My how things change. Last year my manager and director at Google wouldn’t let me be away from the office to work from another location for 2 weeks without forcing me to take a family leave. To quote “remote doesn’t work, if you can’t be in the office you need to take a leave or vacation”. Apparently those two L7 geniuses weren’t consulted before this decision :)
I think it's heavily dependent on the company and the employee and that blanket statements about it oversimplify the issue.
Full-remote companies like GitLab seem to have an effective remote-work culture, while others seem to be struggling to convert their existing processes and communication avenues to remote. On the other hand, I dramatically prefer working from an office, while several of my coworkers prefer working from home.
Even if it's strictly less productive than in-person..you can get the job done. Why in the world would an engineer advocate for optimizing productivity at all costs instead of benefit for themselves?
I'd rather get a job at 80% productivity and have control of my time instead of maximize productivity & spend more time solely focused on work than sleeping.
> remote or in-office makes very little difference
(Genuinely asking) what makes you think that way? From what I have seen, remote works only if everyone on the team is remote and timezone differences are somehow taken care of. If you are the only remote member of the team and everyone else is in office in close proximity of each other, you are going to suffer mainly in terms of career growth.
Here are the things remote members miss out on when a lot of team members are in office: water cooler conversations (great to forge bond and trust), quick one-minute clarifications, grabbing a minute from your super busy bosses (when they are walking from one meeting to another), grokking and perceiving things that are not said during in-person 1:1's (important for managers or leads to understand the issues of their team members) etc. If you are missing out on all this while the rest of your team members have these advantages, guess who is going to be more productive in the long run?
really? ever have to work on project split like that?
Its easy for key features to be lost - and a lot of time and $ to be wasted.
I wont mention any names but I found out today that our team should have been on a call about a major website rebuild - I have a suspicion that some key areas have been missed.
I can say with all sincerity, that I have been on projects like that.
And because "remote' is such an incredible afterthought, co-dev production is harmed immensely as a kind of collateral damage.
I have worked in companies that did this right, we had offices in NYC/London/Bangkok and we did everything over RT tickets+IRC, mostly because it was incredibly frictionless (yes, I know IRC and RT are not the best tools in the world, but once they were set up and everyone was in people preferred using them to taking in person meetings).
Contrast with today: we have teams in Sweden, UK, North Carolina, San Francisco and Helsinki- and we use Jira/Teams/Confluence as our "tools".... but they're so /slow/ that we have to be dragged through the coals to use them, we much prefer in-person meetings, we much prefer hashing things out over a coffee.. and thus, our co-dev is very much out of the loop, and it's "odd" (as in, not default) to include them. So what happens is we carve out bits of responsibility and we restrict immensely the communication channels.. in fact some peoples entire job is to ensure those communication channels run smoothly.. and it's still very many shades of terrible.
I want to blame the tools, but really, it's the culture, if you're more comfortable engaging over IM/Tickets w/e then it doesn't matter if you're sitting 10ft away or 100mi away.
I've worked on projects like this at two separate companies, both of which had people on opposite sides of the world and across the US. It was easiest at the smaller start-up because communicating via Slack/Hipchat made this work fairly smoothly, aside from the occasional situations where we had to go on a video chat at 7a or 10p.
For the start-up I worked at, everyone around the world was working on the same APIs. Issues and priorities were just bubbled up via chat.
The larger company I work for now is more difficult because more people = more questions that need to be resolved via video chats. We have a PM that talks with the people on the other side of the world and also a "team liaison" on the east coast that hops in their planning meetings, and communicates with us if there are any issues we need to be aware of. The project we're working on is being completed by three separate teams, all in different parts of the world.
The smaller team I am on has people all over the US and Canada. That itself hasn't been much of an issue. Prior to COVID, we would have the occasional fly-in to San Francisco so we could do team stuff in person, go out for happy hour, etc.
The most complaints I've seen where lack of communication within team members which contributes to siloing, but that is more of an issue with how many services our team has assigned to it and less to do with having team members working remotely (although it does contribute).
Everyone working at a large tech organization above a certain size on projects of central importance to the organization has worked on projects split like this.
Does no one have a project management/coordination role for your team? It's literally their job to make sure this doesn't happen.
It also doesn't matter if you would be more productive in-person or not. Maximizing productivity isn't some moral truth we must satisfy. Corporations for good reason try to get workers to think it is.
Glad to see you bring this up because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I get the feeling that many people are on board with the idea that productivity trumps all and are willing to be like rags to be squeezed by their employers until every last productivity drop comes out.
I think this needs to be talked about more with an eye towards reducing the amount people must work.
Its not a moral truth, its an economic one. If you want to charge a premium price for your labor, you had better be offering a premium product, or your customers won't buy it.
It's also not an economic one. My salary is locked in. So long as I don't get fired, I get paid the same. So I can give different outputs and get paid that same "premium price." Just have to meet the bar. So it's in my interest to reduce how much work I do in order to increase my de factor hourly rate. If you factor in promotions etc, it's the same thing - just a different bar.
I guess you could say I'm offering a "premium product" either way and be right, but my original point stands. I don't need to be giving 100% to get that money. And the longer I'm at a job, the more I can understand the effort bar I need to meet and influence it downward.
Do you seriously think that you should get full pay for part-time work? If you only want to work part-time, then by all means feel free to pursue part-time employment. But if your employer finds out that they've been paying for full-time labor and getting only part-time labor, don't act surprised and indignant if they fire you.
Yes I should get paid my current salary for my current work. Feedback on my work is that it is "Good" which means the employer is happy paying me for my contributions. I'm not being paid for my labor and time - I'm being paid so long as my employer thinks what I'm giving them is worth it. I'm not grifting anyone - I'm just in an at-will employment arrangement.
Caring about hours worked is for bad managers, plain and simple. The biggest reason to not work in the office is that it's easier to avoid these bottom-of-the-barrel, butts-in-seats leaders. With them out of the way, you're free to tune your output in such a way that keeps your employer happy while also freeing up your life.
Its not about "hours worked." Its about available throughput.
If you're under-loaded, then a good manager can shift the balance around the team. Maybe someone else is over-loaded. If the whole team is under-loaded, then maybe the team can deliver more features. Maybe its a good time to pay down some of last year's technical debt. Maybe its a good time to take a bet on a higher-risk research project.
If I spend 4 hours working and the result is enough throughput to make my team and manager happy, then that's what I'm going to do and I'll do everything in my power to keep it that way. Everyone's happy, what's wrong with that?
I just can't relate to this mindset that is oriented around optimizing company success. I'm more focused on my own success.
My peak throughput isn't necessarily there for the company's taking. I guard it as my greatest secret. My manager only gets 2 signals from me regarding load: It's good..or I'm overloaded. Never the truth when I'm underloaded if everyone's happy - that would just be harming myself for some company's benefit.
Can you elaborate a little on how maximizing productivity is directly related to offering a premium product? For what it's worth I disagree, this doesn't seem like a truth at all.
That's a huge assumption. There are certainly situations where it doesn't work but to have a blanket policy of refusing to do it is right up there with luddites hating the internet. Companies should be smarter than that.
Most teams wouldn't bat an eye at a few weeks working somewhere else. The managers will change their tune if they lose engineers over such a stupid policy.
