but I'm not sure about "an awful lot of people". There are other reasons that productivity and availability tanked.
edit: and let's imagine that I didn't have the finances to quit despite other demands preventing me from putting in a full workday (and me not feeling up to one anyway). I probably would have kept plugging along, sort of working, as best as I could. We could debate the morality of that, and maybe remote work makes it more possible to get away with that, but I wouldn't say remote work is the underlying reason people aren't putting in a full day's work. Maybe for many, "get away absolutely everything they can" should read "get away with absolutely everything they have to" or "do only what they can".
My suspicion is those people probably don't do anything while at the office either but they are good at making themselves very visible and appearing to be productive when in an office situation.
How is this not an immediately fireable offense? At least at the point of reestablishing contact where a doctor’s note or equivalent excuse can’t be furnished…
If you look at OSS maintainers, a lot of times their written communication is excellent, and they obviously manage their time really well. These are people who by the very nature of what they maintain are distributed.
A lot of OSS software is also of excellent quality, because they don't have the luxury of being able to be in an offer, fire people, etc...
I would argue to the people who complain about not getting stuff done or that they need structure... don't take those feelings as a sign that you need to automatically return to what you know. You can also take it as a sign that you have an opportunity to grow, but it's just hard... which is totally ok and normal. If you can overcome this, you will become an excellent engineer as a result.
In my experience, a majority of the workforce requires some degree of regular supervision or things will go off the rails quickly. Hell, I am full-time remote (pre-covid) and I don't think I should be left alone on something for more than 2 weeks.
Same, I've been remote for 10 years with another decade+ on-site prior to that as a SE.
I have no issues with remote work. When I need people I can easily schedule calls, send them an instant message, email them, etc.
Every single thing I do is timestamped and logged in a database somewhere at some point. If anyone wants to know what I was working on at 2:13 in the afternoon they can query for it. Reports can be run on what issues I've resolved, what code I've checked in against them, who I was on a meeting with, when I connected to remote machines, what time I started/ended at, etc. at any given time.
I have not noticed any productivity declines, but have noticed huge QoL improvements.
I applaud all shirkers, they are the winners in your story.
I have feeling that in 5 years companies will mostly revert back to only hiring new employees on site but grandfather in previously remote employees who have proven to be able to handle it. In 10 years, it will be almost entirely back to how it was before the pandemic. Not saying this to be a contrarian, and I think there will always be a place for fully remote teams/companies or exceptions in large companies (just as there was in the before times). But it’s really hard to see someone be unproductive or not work much and not attribute that to them being remote - and being remote will be even more likely to be blamed when a large portion of employees aren’t remote already.
As much as life is cyclic, in 10yrs time we AR/VR will be worked out and there will be even less reason to be in a physical space with someone.
Same experience here.
Of course, management shares some of the blame. People will push the boundaries of remote and flex time until someone tells them they’ve gone too far. If nobody in management is doing anything about the abuse, or if someone is openly breaking the rules without any consequences, the bad behavior will only get worse.
As a manager why cant you call out this behaviour when you see people slacking off?
I don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be at your desk to get work done, and I do my own best work usually hiding away somewhere quiet. However, with the middle- to low-performers, I admit it's disquieting to suspect that some people are working only an hour a day, but I have no way to confirm.
It happens if your company, originally on site, suddenly become remote. Nobody knows how to do remote works.
My manager is one of them. I am slacking because there is literally no tasks (no tasks given from him). Also same when in the office, but he has a habit of initiating small talk and assign / proceed tasks there, which isn't possible in remote world.
Changing at how you work remote is crucial at maintaining productivity.
It's not that they're trying to "get away with absolutely anything". It's that their survival incentive is not to get fired, and they've been operating in that mode for years if not decades. The less you do, the less likely you are to inadvertently piss someone off and lose your job. Overperformers get fired faster than underperformers, who can usually kick around in the system for years.
Take a risk and win, and your boss makes more money. Take a risk and lose, and your income drops by 100%. The incentive structure rewards doing as little as possible, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing, because there are organizational situations in which it's better for people to be underutilized than overtaxed and therefore unpredictable.
Capitalism is an abusive system, but there's no escape because the legal system is on the abuser's side. How do you survive an abuser, if you can't get away? You become meek, reactive, and passive.
Remote work isn't for everyone, and unfortunately there is a non-trivial percentage of the workforce that actual does need someone watching over them to make sure they do what they are supposed to be doing each day.
They weren't getting much done in the office, either. In fact, in the office regime, the problem employees were interfering with other people's productivity. In the WFH world, they do less damage.
Maybe they're in a blind spot for you, but I guarantee you they exist, and they're probably the majority.
The environment that you work in has an effect on how well you can do the work.
Why does that matter? We should probably start asking how much does it actually correlate with productivity, before assigning it importance.
I have a hunch that even if there even is such a thing as self-motivation, and even if there is a correlation with production, the effect size is probably not high and is conflated with other factors which explain a much higher proportion of the variability.
An employer which cares about their workers will (a) grant them the freedom to work from home, and (b) provide them with the structure to do so effectively. In the absence of such structure I can see how motivation could replace it and make up the productivity, however that should not be the worker’s responsibility. The loss in productivity is 100% on management for failing to provide to structure to keep the workers productivity while remote.
self motivation seems to me to be a poor excuse to shift the responsibility of management to the worker.
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Are you sure they were doing more work while in office?
But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.
I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.
I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours and get home to their families. I love pool but never played with anyone on the table one floor down because it just wasn't a make-friends environment. I think I shot the shit with someone when I got into work a handful of times in the more-than-a-year that I worked there. Huge reason I left.
This isn't even coming from a social person. I prefer WFH. I don't particularly like going out. However, if I'm gonna be forced to be around people I'd at least like it to be pleasant.
I've attended the weddings of multiple friends from my first job. I'm still in touch with 4-5 people from my second job. I haven't spoken to anyone from my team at Google since the day I left. I had good, cordial relationships with all of them, but it was also incredibly impersonal. I don't even recall learning anything about anyone's spouse, for instance.
This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.
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This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.
In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.
This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.
> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?
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This is a solid point; I work for a company that had four key buildings in two cities at the start of the pandemic; in reality, we were a "remote company" who were just rubbish at remote practises. The pandemic forced us to be remote-first, which fed back into being better organised for day-to-day.
I suspect most companies have this sort of mixed-model, and are just shitty at remote work.
(I will also note, as always, that there is a rich irony that big tech firms who push cloud-everything, remote collaboration tools and so on, won't eat their own dogfood. How much of Google watching Zoom walk away with the video calling market was due to their intransigence on this?)
I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.
It sounds like an absolutely terrible way to learn and grow as a developer.
When you work at Google, it means technology for avoiding a walk.
this false dichotomy again, who said that pair programming was to replace code review, or vice versa?
My company: - Started with a strong in-office culture - Communicated to managers that all employees now have a choice between being fully remote, hybrid, or in-office; there’s never a mandate to be in person - All new roles can be based anywhere in the country of the roles’ origin - All salaries are being standardized to one city per country (NYC for the US.)
By contrast, my partner’s company: - Mandated return to work date 3 days/week minimum unless you’ve transitioned to remote (and they don’t seem to be making that easy for existing employees) - Significant, growing attrition problem causing serious concern among leadership - Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues
If I had to put money on which company will thrive and which one will seriously regret it’s decision a year from now… the answer seems very clear.
This is what bugs me about the hybrid set up. If the company onboarded a lot of permanent remotes and also doesn't have people sync up the in office days, then there is no point of going into the office. It's the worst of both worlds.
I was remote for 13 years and I definitely missed the option of the office, though not the mandate of it.
So in my biased opinion the hybrid model is to keep people like me happy. And my bet is these will eventually become the new senior management, comfortable with remote but happy in the office, just like the current managers who set up the hybrid thing for similar reasons for themselves.
Doesn’t help people like me who can’t do the jobs they want in the cities they want without being remote, but I think we’re a pretty small minority.
Yes there's variance but it's being left intentionally vague for teams to set their own cadences.
I do think that companies that allow remote are going to see an influx of workers as people leave other companies with in-office mandates. So many people have adjusted to remote working that it seems somewhat crazy to me to try and walk that back. There’s a clear preference based on what we’ve seen for some level of remote work among existing in-office workers who probably aren’t going to put up with a shift back, especially when tech jobs are in such high demand.
I arrived, checked in and was shown to a meeting room. A few minutes after the meeting was supposed to start the receptionist came scurrying in and connected me to the meeting via that cube looking meeting machine they had in every office. Everyone appeared on the screen from various different offices, some at home, and one person in the same building as me.
I regretted that trip the entire flight home.
So even when I went in, I never dealt with team members.
those folks have a reserved physical desk / office space at which they will be required to go 3 days per week starting apr 4th. They may switch to fully remote but cannot keep a dedicated physical spot if they do so.
source: googler
That said, I don't think it has to be that way. Companies and teams do have the ability to choose their cultures and communication styles in an intentional way. It's just that very few actually do. And this is a situation where you absolutely do not want to accept the default configuration.
I was confused why 1/5 was so much more powerful than 0/5. I sorta get 3/5 if you have a commitment to in-person culture. Anyway, the 1 per week doesn't at all line up with your more credible 3 per week.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22691275/googles-remote-work-home...
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
FWIW, I found synchronous interruptions to be more of a problem when remote. Too many people used Slack messages or video calls for everything because it was only a click away, as opposed to having to get up and walk over to someone’s desk
> Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting…
Slack is terrible for documenting. It needs to be reserved for ephemeral communication.
Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
Slack is not usefully searchable, true, but its purpose for documentation is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. If you have a link to the conversation you have the whole conversation; that can be useful to share context. Likewise meetings; being able to record them is HUGE. But either way, you mention Slack should only be used for ephemeral communication...all in person communication is ephemeral. Slack at least has it saved, even if it's a pain to find; in person does not. I can share a Slack link; if you missed it, forgot it, or disagree about what was said, you're out of luck with in person.
At my company, we send messages when we need help, but the expectation is that the reply comes at the convenience of the person being asked.
>Forcing people to search through Slack archives works when the team is small and company is new, but it becomes useless at scale.
The OP was comparing it with someone walking over to his desk to tell him something, which if you are busy and eager to get back to what you were doing, is easy to forget. At least Slack has a record while vibrations in the air have none. He also said Slack or tickets, so you weren't even attempting to refute his actual argument.
I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it.
It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly hire less than full time employed engineering staff at a reduced comp rate with low stress / low pressure work. Say, 10-20 hours a week, choose your own hours. You might be able to grab a few MANGA/FAANG folks and get them to work on your project instead of their "110% time" pet project at the giantcorp. It might be an operational advantage.
Has anyone looked into this?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed ; the lingo is J2 = "job two", J3, etc.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Part+time
* Microsoft
* Amazon
* Netflix? (Why not META?)
* Google
* Apple
I feel the same way.
I have been remote for over 10 years but prior to that, it was another 10 in an office.
That included an hour commute each way, random downtime and interruptions.
I honestly have no doubt I am more productive now, given that was "leave at 7 AM get home at 7 PM".
There is no way in any given day I am getting less work done in 12 hours than I was then.
I will never again go back to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the expressway again, even if we end up in a race-to-the-bottom on salaries. QoL is more important to me now.
Not exactly.
Some organizations have limits to how long historical chats are stored.
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