I don't expect this view to do well here, but my theory on WFH is it's very effective for focus time, so for the first year, people could effectively work through solo work backlogs. Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing. There's a popular thing you read here from ICs (I'm also an IC) about being more productive at home, but what they never bring up (and probably don't know) is if they're working on the right things.
In many companies people are working on the wrong thing most of the time. It's so endemic that many people don't even see it.
When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason.
If this was already the case at your company before the WFH, then yes, WFH didn't change anything, or even maybe let your emloyees work on the wrong thing even faster.
The other thing people don't appreciate is that it's significantly harder to find good managers than good individual contributers. I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment. As in, I can effectively make sure that 3x the number of people are working on the correct things in an in-office environment.
I find it nearly impossible to find people with the ability to do this correctly right now, let alone somehow needing to find 3x this number.
Even if people worked at half speed at the office (which I don't really believe), that is still worthwhile.
This is the first writing I've seen in a while that posits something specific that works better in office than remote.
It doesn't match my experience though. The person I hired during WFH consistently works on the right things and has great judgment, while the other team members who predate it are either neutral or struggling in the same way they did before the pandemic.
Why do you believe seeing a person live makes it easier for you to instruct them on what is worth spending time on? What's your evidence?
> When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason.
What drives (drove) most of it is that as a product matures and the user base grows, polishing smaller features and chasing 0.1% wins can meaningfully drive metrics to a point that having a team focus just on a single user flow is a net positive. Enabling this often means a more modular codebase and system architecture so people aren't stepping on each other's toes. There are also exploratory features that are unlikely to pan out, but at the scale of 500M users, if they do, it's huge. A lot of this work might be wrong, but some of it isn't, and you won't know what's what until you try.
At 500M users, you also need more spam detection, account protection, content moderation, etc.
You can run status quo Twitter with fewer engineers, but don't expect incremental growth, and expect more issues like the recent SEC mishap.
> I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment.
I'm going to be a bit blunt but most of management in reality is useless, if not actively harming people under them. 300% of 0 in those cases still remains 0.
I’ve worked in person on a project, for over a year, for it to get canned.
Having ICs in the office doesn’t suddenly cause managers, product owners, or business people to figure out what the true direction is. And ICs typically only work on what’s assigned to them.
Maybe you are correct. But ICs do not decide what to work on, the PMs and other leadership do. So why can’t ICs continue working from home while the “deciders” go back to the office?
Because in software and other knowledge industries, feedback from the ICs is an essential component in determining which projects are worth working on (and what their chance of success is, what other consequences they will have for the product, how long they'll take, how much they'll cost, etc).
This was one of my biggest lessons transitioning to management. My biggest mistakes have all been cases where a feedback loop from engineering to PM/UX/leadership was missing and I failed to set one up. Biggest successes have been projects where I set that feedback loop up early and got out of the way, so that engineering and UX had a high-bandwidth communication pathway to negotiate issues and make product compromises based on real constraints.
Unfortunately it feels like I'm swimming upstream when it comes to actual org policies here, which have forcibly reclassified me from a TLM to an Engineering Manager (so my official job duties now include assigning work, but not necessarily understanding the work I'm assigning), given me a reporting load that's too big to understand the details of each project I'm managing, made my report's performance reviews independent of how well they work with others and instead fully dependent on how much they please me, made my performance reviews largely independent of how well I support my team but very dependent on how well I please my superiors, and so on. Somebody in upper management wants people to be responsible for things and yet doesn't seem to know or care much about how to actually get results in a knowledge-based org.
Maybe entry-level ICs and ICs in bad orgs, but good PMs know that the ICs building the product will have some amount of insight into its usage and pain points.
If you work for a shitty organization sure. In a well functioning org, that isn't the case. Leadership/PM should help set direction, but not specifics.
That's my impression as well, as an IC that transitioned to management soon after the pandemic. If you're already aligned on what you're doing, WFH is a good way to get there faster. But getting that alignment has become very difficult in the WFH world. You don't have high-bandwidth communication to lay out complex trade-offs between different people, and you lose a lot of trust that makes it possible to compromise, disagree, and commit.
You’re probably also bad at being a manager, given that you just started in odd circumstances and, if your company is like any software company I’ve ever heard of, you likely weren’t trained into your new role.
Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation.
This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
As someone who's been fully remote for going on 5 years and is responsible for managing my own fully remote team at this point: It is a challenge, for sure, but I think it's incredibly defeatist to call it a failure. Your team not knowing your larger initiatives and how they contribute to them is an organizational failure, not a work from home failure, and is also fully able to happen in an office too.
We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.
I found WFH terrible for onboarding new hires. They don’t have the work network and miss out on conversations, both work and water-cooler social stuff. It’s taking much longer to get them up to speed and as productive as their co-workers than it did when we were all in the office.
And yeah completely agree on working on the right things. Programmers (me included) pine for “focus time”, but we need a lot of talking to know if we’re overengineering or underengineering. I’ve watched a lot of people get their way with too much focus time and implement the wrong things, wasting weeks or months at a time.
I generally agree with you on that, but my partner started a new job (as a technical lead for an engineering team) about 6 months ago, and her onboarding was actually pretty good -- not perfect, there were some snags, but the overall experience was positive. Was it as good as in-person onboarding? Maybe not as good as if she were in-person at this same company, but IMO it was still better than the in-person onboarding I've seen at other companies. She started getting solidly productive after two months or so, which I think is comparable to most in-person jobs, especially when you're not joining in a more junior position. But social connections with the members of her team were definitely slower to form, and I think there are still (after 6 months) some holes there.
But... that's kinda ok? A company might be upset at any negative effects that might have, but I personally think it's a completely acceptable (fantastic, even) trade off for the ability to eliminate a commute, work in comfort, and have a more flexible schedule.
Obviously not all companies are going to do remote onboarding well. Just as many companies don't do a great job of in-person onboarding either. But that doesn't mean throw up your hands, give up, and make people go back to the office. It means... do better.
I do think remote onboarding is especially hard for people starting their first job in the industry. But I'm not convinced these problems don't have solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions, but good-enough solutions.
I keep hearing this while at the same time seeing very little evidence for this.
Most 'water cooler social stuff' is absolutely pointless small talk at best that you have to often engage in to remain polite. I'd rather not if I could avoid it except for certain circumstances with people I am already 'friends' with.
Guess what I do with those coworkers I am friends with? we have a separate channel/group from official channels where we do that already. Nothing's missing there.
It seems like you're describing a common situation where orgs that didn't function well before WFH, continued not to work well. The sign was that suddenly people were able to be productive on certain things when WFH. The org was out of balance before WFH, and is now out of balance after. That's an org thing, not a WFH thing.
Our experience with software development team was WFH actually helped with the larger picture. It allowed people to be more strategic and intentional about decisions, instead of trying to do that in the daily tilt-a-whirl that is the office.
> Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing.
Where are we seeing this? I'm a manager at a mostly WFH company and we don't fall short on this.
Big thing is this was never an office based company, WFH is in the DNA from the co-founders and while we regroup occasionally, remoteness has not affected our ability to grow and build meaningful things. One could argue that we might do better if we were an office based company but as far as I know there's no data out there showing that this would be the case.
I think your and nostrademon's comments are both insightful.
What I would add as someone who has been managing collaborative science teams embedded in large companies remotely, pre- and post-pandemic, is that some forms of alignment translate to the remote setting, but other forms of alignment are more challenged. I think the boundary is probably: if the teams were aligned pre-remote, you can sustain the alignment, even with new collaborative initiatives, but gaining new alignment with new teams is way more challenging.
Which is fine when what you are doing is Business as Usual, but falls apart when there are crises or disruptions that require net new collaborative relationships.
Most large enough orgs have teams distributed between offices. I routinely work with people in New York, multiple locations (far enough to not be able to walk over for a meeting) in SF Bay Area and Seattle. When everyone is in their assigned office location we are still on video conference. SF office is close to an hour away from Mountain View for example. The alignment is just fine and things get done. Whether a given person is in the specific room or not makes little difference, but whether the rooms are truly engaged does. I’ve been in plenty of in person meetings where laptops open and attention goes elsewhere.
I've never really had an issue with that last point when working remotely. Ultimately there isn't that much difference between 8 people sitting in a conference room together and 8 people on a video call.
Sure, communication isn't as fluid, and you lose some context cues, but we're not talking about things that need intense physical interaction.
I did enjoy going into the office from time to time for group meetings (I lived close enough to the office for that to be easy to do), but never felt like the meeting was significantly more productive in-person.
No need for this antagonism, regardless of whether it's true.
Anyway, yes, I think your theory is based on something true on average about RTO vs WFH. However, improving collaboration under WFH is simply an easier problem than improving focus/efficiency/work-life-balance/happiness/etc under RTO, for most people.
I also find that communication/sync overhead is less efficient in remote teams (I have been working in globally distributed teams, since the early 1990s).
It's been my experience, that everyone (from the lowliest IC to the CEO) fails to understand the cost of team synchronization. That's a [set of] topic[s] that would fill an entire bookshelf, and anyone that gets it right, could live in opulence.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be planned for, by managers and architects.
Architects need to design systems that allow ICs to have more personal agency, while encouraging synchronization (an approach that I use, is blackbox implementations, and whitebox APIs). The more an IC can work on their own, the better, but we still need that transparency.
Managers need to know when it's OK to send work to remote agents, and when work is required in-office. They need to know their teams well enough to be able to choose wisely. Human nature is a big deal. Until the entire workforce is AI, you'll always have those pesky humans in the mix, with their annoying emotions and personal lives.
Also, and this is almost never talked about, is that different people work differently. Some folks are almost superhuman, when left alone, while others just screw the pooch.
They may both be incredible employees, but they need to be handled differently.
Unfortunately, modern HR practice, is to treat every employee exactly the same as every other one (and there are actually valid reasons for this).
TL;DR, it's not simple, there's no "one policy to rule them all," and good managers are hard to find.
I think that’s probably true for companies that were forced into WFH due to the pandemic, but I’ve been working remotely for more than 14 years now and companies that are already doing it don’t have problems building alignment on larger initiatives. Worst case, there’s an in person meeting every year or so, but otherwise, if they company is already used to planning in a distributed way, it can execute larger initiatives without problems.
Meh, my experience returning in person is that we’ve returned to a culture where the inputs of decision makers are bound by conference room size. The winning decision has returned to the one of the loudest voice, or most conventionally attractive.
Meeting from time to time is great, but the RTO push has been problematic across multiple dimensions.
Financial performance during the pandemic was very favorable for some orgs, and leadership will struggle to deliver on shareholder go forward expectations (which are arguably unrealistic in the new post pandemic macro, due to structural demographics, cost of money, etc), leading to performance art ("someone do something").
Somewhat similar to retail stores blaming theft for store closures when it's their fundamentals [1]. Like a magician, misdirection.
I agree with you. Everyone is trying to get you riled up over theft, but it's really just a calculated risk. There are two retail strategies.
One is to let people walk into the distribution centers and touch everything, hopefully making them more emotionally attached to the product and thus pay a higher price. This carries the risk of people walking out with the merchandise without paying, but it's offset by the improved convenience. ("Is this the right size? Let me just take it over to that closet and see. Yeah it is, here is my credit card, can I wear this out?")
The other strategy is to publish a list of what's in your distribution center, and then have an employee of the store bring it to your house. Since the general public can't get into the distribution center, the risk that they walk off without paying is lower.
(But not zero. Employees steal. Customers steal by claiming they never received what they order.
To me, that's the same thing as smashing the glass of a retailer and walking out with their stuff. But, it doesn't make for an emotional photograph, so people don't treat it that way. They're wrong, though. Stealing $1000 worth of stuff through deception is the same as stealing $1000 worth of stuff by force.)
Strategy two is doing very well these days. But it's always done well. Remember when you could order a house kit from Sears and they would put it on the next train to your town? Same thing as Amazon. It was popular then and it's popular now.
I see so much of it. Serious problems that need creative solutions instead being hit with antics to show everyone is “working hard” or doing their best. Gratitude channels that were created with the intention of genuinely celebrating “wins” turning into political schemes abused by some to portray how much they’re “winning”. Its all very gross and seems like a huge distraction while the real issues remain unaddressed.
Did you read that article? The conclusion is shoplifting is just one of many kinds of theft (return fraud, employee theft). This is absolutely an issue with degrading trust, not business fundamentals.
RTO is disliked by everyone. I work in big tech and everyone including the VP of my org dislikes it. It has become a formality and everyone just does whatever is needed according to policy. It is very hard to see anyone benefitting from it. The velocity has gone down and everyone knows and accepts it. I am being told even the EVPs dislike it but it is top down from CEO and everyone should just do the bare minimum required.
Disagree with your sentiment. Big tech employee for 12 years. There is substantial support for RTO, but those voices aren’t as loud, don’t advocate their positions as vocally as the rest.
I don't think the "we prefer RTO" crowd is anything more than 10%, but I won't quibble about exact percents.
The problem with the RTO boosters is they aren't happy enough to just RTO themselves. RTO boosters generally start demanding OTHER people return to the office with them. So the problem is RTO boosters demand other people conform to their preference because "the office is dead without my team there" or similar statements.
Hybrid/WFH boosters don't care what OTHER people do. You wanna work from the office, go for it man, I literally could not care less. Work from the moon, your beach house, your moms house, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, or the office.. whatever.
How do you know there is substantial support if the people who support it don't voice that opinion? Also, why would they not voice that opinion if it matters to them?
I know some people who like working in the office, and some whose home arrangements make WFH hard, and that is fine. However, the majority of my colleagues I have spoken to have the opposite view and prefer WFH. I haven't found anyone who withholds their view.
Just anecdata of course, like yourself, but I haven't seen substantial RTO support, even if some people prefer it.
At my company with thousands of employees, informal polls (where every employee can participate anonymously) show that people who are in favor/against of RTO is 1:4. At least that's a number I can quote.
There are great places to work in-person, for example, any of Musk's companies which have missions that require extreme levels of communication and dedication that can only be achieved through colocation. This makes it worthwhile.
And it's great for other people to be able to choose something more flexible, whether for family or some other desire, and be able to leverage the benefits that remote work provides.
But even in small company, it's absurd to think that there's a single answer to "which is better" for every employee.
What's more absurd is that the executive-level positions tend to be more flexible. If anyone's to benefit from in-person communication and spontaneous interactions it's those making decisions that impact those people.
As an outsider, neither employee or employer, to me the whole thing looks like an abusive relationship, particularly egregious on the employer side, but not without problematic actions from the employee side either.
And while HN is an outlier, most people work to survive, not the other way around. Imagine if the same energy that went into promoting RTO, or even WFH for that matter, went into "enabling individuals to make worthwhile contributions and feel good about what they do."
Queue the "people are lazy and can't be trusted" and "basic income is the only answer" choir.
The preference seems to be highly asymmetric. People who want to RTO want to go back and think they'll be more efficient there. People who don't want to RTO may have things childcare routines, hell, even recent moves to distant cities, that make RTO a severe hardship.
I don't mind going in to the office to meet up with my coworkers sometimes. People who took advantage of the opportunity to move to cheaper locales may have an incredibly hard time with that.
If the RTO support is substantial And backed by the executives, why is RTO support not heard in the workplace? Except by a tiny minority? At least that's what I see in the co I work for with several thousand techies.
Consistently every single survey at various places has shown you're wrong.
Force RTO has also been devastating for caregivers (which are, usually, non-white & immigrants due to larger family sizes and less-established parents).
Succeeding in management is mostly about taking credit for successes and avoiding blame for failures. The better you are at doing that, the higher you'll go in a company. With COVID, remote work, RTO, for the last few years it's all been a regular train of plausible scapegoats that management has been able to deflect blame onto.
Succeeding as a bad manager maybe. I’ve had the pleasure of working for three fantastic managers, one being now, over my career. The second I began asking for leadership advice as I was contemplating making the transition at the time. He gave me a bunch of sage books to read but summarized it in one quote from General Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
This has been an easy gauge for sussing out whether a new manager deserves my praise or not in the roles that came after. Leaders that embody that have, in my experience, always maintained a loyal, productive, non toxic team where individuals move up more rapidly, as well as the leader, due to the momentum that comes from not having constant turnover and a team that respects and enjoys their mission and mandate.
That's how genuinely good managers behave, but also why there's so few generally good managers.
People do not advance in corporate America by being blame sponges for the people below them. You advance by being a nonstop self promoter and, on occasion, eating blame for your boss.
That’s a great quote. I’ve always said when it works, it’s to our team members’ credit; when it doesn’t, it’s my fault. But don’t rely on just that as a gauge of a good leader. I don’t know that I’m that effective a leader, since I’m not confident I help the team be particularly productive.
WFH and WFO companies are pretty different, from the leadership down. Many existing companies (especially large) can't just adapt so they force RTO to accommodate their existing "style" instead of adapting.
I think we'll end up with two types of companies, WFH and WFO, and right now it looks like the WFH companies will have an easier time recruiting and hiring. So imo this would work especially well for small, fast-growing companies. We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow but maybe there's a limit where they'll need to transition to working from the office.
If that's true, it might be a good time to start companies again and take on some of the incumbents. WFH is a pretty strong selling point to those disgruntled by RTO policies.
When I’ve been at companies large enough to need to solve communication issues, I’ve seen two major styles:
1) Need something? Post in the relevant channel. Use @s if appropriate. If you’re in the wrong place, someone will let you know. Break off to private chats when it makes sense, but mostly not. Folks have a good idea what‘s going on because most exchanges halfway-relevant to what they’re working on or connected to take place in public.
2) Need something? Ask around until you find the right person to talk to, then communicate with them. If electronic, DM or email them, don’t contact in a public channel (there may not even be one that makes sense for the chat). Communication is a network of who-knows-who-to-talk-to. Messaging app is mostly oriented around ad-hoc group and individual chats rather than channel-focused (thanks, fucking MS Teams, for practically enforcing this style at the tool level). If you’re not around to overhear things in person, you won’t know wtf is going on.
IMO the latter is clearly just dysfunctional, but this dysfunction is far less painful in-person—it seems to work basically ok, mostly, except that everything takes a little longer than it should. However, all its problems are brought in the open with WFH, and for someone who hadn’t seen the other (better, no matter where everyone’s working) style, I can see how they might think their struggles with WFH are because of WFH.
I think this is exactly the issue. To rephrase: the biggest difference is management. There are different challenges of course, but the most significant is how to manage. Workers have an easier time shifting location. Furthermore, it's often more difficult to troubleshoot and repair bad management than bad workers, so it's not trivial to discover the source of the corporate problem when you flip your WFH/WFO setting.
I think it's also the case that management is less willing to accept that they are the problem, and that they need to change. And since they're the ones who call the shots, they force their employees back into a working arrangement that makes them more comfortable and more effective at management.
> We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow
I don't think transitioning a medium or large company with a WFH culture into WFO is even possible. If companies grow that way, I'm sure they will stay that way.
RTO is like voluntary redundancies as a solution to layoffs. It seems like its a good idea but it's not.
You rarely hear about voluntary redundancies these days for good reason. If, say, you wanted to downsize by 10% you'd seek volunteers within each division. They'd get a severance package. The net result? All the best people left because they could take the money and get another job.
RTO mandates are quiet layoffs. They're layoffs without having to pay severance. It's great (for the employer). At least in theory. Layoffs are a tool for increasing uncompensated workload (as the 5 remaining people still have to do the work of 8) and suppressing wages. Some people can't RTO (eg they moved during the pandemic). Some just don't want to. Particularly in the Bay Area, the commute is a giant waste of hours a day. So, again, the best people just leave. The ones who stay usually can't leave because they're being held captive by work visas and green card applications.
Blaming employees is nothing new here. In any large company you will see reorgs happen every 6 months, maybe more often. Some VP you've never heard of (but is in your direct management chain) now reports to a different VP who you've also never heard of. Some orgs have their names changed and there's a new set of priorities.
The point of these reorgs is for leadership to escape responsibility for consequences. There's a perpetual handover or ramping up period. Nothing lasts long enough to fail. Nothing lasts long enough to succeed either but there's little value in success and a huge cost to failure so the people involved optimize to avoid failure. More specifically, the appearance of failure.
In all of this, you, the employee, are entirely expendable. Your life can be completely upended for no other reason than someone wanted to cancel a project to give the appearance of a reorg or your name was randomly picked for a layoff on a spreadsheet. Always act in your own best interests.
Yeah, it's crazy how common that view seems to be in the industry for something that simply does not make sense.
What people call "velocity" is an inherently relative measure, but they insist on treating it as an absolute. You can have a really slow team have a "great" velocity if their estimates account for moving slowly, and a fast team have awful "velocity" if their estimates are too short.
Ultimately, it's a measure of something like predictability or consistency. Treating it as if it actually measures development speed is a category error.
And hey, maybe consistency is what you want to prioritize over everything else! But, well, probably not.
i love it when product sets requirements and milestones and then leadership says "what if we try this thing" in the middle of the work but then doesn't give additional time for experimentation. then when the deadline comes around it's engineering's fault.
Ideally, you have enough handle on the schedule that you can approximate the schedule cost, and present them with the option. Example:
ENG LEAD: I can add that experimentation to the Gantt chart, but normally any new ask will push out other things.
BIZ PERSON: Can we do it without slipping our next MVP milestone? It would help with a sales prospect, but isn't worth slipping.
ENG LEAD: OK, since you want it in a week, to minimize impact to the MVP schedule, I can task Jimmy 90% on it. Plus myself 20%, to mentor and keep this on the right track, while Jimmy gets up to speed. We just heard that other customer pilot project was canceled, so I can probably shuffle those resources towards the experiment, without slipping MVP. OK?
BIZ PERSON: Sounds good.
(Of course, if the business people are bad at business, this can go wrong...)
BAD BIZ PERSON: Isn't Jimmy a junior engineer? This experiment is my best drug-fueled mindfulness epiphany yet, and needs the best engineers.
ENG LEAD: If this were key for the MVP, without time for anyone to ramp up their skills, I'd normally plan for Jane or Bob to do it. But interrupting their current immersed critical path MVP work for even a couple days now would probably throw them off for calendar weeks, and likely result in a poorer solution too. And that would end up blocking half a dozen other people for a couple calendar weeks, and they'd only be able to work on lower-priority things. Which would be a immediate 2-week hit to the MVP milestone, plus, worse, a hit to morale of everyone, which would slow us and introduce more risk, just as we're entering the aggressive MVP final stretch where we need everyone rising to do their best work. So I recommend Jimmy, with me working closely with him.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Sounds like this needs my charisma to inspire Jane and Bob to squeeze this in without slipping the schedule.
ENG LEAD: They're already hyper-motivated, on a great path towards MVP, and are operating at peak efficiency. This is an almost mythical moment of greatness, rarely attained by any company, and is startup-defining magic, which will not only make our successful MVP possible, but will also become an instant company-internal legend, setting our engineering and product culture to achieve greatness, for years. If we broke that now, we'd be the world's greatest imbeciles.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Great, the rest of this week, let's do a company stand down for team-building retreat, where I can have 100% of their attention, to leadership them. That will increase their velocity, and we can do the experiment without slipping the schedule.
ENG MANAGER: I should've just said yes, without giving implementation detail, rationale, or tradeoffs.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Jane and Bob can also work on the experiment in the evenings during the retreat, from their tents, after each day of Executive Forest Survival(tm) zip line trust falls. Bam. More time saved. Now go do your magic, buddy! [flashes best confident smile]
Every time this topic comes up I feel compelled to offer my opinion that there is no universal rule when it comes to WFH or RTO. Whether employees are productive when working from home has more to do with how well the company has prepared to operate in that environment rather than any fundamental aspect of the two models. Companies complaining about unproductive staff working from home should focus on improving their processes and management around WFH rather than simply throwing up their hands and trying to force a return to the office.
Readit News
When people ask questions like "Why does it take X engineers to run twitter?", well that is the reason.
If this was already the case at your company before the WFH, then yes, WFH didn't change anything, or even maybe let your emloyees work on the wrong thing even faster.
The other thing people don't appreciate is that it's significantly harder to find good managers than good individual contributers. I believe that management is about 300% more efficient in an in-person environment. As in, I can effectively make sure that 3x the number of people are working on the correct things in an in-office environment.
I find it nearly impossible to find people with the ability to do this correctly right now, let alone somehow needing to find 3x this number.
Even if people worked at half speed at the office (which I don't really believe), that is still worthwhile.
It doesn't match my experience though. The person I hired during WFH consistently works on the right things and has great judgment, while the other team members who predate it are either neutral or struggling in the same way they did before the pandemic.
Why do you believe seeing a person live makes it easier for you to instruct them on what is worth spending time on? What's your evidence?
What drives (drove) most of it is that as a product matures and the user base grows, polishing smaller features and chasing 0.1% wins can meaningfully drive metrics to a point that having a team focus just on a single user flow is a net positive. Enabling this often means a more modular codebase and system architecture so people aren't stepping on each other's toes. There are also exploratory features that are unlikely to pan out, but at the scale of 500M users, if they do, it's huge. A lot of this work might be wrong, but some of it isn't, and you won't know what's what until you try.
At 500M users, you also need more spam detection, account protection, content moderation, etc.
You can run status quo Twitter with fewer engineers, but don't expect incremental growth, and expect more issues like the recent SEC mishap.
I'm going to be a bit blunt but most of management in reality is useless, if not actively harming people under them. 300% of 0 in those cases still remains 0.
Having ICs in the office doesn’t suddenly cause managers, product owners, or business people to figure out what the true direction is. And ICs typically only work on what’s assigned to them.
This was one of my biggest lessons transitioning to management. My biggest mistakes have all been cases where a feedback loop from engineering to PM/UX/leadership was missing and I failed to set one up. Biggest successes have been projects where I set that feedback loop up early and got out of the way, so that engineering and UX had a high-bandwidth communication pathway to negotiate issues and make product compromises based on real constraints.
Unfortunately it feels like I'm swimming upstream when it comes to actual org policies here, which have forcibly reclassified me from a TLM to an Engineering Manager (so my official job duties now include assigning work, but not necessarily understanding the work I'm assigning), given me a reporting load that's too big to understand the details of each project I'm managing, made my report's performance reviews independent of how well they work with others and instead fully dependent on how much they please me, made my performance reviews largely independent of how well I support my team but very dependent on how well I please my superiors, and so on. Somebody in upper management wants people to be responsible for things and yet doesn't seem to know or care much about how to actually get results in a knowledge-based org.
Most places are bad.
Is it this way because they have "manager" on the task name?
Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation.
This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.
And yeah completely agree on working on the right things. Programmers (me included) pine for “focus time”, but we need a lot of talking to know if we’re overengineering or underengineering. I’ve watched a lot of people get their way with too much focus time and implement the wrong things, wasting weeks or months at a time.
But... that's kinda ok? A company might be upset at any negative effects that might have, but I personally think it's a completely acceptable (fantastic, even) trade off for the ability to eliminate a commute, work in comfort, and have a more flexible schedule.
Obviously not all companies are going to do remote onboarding well. Just as many companies don't do a great job of in-person onboarding either. But that doesn't mean throw up your hands, give up, and make people go back to the office. It means... do better.
I do think remote onboarding is especially hard for people starting their first job in the industry. But I'm not convinced these problems don't have solutions. Maybe not perfect solutions, but good-enough solutions.
I keep hearing this while at the same time seeing very little evidence for this.
Most 'water cooler social stuff' is absolutely pointless small talk at best that you have to often engage in to remain polite. I'd rather not if I could avoid it except for certain circumstances with people I am already 'friends' with.
Guess what I do with those coworkers I am friends with? we have a separate channel/group from official channels where we do that already. Nothing's missing there.
Our experience with software development team was WFH actually helped with the larger picture. It allowed people to be more strategic and intentional about decisions, instead of trying to do that in the daily tilt-a-whirl that is the office.
Where are we seeing this? I'm a manager at a mostly WFH company and we don't fall short on this.
Big thing is this was never an office based company, WFH is in the DNA from the co-founders and while we regroup occasionally, remoteness has not affected our ability to grow and build meaningful things. One could argue that we might do better if we were an office based company but as far as I know there's no data out there showing that this would be the case.
IMO companies should embrace what they truly are and not force it.
What I would add as someone who has been managing collaborative science teams embedded in large companies remotely, pre- and post-pandemic, is that some forms of alignment translate to the remote setting, but other forms of alignment are more challenged. I think the boundary is probably: if the teams were aligned pre-remote, you can sustain the alignment, even with new collaborative initiatives, but gaining new alignment with new teams is way more challenging.
Which is fine when what you are doing is Business as Usual, but falls apart when there are crises or disruptions that require net new collaborative relationships.
Sure, communication isn't as fluid, and you lose some context cues, but we're not talking about things that need intense physical interaction.
I did enjoy going into the office from time to time for group meetings (I lived close enough to the office for that to be easy to do), but never felt like the meeting was significantly more productive in-person.
No need for this antagonism, regardless of whether it's true.
Anyway, yes, I think your theory is based on something true on average about RTO vs WFH. However, improving collaboration under WFH is simply an easier problem than improving focus/efficiency/work-life-balance/happiness/etc under RTO, for most people.
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I don't think I would ever want to do a full WFH/remote arrangement, rather one that allows for flexibility without judgement and mistrust.
It's been my experience, that everyone (from the lowliest IC to the CEO) fails to understand the cost of team synchronization. That's a [set of] topic[s] that would fill an entire bookshelf, and anyone that gets it right, could live in opulence.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be planned for, by managers and architects.
Architects need to design systems that allow ICs to have more personal agency, while encouraging synchronization (an approach that I use, is blackbox implementations, and whitebox APIs). The more an IC can work on their own, the better, but we still need that transparency.
Managers need to know when it's OK to send work to remote agents, and when work is required in-office. They need to know their teams well enough to be able to choose wisely. Human nature is a big deal. Until the entire workforce is AI, you'll always have those pesky humans in the mix, with their annoying emotions and personal lives.
Also, and this is almost never talked about, is that different people work differently. Some folks are almost superhuman, when left alone, while others just screw the pooch.
They may both be incredible employees, but they need to be handled differently.
Unfortunately, modern HR practice, is to treat every employee exactly the same as every other one (and there are actually valid reasons for this).
TL;DR, it's not simple, there's no "one policy to rule them all," and good managers are hard to find.
Meeting from time to time is great, but the RTO push has been problematic across multiple dimensions.
Somewhat similar to retail stores blaming theft for store closures when it's their fundamentals [1]. Like a magician, misdirection.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602429 (Retailers Lobby: “We Lied About Organized Theft”)
I feel like the anti theft is performance art to scare voters into voting for tax dollars to replace Walgreens store security.
One is to let people walk into the distribution centers and touch everything, hopefully making them more emotionally attached to the product and thus pay a higher price. This carries the risk of people walking out with the merchandise without paying, but it's offset by the improved convenience. ("Is this the right size? Let me just take it over to that closet and see. Yeah it is, here is my credit card, can I wear this out?")
The other strategy is to publish a list of what's in your distribution center, and then have an employee of the store bring it to your house. Since the general public can't get into the distribution center, the risk that they walk off without paying is lower.
(But not zero. Employees steal. Customers steal by claiming they never received what they order.
To me, that's the same thing as smashing the glass of a retailer and walking out with their stuff. But, it doesn't make for an emotional photograph, so people don't treat it that way. They're wrong, though. Stealing $1000 worth of stuff through deception is the same as stealing $1000 worth of stuff by force.)
Strategy two is doing very well these days. But it's always done well. Remember when you could order a house kit from Sears and they would put it on the next train to your town? Same thing as Amazon. It was popular then and it's popular now.
Walgreens has stolen MUCH more from its employees than shoplifters have
I see so much of it. Serious problems that need creative solutions instead being hit with antics to show everyone is “working hard” or doing their best. Gratitude channels that were created with the intention of genuinely celebrating “wins” turning into political schemes abused by some to portray how much they’re “winning”. Its all very gross and seems like a huge distraction while the real issues remain unaddressed.
There is an early-seasons Simpsons clip for every "new phenomenon" that people notice today.
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The problem with the RTO boosters is they aren't happy enough to just RTO themselves. RTO boosters generally start demanding OTHER people return to the office with them. So the problem is RTO boosters demand other people conform to their preference because "the office is dead without my team there" or similar statements.
Hybrid/WFH boosters don't care what OTHER people do. You wanna work from the office, go for it man, I literally could not care less. Work from the moon, your beach house, your moms house, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, or the office.. whatever.
I know some people who like working in the office, and some whose home arrangements make WFH hard, and that is fine. However, the majority of my colleagues I have spoken to have the opposite view and prefer WFH. I haven't found anyone who withholds their view.
Just anecdata of course, like yourself, but I haven't seen substantial RTO support, even if some people prefer it.
At my company with thousands of employees, informal polls (where every employee can participate anonymously) show that people who are in favor/against of RTO is 1:4. At least that's a number I can quote.
And it's great for other people to be able to choose something more flexible, whether for family or some other desire, and be able to leverage the benefits that remote work provides.
But even in small company, it's absurd to think that there's a single answer to "which is better" for every employee.
What's more absurd is that the executive-level positions tend to be more flexible. If anyone's to benefit from in-person communication and spontaneous interactions it's those making decisions that impact those people.
As an outsider, neither employee or employer, to me the whole thing looks like an abusive relationship, particularly egregious on the employer side, but not without problematic actions from the employee side either.
And while HN is an outlier, most people work to survive, not the other way around. Imagine if the same energy that went into promoting RTO, or even WFH for that matter, went into "enabling individuals to make worthwhile contributions and feel good about what they do."
Queue the "people are lazy and can't be trusted" and "basic income is the only answer" choir.
/end rant (cost: -37 karma)
I don't mind going in to the office to meet up with my coworkers sometimes. People who took advantage of the opportunity to move to cheaper locales may have an incredibly hard time with that.
Force RTO has also been devastating for caregivers (which are, usually, non-white & immigrants due to larger family sizes and less-established parents).
“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
This has been an easy gauge for sussing out whether a new manager deserves my praise or not in the roles that came after. Leaders that embody that have, in my experience, always maintained a loyal, productive, non toxic team where individuals move up more rapidly, as well as the leader, due to the momentum that comes from not having constant turnover and a team that respects and enjoys their mission and mandate.
People do not advance in corporate America by being blame sponges for the people below them. You advance by being a nonstop self promoter and, on occasion, eating blame for your boss.
I think we'll end up with two types of companies, WFH and WFO, and right now it looks like the WFH companies will have an easier time recruiting and hiring. So imo this would work especially well for small, fast-growing companies. We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow but maybe there's a limit where they'll need to transition to working from the office.
If that's true, it might be a good time to start companies again and take on some of the incumbents. WFH is a pretty strong selling point to those disgruntled by RTO policies.
1) Need something? Post in the relevant channel. Use @s if appropriate. If you’re in the wrong place, someone will let you know. Break off to private chats when it makes sense, but mostly not. Folks have a good idea what‘s going on because most exchanges halfway-relevant to what they’re working on or connected to take place in public.
2) Need something? Ask around until you find the right person to talk to, then communicate with them. If electronic, DM or email them, don’t contact in a public channel (there may not even be one that makes sense for the chat). Communication is a network of who-knows-who-to-talk-to. Messaging app is mostly oriented around ad-hoc group and individual chats rather than channel-focused (thanks, fucking MS Teams, for practically enforcing this style at the tool level). If you’re not around to overhear things in person, you won’t know wtf is going on.
IMO the latter is clearly just dysfunctional, but this dysfunction is far less painful in-person—it seems to work basically ok, mostly, except that everything takes a little longer than it should. However, all its problems are brought in the open with WFH, and for someone who hadn’t seen the other (better, no matter where everyone’s working) style, I can see how they might think their struggles with WFH are because of WFH.
I think this is exactly the issue. To rephrase: the biggest difference is management. There are different challenges of course, but the most significant is how to manage. Workers have an easier time shifting location. Furthermore, it's often more difficult to troubleshoot and repair bad management than bad workers, so it's not trivial to discover the source of the corporate problem when you flip your WFH/WFO setting.
I don't think transitioning a medium or large company with a WFH culture into WFO is even possible. If companies grow that way, I'm sure they will stay that way.
You rarely hear about voluntary redundancies these days for good reason. If, say, you wanted to downsize by 10% you'd seek volunteers within each division. They'd get a severance package. The net result? All the best people left because they could take the money and get another job.
RTO mandates are quiet layoffs. They're layoffs without having to pay severance. It's great (for the employer). At least in theory. Layoffs are a tool for increasing uncompensated workload (as the 5 remaining people still have to do the work of 8) and suppressing wages. Some people can't RTO (eg they moved during the pandemic). Some just don't want to. Particularly in the Bay Area, the commute is a giant waste of hours a day. So, again, the best people just leave. The ones who stay usually can't leave because they're being held captive by work visas and green card applications.
Blaming employees is nothing new here. In any large company you will see reorgs happen every 6 months, maybe more often. Some VP you've never heard of (but is in your direct management chain) now reports to a different VP who you've also never heard of. Some orgs have their names changed and there's a new set of priorities.
The point of these reorgs is for leadership to escape responsibility for consequences. There's a perpetual handover or ramping up period. Nothing lasts long enough to fail. Nothing lasts long enough to succeed either but there's little value in success and a huge cost to failure so the people involved optimize to avoid failure. More specifically, the appearance of failure.
In all of this, you, the employee, are entirely expendable. Your life can be completely upended for no other reason than someone wanted to cancel a project to give the appearance of a reorg or your name was randomly picked for a layoff on a spreadsheet. Always act in your own best interests.
velocity is a vector. ICs may bear some responsibility for its magnitude but direction is straight from the top baby
What people call "velocity" is an inherently relative measure, but they insist on treating it as an absolute. You can have a really slow team have a "great" velocity if their estimates account for moving slowly, and a fast team have awful "velocity" if their estimates are too short.
Ultimately, it's a measure of something like predictability or consistency. Treating it as if it actually measures development speed is a category error.
And hey, maybe consistency is what you want to prioritize over everything else! But, well, probably not.
ENG LEAD: I can add that experimentation to the Gantt chart, but normally any new ask will push out other things.
BIZ PERSON: Can we do it without slipping our next MVP milestone? It would help with a sales prospect, but isn't worth slipping.
ENG LEAD: OK, since you want it in a week, to minimize impact to the MVP schedule, I can task Jimmy 90% on it. Plus myself 20%, to mentor and keep this on the right track, while Jimmy gets up to speed. We just heard that other customer pilot project was canceled, so I can probably shuffle those resources towards the experiment, without slipping MVP. OK?
BIZ PERSON: Sounds good.
(Of course, if the business people are bad at business, this can go wrong...)
BAD BIZ PERSON: Isn't Jimmy a junior engineer? This experiment is my best drug-fueled mindfulness epiphany yet, and needs the best engineers.
ENG LEAD: If this were key for the MVP, without time for anyone to ramp up their skills, I'd normally plan for Jane or Bob to do it. But interrupting their current immersed critical path MVP work for even a couple days now would probably throw them off for calendar weeks, and likely result in a poorer solution too. And that would end up blocking half a dozen other people for a couple calendar weeks, and they'd only be able to work on lower-priority things. Which would be a immediate 2-week hit to the MVP milestone, plus, worse, a hit to morale of everyone, which would slow us and introduce more risk, just as we're entering the aggressive MVP final stretch where we need everyone rising to do their best work. So I recommend Jimmy, with me working closely with him.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Sounds like this needs my charisma to inspire Jane and Bob to squeeze this in without slipping the schedule.
ENG LEAD: They're already hyper-motivated, on a great path towards MVP, and are operating at peak efficiency. This is an almost mythical moment of greatness, rarely attained by any company, and is startup-defining magic, which will not only make our successful MVP possible, but will also become an instant company-internal legend, setting our engineering and product culture to achieve greatness, for years. If we broke that now, we'd be the world's greatest imbeciles.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Great, the rest of this week, let's do a company stand down for team-building retreat, where I can have 100% of their attention, to leadership them. That will increase their velocity, and we can do the experiment without slipping the schedule.
ENG MANAGER: I should've just said yes, without giving implementation detail, rationale, or tradeoffs.
BAD BIZ PERSON: Jane and Bob can also work on the experiment in the evenings during the retreat, from their tents, after each day of Executive Forest Survival(tm) zip line trust falls. Bam. More time saved. Now go do your magic, buddy! [flashes best confident smile]