I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue.
I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric.
There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity.
This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.
It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
You better be good then or have a niche/rare skillset. There's no intrinsic right to remote work. Things will mostly revert to pre-covid, where only the best/most disciplined/highest performers are given the freedom to WFH. Sure, some companies will be 'remote first', but for the most part, you'll need to be a special hire with an exemption carved out. I'm already seeing this in my workplace. Managers are begging leadership for remote headcount but getting Bay area headcount instead. The teams getting remote headcount are the hardest to fill/most in demand skillsets, and almost always very senior.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
This is a double edged sword. You don’t care about the company, you care for yourself. Your company sees that and gives you a certain treatment. If you don’t care just quit?
Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC.
For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations.
The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.
I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic.
But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.
It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other.
Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice.
Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person.
We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years?
I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
Most people struggle to be efficient and effective at written communication. There are a huge number of people with good technical skills whose writing skills don't go much beyond writing a string of one-liners on Slack. And particularly in the younger generations, there is an enormous amount of resistance to anything that looks like detail-oriented long-form writing. In-person interactive discussion is much easier for people without these skills.
It takes years of practice to become proficient at this, even if English is your native language. Everyone wants full-time remote but few people possess the communication skills to effectively work asynchronously and I see very few people intentionally trying to develop these skills or being willing to put in the many hours of work required.
This may be the primary essential gap for remote: people need to dramatically improve their written communication skills. Until they do, they lack the skills to work remotely effectively.
Ironically, we used to do asynchronous highly technical long-form discussions over email and on mailing lists. It is where I developed a lot of my writing skills, and this used to be the norm. It worked pretty well and some older open source projects still work this way. Now everyone hates email because it forces them to write.
If we’re talking about the IC work, the benefits of WFH are acknowledged even by its detractors.
The people struggling with the “management” problem in remote work are either looking at the wrong place or being oblivious that it’s solution will come from adjacent fields like lawyers or accountants. Perhaps it’s time for them to look beyond their own field?
Agree. I don't think there's enough discussion about how bad remote collaboration tools are beyond "Teams sux". We need low latency, large screen, high resolution tools like Google's Project Starline, which is a good step in that direction. Voice cloning and deepfakes offer a plausible route to achieve very high fidelity in low bandwidth, but I think Zoom et. al. may be reluctant to explore that path because of its [currently] creepy perception.
I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.
WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few.
On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.
One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.
Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.
(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.
Documentation is not a complete fix. So you have 1000 pages of documentation. Which page has the answer to your question? At work you ask your coworker with more experience "Can you tell me how X works?" and get an answer immediately. On remote you type in to chat "Can you tell me how X works?" you get an answer in 5 seconds, or 30 or 5 minutes, or 10 or 3hrs later, or never. Where as in the WFO example you were back to work immediately with little to no context switching, in the remote example you might have to just go work on something else (30-60 minute context switch) while you wait for an answer, then once you get it do another 30-60 minute context switch to get back into whatever it was you were doing.
Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works?
It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never.
People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.
I think this is backwards. It's much easier to join Zoom meetings from home, and while you are on these meetings everyone can see that you're giving them at least partial attention. While heads-down work at home requires more discipline from you and more of a leap of faith from management.
In the office, quiet spaces to take a meeting from are scarce, but it's better established that your unscheduled time is actually spent on work.
Some people collaborate better in person, some don't. I work with people (deliberately) who collaborate better via text chat. We sometimes jump on a call with a screen share, but that is rare. I have tried everything over the past 30+ years and find there are some people who just 'need' the office as they thrive there, but mostly I found that people who insist on office hours and say they are more productive are just really not very good at what they do and compensate for that with an external cabaret of 'work' which really doesn't work at home.
By the way, LLMs really helped us here; we chat with a bot reading and extracting everything and storing it conveniently so it won't get lost for later.
I agree it's not a black-and-white problem, but I don't fully agree with your statement about collaboration.
I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020.
Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.
I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though.
But we barely do any productive work at these meetings.
We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done.
In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.
However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.
Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them.
Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time.
That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.
Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand.
Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues.
There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time.
And working on the same codebase was horrible.
One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns.
And that was if we had a room with a display...
If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing.
If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.
When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away.
We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment.
We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others.
If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer.
If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.
I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed.
However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects.
Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time.
This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.
But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking."
Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before.
The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month.
It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings.
But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.
Funny you mention whiteboard work. I agree that is one of the things that sucks remotely, but I also think it's because whiteboard support in video calls is universally awful.
Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc).
We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.
I am literally at least 10x when I work from home.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
> A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.
I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i:
- unload the dishwasher
- walk to the shops to buy items for dinner
- sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
In my experience, most people who struggle with WFH lack specific material things like space, a quiet home, a schedule anchored by the presence of loved ones who live nearby and a functioning community which they're a part of, good mental and physical health, coworkers who will help them without a fuss, and a million other things.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
Hard disagree. Working from home is a skill that does takes time to develop, but it's no more out of reach than developing the skill of being productive in an office. It was a terrible decision for companies to yank away that opportunity from employees.
Every system in place for measuring output and bringing transparency to work done by office workers/software developers finally make sense in the context of working from home.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
It seems too take more discipline to attend a workplace than to do the same work from home. I don't understand your position.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
WFH requires discipline, but allows you more freedom to mould your environment to your needs.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
I think that he is the norm, actually. Slacking off in the work is easy too, there are many empty discussions that feels like a work, discussions that are not work at all but you still count it as working time. If no one sees your monitor you can watch the same youtube. But, since you are at office you clock at as working.
It also takes discipline to work at the office. and as you said, most people aren't disciplined. They just stay at the office, doing absolutely nothing productive and wait for the clock to tell them they can go home.
I'm not disciplined at all when it comes to my work and I'm still massively more productive at home. What are you talking about?
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break
up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus?
I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.
I think the top comment reflects this - I have adhd too and I can’t be productive at home. I suffer a commute every day because my job performance tanked when I worked from home 8 mo strait. I’m much more productive at the office - I just wish my wife would agree to move closer to the office.
The benefits of which you speak, are pretty much I've to say, too. My present situation offers me above-average flexibility, but not to the level as yours. Care to share whom you work for, or where to find such roles?
It's basic common sense. Cut almost 3 hours of commute+preparation and not only you have saved yourself half a working day but also the fatigue and exhaustion.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
I really don't think this is the case... I believe more than anything it's about the kind of personalities that make up people who are in charge of these decisions... Think about the types of people who are c-suite executives. They are likely people who prefer to be in an office setting.. at least most of the time. I don't think they like it very much coming into an office and seeing it mostly empty... Partly because it diminishes their perceived value as a leader and everything they've worked for but also because they truly believe people work better in person because that's what they've always done and continue to want to do.
I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
>In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
This argument has never made sense. Commercial real estate exists to optimize the real cost (labor). There is no temptation to put it above the needs of labor.
Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
Yes, all this. I have a 5 minute commute, an office with a door, and plenty of parking. Going back to the office is no big deal (and has some major advantages.)
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
“Company culture”… that’s the word they use for sure. Often it’s ego, sunk cost fallacies and other things that have to do with the culture in the C suite for sure. Pay people well and treat them with respect and you’ll end up with good and loyal employees, as always.
We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
Completely agree. And it is funny how we put so much emphasis on developing our skills and abilities, when really our actual value is always determined by the market.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
I live and run a (non-tech) business in Vietnam. I've never tried to run a business in India but I've spent quite a while there, and have worked on occasion with Indin freelancers.
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
I work for a company that has satellites in both India and Vietnam (among others).
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials.
They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
> our entire development team has been replaced. They can barely speak English.
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
> If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
Yeah, the argument made no sense. If "outsourcing" will work this time (and it might), it's because the global south have developed quite a lot in education and infrastructure (pretty much all of the global south has good internet now, sometimes better than the US).
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
It seems much less likely to me that this wouldn't have the effect of raising the global south up to the level of the global north, rather than drag down the global north to the global south, which would be a huge win for human flourishing. So I can't say I oppose it.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
They tried remote body shops, which was a disaster (we had "tested deliverables" that didn't compile). This time there seems to be more emphasis on opening your own remote office and hiring the strong candidates there.
> How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
The title of the article doesn't match the rest. Productivity is getting more from the same inputs, not getting more with more inputs.
First, there is very little data and just a couple conjectures thrown around. There isn't much substantive evidence of what it claims.
Second, even if people aren't commuting, it just assumes people work the same hours, but many people are probably working longer hours so you can't tell the impact on WFH on productivity.
Third, it doesn't look at outputs at all, especially the output of the company. While some (or even all) individuals might produce more, the group as a whole will have less communication and each employee might have less context of what else is going on in the company, so much of their contribution might not align as well with company objectives. Management of all the individuals would be more difficult and the company would be less of a team. This would support the idea that the increased productivity is only available to well managed groups. I think this sounds much more likely.
Fourth, much of the increase explained is from widening the labor pool. It explicitly mentions those with disabilities, stay at home mothers, and larger geographical inclusion. This isn't increasing productivity, just increasing the labor input.
This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
I currently work somewhere where I can't WFH. And as a counterpoint to pretty much everyone here I prefer it. My last role I was able to WFH.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
Tell me where this dream job is and I will apply. For over 20 years I commuted to the office. Some days I stayed late in the office and pulled 12 hour workdays. Most of my time was stolen by coworkers and managers who constantly interrupted or insisted I attend a meeting about some issue I knew nothing about. When I left the office after only putting in 8 hours, I would end up working 2+ hours at home to catch up for the work I couldn’t do on the office. Now with WFH, when people try to interrupt me on Slack, I tell them to send me a meeting invite.
as with all things your experience depends on context. if you are part of a business team that needs to request things off other people and build off needing something from others, then you love working from the office cuz the others are available for you
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
Haha dream job it is not, but a definite benefit is you never take it home. And I am never not paid overtime if I work beyond my hours. I could definitely get a better paid job but this one is good enough with a decent work/life balance.
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
It's a mental separation kind of thing. When I've had jobs where I work at an office, I am able to mentally leave work at work. When I've worked from home, I struggle to do that and end up thinking about work when showering or doing dishes.
Hence why I'm now a consultant and get paid by the day/week.
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH. When I finish working, my laptop gets put in a bag and not taken out until I start working again and colleague interaction while remote is going to vary based on how your invested your company is in remote work. As far as your home being your workplace, you could always rent a cheap office to work from. The co-working space around me offers private offices for a few hundred a month.
Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.
I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?
(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)
IME software engineering is a mix of coding, which can sometimes be fairly independent of others and require focus, and a range of collaborative activities. Face to face meetings help building the relations that help the collaborative part go smoothly. But once the high level requirements are understood and the humam relations are in place, a team can complete projects online quite effectively, even as the requirements evolve.
Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.
I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?
There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings.
That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.
It's funny how the internet became widespread which enabled what you say in theory but it wasn't enough, we needed a global pandemic to push us to use it as intended and get over the stone age type of culture we had before (remember doing your taxes on a frickin paper? Working only from the office? Having to sign papers with a pen?)
It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.
Readit News
For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue.
I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric.
There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity.
This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.
You better be good then or have a niche/rare skillset. There's no intrinsic right to remote work. Things will mostly revert to pre-covid, where only the best/most disciplined/highest performers are given the freedom to WFH. Sure, some companies will be 'remote first', but for the most part, you'll need to be a special hire with an exemption carved out. I'm already seeing this in my workplace. Managers are begging leadership for remote headcount but getting Bay area headcount instead. The teams getting remote headcount are the hardest to fill/most in demand skillsets, and almost always very senior.
This is a double edged sword. You don’t care about the company, you care for yourself. Your company sees that and gives you a certain treatment. If you don’t care just quit?
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For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.
But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.
It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.
Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?
Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years?
I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
It takes years of practice to become proficient at this, even if English is your native language. Everyone wants full-time remote but few people possess the communication skills to effectively work asynchronously and I see very few people intentionally trying to develop these skills or being willing to put in the many hours of work required.
This may be the primary essential gap for remote: people need to dramatically improve their written communication skills. Until they do, they lack the skills to work remotely effectively.
Ironically, we used to do asynchronous highly technical long-form discussions over email and on mailing lists. It is where I developed a lot of my writing skills, and this used to be the norm. It worked pretty well and some older open source projects still work this way. Now everyone hates email because it forces them to write.
If we’re talking about the IC work, the benefits of WFH are acknowledged even by its detractors.
The people struggling with the “management” problem in remote work are either looking at the wrong place or being oblivious that it’s solution will come from adjacent fields like lawyers or accountants. Perhaps it’s time for them to look beyond their own field?
On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.
One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.
Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.
(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.
Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works?
It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never.
People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.
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In the office, quiet spaces to take a meeting from are scarce, but it's better established that your unscheduled time is actually spent on work.
Unsure if you're attributing it to Feynman (although I do see the relationship in Feynman's thought process, but the quote is from Einstein:
> If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
... buuut really it's from Nicolas Boileau (1674):
> Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement. Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
Tx'd:
> What is well understood is told with clarity, and the words to say it come up easily.
As well as a few others that are right on point:
> Avant donc que d'écrire, apprenez à penser. Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure, l'expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure.
Tx'd:
> Before even to think one should learn to write. Whether the idea is more or less obscure, expression follows through, 'ther less sharp or more pure.
By the way, LLMs really helped us here; we chat with a bot reading and extracting everything and storing it conveniently so it won't get lost for later.
Once a problem is well defined, WFH is more productive.
I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.
I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.
However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.
Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.
Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.
When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.
I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.
But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.
Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc).
We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.
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I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
Pry it from my cold dead hands.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
It would be nice if wfh wasn't such a polarised issue.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
Btw which is something I also sometimes seek out, a hard working colleague is an inspiration.
Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
That is bizarre to me. I find the office takes far more discipline. Do people really get that distracted at home? What is so distracting?
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.
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On the other hand, executives are clearly banking on a good old-fashioned recession to rein in the unruly and ungrateful employees.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
Even Indians are losing their IT jobs to Vietnamese. [1]
The squeeze is real.
Good time to start a business I guess.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1eckee9/oh...
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials. They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.
If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.
Ofc, it's true, you might get to the same destination. But the journey would be so different you can hardly call it the same thing.
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
>How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
You don't have to wait long, it happened around 20-25 years ago.
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
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Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
First, there is very little data and just a couple conjectures thrown around. There isn't much substantive evidence of what it claims.
Second, even if people aren't commuting, it just assumes people work the same hours, but many people are probably working longer hours so you can't tell the impact on WFH on productivity.
Third, it doesn't look at outputs at all, especially the output of the company. While some (or even all) individuals might produce more, the group as a whole will have less communication and each employee might have less context of what else is going on in the company, so much of their contribution might not align as well with company objectives. Management of all the individuals would be more difficult and the company would be less of a team. This would support the idea that the increased productivity is only available to well managed groups. I think this sounds much more likely.
Fourth, much of the increase explained is from widening the labor pool. It explicitly mentions those with disabilities, stay at home mothers, and larger geographical inclusion. This isn't increasing productivity, just increasing the labor input.
This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
To quote Dilbert:
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
Reasons I prefer staying at home:
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)
Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.
I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?
That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.
It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.