Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the computer, then drive home. So so so stupid.
It’s more than just developers, our CEO is in love with in person interactions, so now we have managers at my company who have made a zoom background of their office and work from home to try to keep up appearances. It’s the most bizarre thing. At a big enough company, everyone won’t be in the same office and you’re interacting across regions, so you’re already doing zoom/teams/emails/voicemails/ whatever pre and post pandemic. If you’re spending your day on the phone or email or in conference calls, that can be done from home.
We're also almost completely remote. I still find it fun to go to the office 2-3 times a week. Yeah, it's a 40 minute commute, sitting in the train and listening to podcasts (or biking in the summer). In the office I typically have my own room without distractions, the company orders lunch and I get to be somewhere else than home every now and then.
I also have a great remote setup at home. A room, with a fast desktop computer and all. Still changing the location few times a week clears my head somehow...
Where I work, it was actually like this before the pandemic. We are a global company with lots of tiny offices. Teams were assembly remotely just to satisfy requirements. It was silly to be in an office.
Not the person you were asking, but I had next to no conversations about work aside from video calls, even before Covid. Between national and international distributed teams (and people working weird hours to avoid sf bay commute hours), and packed meeting schedules, it basically didn’t happen. It’s making me sad to write this and it’s making me think.
> Are they conversations that a company would consider help further the bottom line? Not at all.
I realise this depends on the company and the person, but to me these kinds of conversations are essential. I find all the interesting stuff actually happens in these incidental conversations!
I guess the real takeaway here is that to be an effective company you need to have an environment where your employees can work well, but different styles work better for different people so you end up having to compromise.
It's funny, I once had a manager who was outraged I hadn't done something she asked for. I said I wasn't aware of the requirement.
She hadnt actually made any formal announcement. She just liked informal chats with colleagues and assumed all important decisions she made would just spread to everyone through some kind of office osmosis.
She then got annoyed with me that I didn't have enough casual conversations with the team. She wasn't a good manager. But it remains the only time I've been reprimanded for focusing on getting my job done and not chatting enough!
Not really. I come in, sit down, put on my headphones, and stare at my screen pretty much the entire day. I’ve never engaged in small talk in the hallway, even pre-pandemic. It pisses me off when people stand around talking and disturbing people around them trying to concentrate. If you want to have a conversation, schedule a conference room and close the door.
Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working.
I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment?
Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, however, a lot of employers / teams still have not setup effective means for including and training the less experienced members of the team. I realise that much of this learning is of my own responsibility but I really, really miss spending time with my team and learning from those more experienced than I. I feel as though I have stagnated an awful lot over the last two years and there’s only so far self-learning can take you when software engineering is such a collaborative process.
During COVID, as a CTO, I tell my team to DM me after stand-ups if they aren't sure about their tasks or work, or even how to get started. I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual, where we go through a socratic'ish discovery, using things like draw.io or mermaid to quickly sketch out concepts and architecture. Often this then sparks them to go through their own discovery, and the next day or 2 they will request yet-another call to then propose their design and implementation, and this is yet-another opportunity for us to discuss and hone their work.
So in-short, yes, self-learning is required (always is, always will be), but if your senior can do some sort of guided self-learning, I'd like to think you would then gain the confidence and be more than capable of picking up the necessary skills, along with the sometimes-serendipity that comes from such paths to discovery.
(sadly, my CEO is does not share this remote work mindset, which is why if anybody is looking for a CTO, please DM me...!)
> I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual, where we go through a socratic'ish discovery, using things like draw.io or mermaid to quickly sketch out concepts and architecture.
I'm sure you are.
If you have time.
Thing is, at most companies, most employees are perpetually swamped. Or at least quite frequently.
I'm a new employee (3 months) at a company. The documentation is quite bad. In other words, it's quite standard compared to all other companies out there. There are some wikis, tutorials, confluence pages, etc, but the links tend to get reused, and in the end you have just a handful of true documentation sources, all being 10 or 15 or 20 years old. My team members are friendly and eager to help. They have all gone through the same pains as me. But they are super busy. Some times, I say "hi" on chat, and tell them I have a question, and sometimes they help me, but some times they tell me "can you write your problem in an email, and I'll take a look by tomorrow". And sometimes they tell me they are super-busy "this week".
In the end, I got the most help from another new joiner, who joined 2 weeks after me. He's helping me, I'm helping him. We really depend on each other. Because of him, I'm probably twice as far as where I'd be without him.
But here's the thing: our company has a 3-day-a-week policy. And his desk is just next to mine. Whenever we are physically next to each other, we interact a lot. But when we communicate on zoom, the interaction goes down maybe by a factor of 10.
> I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual
Bingo. I've been doing the same with new remote hires (especially jr). I try to block off a couple hours every other day that are 'open'. When they send their first few PRs, I'll call them and go over it which inevitable leads to lots of random questions about the code base.
Finally, I make it clear this time is open to them as long as it's needed.
My goal is to replicate the ability for someone to stop by my office. I think so far it's been ok.
> how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment?
Yes, three things:
- Learn to write detailed yet succinct prose, and practice this often.
- Learn to unblock yourself, so that asynchronous communication does not become a barrier. Be prepared to dig in at least 1-2 layers of abstraction below where you typically work and spend lots of time researching unfamiliar topics.
- Decide whether you want to be a generalist or a specialist. There is room for both in the industry. If you want to be a generalist, make sure you are getting n years of experience and not one year of experience n times.
These are largely the same actions to take to be a top class engineer in an office too though.
When you say "make sure you are getting n years of experience and not one year of experience n times", do you mean to try and work on something different each year? Or did you mean something else?
Something different in that you aren’t working on slight variations of the same problems over and over again. You’re going deeper or wider or something that forces you to grow.
The failure mode of taking this advice is to constantly churn technologies and spend all your time learning superficialities about the new shiny.
It means continue to grow your experience either wider or deeper or both. You don't have do something completely different each year, but you should be thinking about how to expand your skillset. Unfortunately, this oftentimes means changing jobs, but not always.
An example of getting deeper if you're a Java programmer would be to really learn all the collections available (beyond ArrayList and HashMap) and when to use them. Wider would be to learn and improve on your SQL.
> a lot of employers / teams still have not setup effective means for including and training the less experienced members of the team
In my experience, this is not correlated with remote or office work in any way. For the most part of my career, spent in the office, I have not received any form of mentorship, even though I would have liked it. Most people I've met don't have the "mentorship gene", so to speak. They don't really care enough to stop what they're doing and share this knowledge with you.
The company I'm currently with is an exception to the general rule I've seen in the industry. Specifically, they put a lot of effort into actively sharing knowledge (as in, you don't have to ask for it, it will be given to you even if you're too shy to say anything). And they're fully remote.
So, to put it another way - if a company doesn't put any effort into training while remote, I find it difficult to believe things are any different in an office. Maybe what you miss is those interactions that are inevitable when you're physically working next to others; maybe it was a way to get "training" by accident. But there's no reason why you can't do the same remotely. You could try pair programming, for example, or you could all be in a Discord channel and just work in the same virtual place.
I've noticed this as a serious problem for our new hires as well.
The unpleasant truth is that mentoring someone is something that works far better in person, where they can learn from you both directly, through explicit tutoring, and indirectly, through experiencing the kind of person you are and how you navigate your environment.
I feel like this is one good reason why a hybrid working approach might end up being the sweet spot between all remote and all in person. A few days a week, a few days a month, or a few weeks a year in the office together to facilitate these kind of activities.
Unless you are working for a 100% full time remote company, my suggestion is to go into the office.
You'll get more exposure to people, more chances for one-off conversations, your boss will know what you look like and you'll be closer to the action - all important things early in your career.
Once you're an old hat at things, it doesn't matter nearly as much. You know who to reach out to, know how to navigate politics, know what the resources are.
My prediction is we'll see people slowly return unless their company strongly enacts 100% remote (or the role fits remote well - little to no team interaction).
Once a few ambitious people start finding out the project they really wanted to work on went to someone else who has been having lunch with the boss 3 days a week, they'll get in the office too or find another job.
No need to apologize! It’s reasonable to have needs, and these make total sense.
I’ve had success doing very long screen sharing while someone works normally. Let them forget you are there, in some ways it’s a lighter ask than breathing over their shoulder. Take notes on things which don’t make sense and batch your questions for when they want to take a break from coding (maybe on the phone, they can clean dishes out whatever). If no teammate is willing to do that, you might be seeing cultural problems unrelated to remote - maybe explore other teams at the company.
This is so different from my first job experience, I can't imagine a more night and day comparison. I literally got stuck at a desk and had no mentoring at all, team meetings were blind leading bling into ditch, and all work was 100% individual. Nobody would have helped me even if I had asked, they probably would have told me to fuck off since they had their own tickets. Since I am really introverted and flat out don't like dealing with people, this was pretty nice for me, bu being remote during the whole thing would have been heaven. I'd still be working there if that were the case.
To your question, what do you want to learn? I can tell you that if you want to broaden out, just do projects in new languages/frameworks. If you want to learn technique, I would suggest you go find quality academic publications on the topics you want. The chances that your teammates are anywhere near as "good" as what you might observe in such books is honestly very low. Most engineers are mediocre, that is just a fact, so your team may not be imparting as much wisdom as you feel it is. I know mine didn't.
it might be that after a few years in your career the novelty of being in the office wears off and you start to notice the time you lose by being in an office, due to people asking for more “quick chats”, which are disruptive and cause repeated re-starts of the mental processes of understanding code and fixing hard bugs. this lost time then needs to be made up after hours leading to stress and burnout. i personally think the future is completely remote. as a contractor i cannot imagine going into an office everyday dealing with ass in seat mentality. i have written some of my best code in a bar, with a pen and paper.
What's weird is I've found collaboration works shockingly well remotely. You can jump on a Slack huddle and share your screen or use VSCode LiveShare to pair on hard problem, or a document, and while there's more fiction in drawing, it turns out my whiteboard handwriting is terrible anyway.
The thing is, you have to do this deliberately. You need a culture of teaching or you're going to be bad at teaching, and since it's harder to read the room, your experienced folks and managers might not even realize you feel stuck.
I'd suggest you raise your concerns to the people around you. "I don't feel like I'm learning this way, can we do more pairing or can I join on some of the harder projects" is a fine place to start.
- on your side you need two life, if full-remote, two life means a local, physical social life and a remote social life, without both you'll miss a part of humanity that we need to advance well;
- a room, silent/isolated enough, dedicated just to WFH, enough to been able to talk out loud without earpieces etc, with a good conference speaker (just because a good speaker+a good cam that follow you is too expensive for most);
- on the company side remote work should be organized as remote work, not as "the same but in a virtual office", and that's really hard for most companies;
- time to be dedicated to "coffee machine talking" must be considered, it's needed to be an efficient team.
Generally speaking WFH works after a bit of "team experience", few in-person meetings to getting to know each others a bit, a bit of practice to adjust things etc, it means a slower "personal development" but thanks to more free time and home setup you can grow at your personal peace. Self-learning does not means learn alone, without help, means that you evolve alone following external stimulus, desires, needs, but you still have colleagues to talk to around for suggestions, idea exchanges, support etc.
If that's new for you it's "just" a matter of time to learn a new thing, "just" means not exactly automagic or easy but doable.
Oh boy.We have this onboarding buddy system where the new hire get paired with someone HR just send out an email to connect the two of u and then that's that.Last month we got a new guy, and I was assigned as his buddy. I had a rough week and that email got buried. This man went a whole week under the radar, besides HR and group onboarding called he's had no communication with anyone. He didn't know what Dept or team he was on, or who his direct report was. It was only when I was cleaning up my inbox that I saw the email and reached out.
So moral of the story is to not be shy any take initiative to reach out. We have chats and emails and internal forums message boards, so use all of them. If you're nice, ppl will be nice to you and help out. I've noticed that most new hires are not comfortable with messaging people they don't know, but this needs to be overcome. Even couple years in I DM people knowing nothing but a keyword, and I get a lot of help, and I get to have a nice chat and bitch about the lack of documentation etc .
You are completely correct, orgs need to do a lot better but I don't have a lot of hope but you can totally take it upon yourself to be more forward. Also bring it up with your manager maybe they can find you a dedicated mentor
Your experience is pretty much on point. If you can meet your team in person, do so. Being able to work remotely requires a lot of autonomy and confidence in general.
Bing remote, not having direct contacts with your team/department/etc. tends to be demotivating for a lot of recruits.
There are a lot of companies where, even pre-COVID, the expectation of training or mentorship just isn't there. Startups, small companies, non-tech companies is where this can be common.
This is the most frustrating part of being forced back to the Bay Area. Even before the pandemic, we always had distributed meetings, with people calling in from various buildings, conference rooms, phone booths, etc.
So nothing changes between last month and this month, except that managers get peace-of-mind knowing I’m calling in from somewhere on the premises, and I’m back living in a place where I can’t afford a house.
(I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions.)
I had plenty of interactions at Google over lunch, in the hallway, while taking a break, etc that we brought to a whiteboard and either ended up with a potentially interesting project or saved us time by finding out something didn’t make sense. These often came from a series of multiple, low stakes conversations that were much more difficult to have remotely. I don’t contend they are impossible, but for me they were at least much less frequent during wfh.
After a few years of remote working, me and some colleagues just randomly call each other with “watercooler conversations”. IE About once or twice a day, we are on slack and just call each other to answer and continue talking about random things and ideas
In my experience, this is the closest to just being together in an office without being in an office
I also had those by just doing my work and talking with colleagues about work. At home.
People love (my company included) to say office promotes those low-stake spontaneous conversations that result in something positive. Because these spontaneous conversations don't happen remotely, the argument is that then that something positive wouldn't have happened either. That's a false argument though.
Besides, if a company has responsible employees they will think about work, about their tasks. These types of brainstorming and thinking would come up anyway. And if not exactly this specific brainstorm that came from a lunch-topic, another one.
At the end of the day, right now most arguments are emotional arguments to force people into the office. Those findings that something didn't make sense, would happen anyway if people just think about work and do their job, in the comfort of their home, in the Bahamas, or wherever they choose to work.
this outcome can exist remotely, it simply requires effort and maintenance;
the gains from working remote are the same scenario, just different context;
I haven't figured out yet the specifics of what works because it hasn't been a priority, and what components of it are the quirky part and what are the catalysts for the same outcome (yet);
my flaw is thinking outside the box, which managers and companies don't optimize for; in fact in exemplary situations where I led efforts that gained many times the cost of all my work for many years (millions in USD) they didn't notice or care, which I find hard to understand about US corporate and cultural norms;
I'm sure there's a relationship between these things, I just haven't sorted it out.
Certainly, interesting work and effective in-person collaboration do exist at the these companies, it just varies a lot from team to team. The trope of PhDs hired to optimize button colors exists for a reason.
>I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions
I hope that I get to work on some actually hard problems at some point in my career. Sounds fun :)
Grass can be greener on the other side. Usually hard problems are expensive to solve, and the business end wants nigh endless amounts of justification and planning for those solutions lol. You think you'll be designing cool architecture (and you will!) but you'll also spend a lot of your time making powerpoints and sitting in meetings to "touch base" and "tag up" and whatever lol.
It's odd isn't it? Git went from an idea to being benchmarked in about a month. But tell anybody at work you can rewrite something to fix a fundamental design decision causing issues and they will usually say that will be impossible, take forever etc. While they assign you much longer lengths of time just working around something that was poorly designed.
As someone who has worked on startups, side gigs, and only around 6 months at a “real” company. I’m always blown away at how many meetings there are in corporate America. What are you even meeting about? Why aren’t you doing hands on keyboard work? Why does a decision need to be made in a room, with everyone pretending to listen? Why are you presenting something to me when I’ll comprehend it far better if I read it, gather my thoughts, and then send you my questions?
And don’t get it twisted. I’ve been in these types of meetings. Client meetings, project meetings, etc. It’s always been as an outsider, but they’re all the same. Small talk, people arrive, someone always has to have everyone introduce themselves, then there’s a quasi-presentation/conversation, and eventually everyone leaves. I can’t think of a less efficient means of communicating an idea than that.
Wait till you see government organisations. There are meetings to decide who needs to turn up to a meeting. I thought that was a sick joke until I attended such a thing myself.
On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the keyboard and use that, it's fine, just make a decision already. Nope. Got to run it past marketing. Branding (a separate team). Networks. BAU support. Domain hosting team. Architecture team. SecOps. Etc, etc...
The same org then had daily meetings involving 10+ people to decide how to purchase $500 worth of USB security fobs. At one point a project manager broke down in tears and pulled his credit card out out, and offered to just buy it himself if it would make the madness stop. There was a stunned silence, and then somebody raised the point that yes, fine, sure, but then how would warranty returns be handled if he becomes the "supplier"? With a straight face that same guy suggested another meeting to discuss the warranty return issue.
This reminds me of a great scene[1] from the British show "Yes, Minister". It's from an episode called The Compassionate Society where a minister for Department of Administrative Affairs learns about a newly built hospital which has some 500 employees but no doctors & patients. The scene I linked is a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential no matter what.
I used to think Yes Minister was the least humorous comedy on television, and I could not for the life of me understand why my father liked it so much.
He lived under communism, with its dozen+ levels of government bureaucracy, so you can imagine why he thought it was hilarious.
Once I had worked as a consultant for government departments, I suddenly "got" it, and now Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The bit about hospitals is all too true.
For example, just recently, I had to fill out a stack of paperwork to provision a virtual server for hosting an archived, read-only web site for data that hasn't changed since 2017 and has three (3) users. Literally a stack. As in, a pile. About a hundred pages, or a short novel. That nobody will ever read, except if the time comes to blame me for a shortcoming that they themselves could not have avoided.
Yeah, the company I work for recently got acquired by a US corporate. I went from one ~15min stand-up call a day to 3-4 hours of meetings per day, all mandated by the US VPs. Our company has had to double our number of developers just to get the same amount of work done that we did pre-acquisition.
I don't think meetings are really there for the informational value for a lot of people, but to give face time as a show of strength.
But, I do exactly what you do - I prefer something well-written and it gives me time to think about it. As someone talking to a lot of people within the company, I sometimes get asked to go on a client call. I almost always say no. It's not my job to talk to clients (and that means being ready to look good for them) and saying whatever needs to be said in a call doesn't do much that an email can't do. While being there as an "expert" to the client is probably something that customer-facing people want, I have nothing to gain from it.
Useful meetings engage people : a fresh new idea to have everyone go research more, a way to gather the team to focus on tough questions, or to explain a point better than chat messages.
I recently started doing part time contracting dev work for a couple companies. The best part is that management doesn't invite me to these bullshit meetings because they know I will be billing them for no value being delivered.
I've been working remotely most of my career and I wouldn't trade it for the world. However I believe that "just" having a place to do your video calls or whatnot in peace and quiet can be a tremendous value offer for many if not all people. This isn't to say that I think going to the office should be mandatory. Rather, I would hope that one day more companies can start going remote first with a workspace budget where you get to choose. Whether it's choosing to go to the office and your budget going towards the office rent, or paying for a coworking space with the budget, or just getting a better setup at home, raising awareness of the topic will hopefully lead to more flexible approaches in the long run. Right now, finding a company that's good at remote and has it all figured out is still rare.
I have enjoyed being able to choose when and why I go to the office (or especially when I don't). I struggle to imagine how forcing employees into an unpaid, stressful commute is paying off... tech profits have soared in the face of work-from-home.
This reminds me of the time about 7 years ago when my team (in Redmond, WA) wanted to send me to Beijing for a year. I didn't agree so they sent someone else instead. He spent most of the year living in Beijing and working with a team in Bellevue, WA.
I always found it kind of sad when I would have video conferences with people in the same building. But I didn't want to walk up 12 flights of stairs (very dodgy elevators in that building; wayyyyy under capacity for an office building), and they didn't want to walk down 12 flights of stairs, so there we were.
This is even worse at corporate campuses like the Googleplex. It might be a mile walk to go meet someone in person, while that 1 person video conference room is just footsteps away. Sad, but what can you do. (That said, I've been in meetings where I realized the other half of the group was next door, and said "wait, I'll just come over". Sometimes it's just unfortunate incremental iteration on the list of conference rooms and not actually a good reason.)
The only “bad” case I know of is my cousin who moved to Finland from Australia: her teen struggled because high school was impossible to follow. The younger kid didn’t care as much, and otherwise they all had a great time.
I feel like I know plenty of families who have done this.
What if you don’t have to overlap for the full day? Our team is all over the world and people are used to having real-time overlap with some people only for a couple of hours.
I have to be able to talk to everyone so my schedule is crazy (but is a schedule, so I’m not up at 2 AM every morning, and do get enough sleep). But I’m the only one.
My thoughts exactly. I had a similar opportunity about 10 years back and I turned it down. I still think about what my life would have been like had I chosen otherwise.
I'm confused, what was the point of making you (or your coworker) live on the other side of the globe then? Were they running an "let's see what happens if we expel someone out of the US just for kicks" experiment? The way you described it it sounds like they deliberately did something completely pointless, which seems... unlikely?
That isn't so bad per se. It's pretty common at MSFT from experience, sometimes it helps. But if you are connected in the Seattle area/have a mortgage and such it can def see annoying then to leave.
I meant it in the non family, adventure in China way and work maybe late evening hours to 1:1 w/ the redmond team.
I had something similar happen to me when I was also at msft, I volunteered to go to Manila and Tokyo (since no one else wanted to go) and it was the same exact situation except to interface with same redmond team and barely any with the international office.
My lease was expiring, I didn't feel like renewing, I was home searching (wish I just bought something instead, this was 2015, so imagine the prices) and well I spent over 18 months living abroad with more than quarterly tickets home and I was not even mid 20's.
I loved it, but I 100% get it. If I had a family and truly deep network of friends and long term connections there, I would've probably said no, but I wanted to travel. Only downside was, it was Japan in Winter when I arrived. :)
I have to wonder how long this kind of thing will last in these types of org structures before there's a collective realization that coordinating groups always has a challenging element to it, even in person in a single office location.
With distributed groups, even more "overhead," which Zoom / video calls, I think, have been proven over the last 2+ years to ameliorate to some extent.
These kinds of stories come across as almost validating the critique I've seen going around on various discussion forums - that critique would be that the return to office push when the job doesn't inherently require it is more an artifact of an organizational failure to adapt and/or an attempt to put expensive office spaces to some kind of readily visible use, rather than rational or productive management planning.
I want to come into the office. It's nice to get to know coworkers better. And I like the commute and the routine.
But it sucks.
There aren't enough meeting rooms for all the meetings. When I do get a meeting room, I have to wait for the last meeting to wrap up. Or I find out that the camera doesn't work. Or the lighting is off. And it's harder to tell who's talking. And messages in the meeting are truncated on the meeting room screen, so there's kinda a private side channel where only remote workers can participate effectively.
Our office is open plan, so I can hear people on other teams talking and I can't focus as well.
Sometimes the badge readers break and aren't fixed until the next day.
Sometimes there are evacuations.
The mail room is only open 11am-1pm, so if I have lots of meetings I have to wait another 24 hours to get my important parcel.
If they want me to come into the office, they really should make it more productive than working from home.
I was thinking returning to the office is sort of a 'prisoner's dilemma'. Everyone has to make the same choice for it to be effective, otherwise the office experience is diminished and working from home is better at that point, since you'll be in remote meetings anyway.
I still think it's a matter of control that the office is preferred. There's absolutely no reason why software problems can't be solved remotely, especially when half of the industry is outsourced to China or India.
The reason to have anyone in an office is because it makes managers and executives feel better. It’s really that simple. No one who has ever worked remotely themselves could possibly believe that employees are more productive in an office.
I think the delusion most people tell themselves about in person being better for spontaneous conversations, and better productivity comes down to just wanting human interaction. Which is totally normal. But all of the talk about how being in person is better is just a cope. Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
> No one who has ever worked remotely themselves could possibly believe that employees are more productive in an office
Anyone who makes a statement like this is naive ay best. Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
> Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
For you (and for me). But that doesn't mean it's better for everyone, and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else ("well Fred needs to be in the office and if it doesn't work for Fred it doesn't work for everyone")
> Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
I don’t really see how any of this has to do with remote work. Remote doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. It could mean working from a coffee shop, a co-working space, a boat, a beach, a park, a mountain, etc. If someone craves being around people they can solve that pretty easily in a remote environment (granted it’s been more difficult these past two years, ill give you that).
> and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else
Given the proper setup, and support from management, there isn’t an instance where remote work isn’t better. Whatever Fred is missing about an office environment is reproducible in a remote environment. It just takes looking at remote work holistically.
Personally I feel the pandemic has set us back quite a bit. We had companies haphazardly forcing remote work without any sort of strategy at all. This obviously is going to cause some people to think it doesn’t work. The problem isn’t remote work, it’s that your company just sucks very badly at doing it.
I’m saying if you’re more productive in an environment where you’re forced to commute into work, then you don’t have the proper tools to be more productive remotely. This is very common. It’s the lack of a remote working strategy on the part of your company. Of course you won’t have a successful time working from home if you just take your existing in-office work lifestyle and copy-paste it on to working remotely.
If your location is causing you to be less productive, then change your location. Go to a coffee shop, or a co-working space. Go to the park. Go anywhere you want.
I recently spent a week in the office with my team. First time I'd had office time with any team since mid-2018.
It was really, really, really nice.
I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare.
But... sometimes?
Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed it until I experienced it again. For the first time in years.
I think it also helps team cohesion. We're human beings, not robots. I think my ideal schedule would be "3 days at home, 2 in the office" per week or maybe "one week in the office, two weeks at home."
edit: I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
> I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
The problem is that choices aren't independent. While they're not using this language, you can see that other people are thinking of you as a "scab" for having crossed the "picket line" of returning to the office, and that admitting there is any benefit to being in the office at all will result in their life being made worse. That's why it's so heated.
I wouldn't mind being in the office. I do mind commuting, and I definitely would mind getting COVID as my wife is in the vulnerable category.
I get where you’re coming from. I’ve been half time remote since 2017 (I.e. on one coast half the time and back near the office the other half) and full time since 2019. It is very nice to visit and have a really good in person session occasionally.
My work has moved the office to a general hoteling model where the dozen people that need the office every day are always welcome to use it. It’s mostly a ghost town but everyone is happy with how this worked out.
The most common use case is a team coming into the office to see each other for the first time in two years or the first time ever depending on when they started.
We have a rule that all calls are done over Zoom or Meet, so we will have the eventual insane looking situation of the majority of the participants in the same conference room speaking into a laptop.
The company owns several Owl cameras which did a good job pre-pandemic of bridging the gap of seeing who is speaking in a conference room. I’m not sure if all laptops open is a good policy for remotes like myself but I’m sure we’ll figure that out in a few months time.
I'm with you. I definitely miss having an office to go to.
Would I take a job that required me to be in the office every day? Almost definitely not. Would I sacrifice a bit of pay if it meant working for a company local enough that I could go to the office 1-2 days a week? Probably.
That would really be the sweet spot for me. I like working from home a lot, but being a fully remote team wears on you. I've considered taking a part time bartending job just to satisfy the desire to have in-person coworkers a bit of time a week.
1. There are people who are more sociable and more likely to thrive working with other people in person, while some other type of people are more introverted, sensitive and dislike human interactions.
2. There are companies/work environments/jobs/teams where coworkers are mostly nice, smart and a pleasure to work with. There are also companies/work environments/jobs/teams that suck and filled with political, disgruntled and unhappy employees.
So, the only thing that is universally true is YMMV.
There’s introverted and then there’s reclusive. People who don’t like big groups or find social situations draining may nevertheless find a lifestyle with 95% of their time spent alone (assuming 8 hours of social plans in a 168 hour week) to be too isolating.
I am introverted, but the pandemic has taught me that I'm not actually suited to a reclusive life. I get far more done when working from home, but need a day in the office every month or so as a "reset", to remind myself that the company is bigger than just me and my projects, and that my colleagues are people rather than Slack bots.
No offense, but your comment reads like it came from a script. Thing happened -> unexpected result -> wonder why -> learn more about yourself. And the moral of the story is that working in the office is not that bad, because we're human beings not... robots?
Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)
I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey.
Regarding why this post is so inflammatory, it's just tedious "i hate people" misanthropic posturing from people who still haven't figured out that their problem is them.
I've read your comment a few times and I'm baffled. What are you saying, here?
I understand that people fake "happiness" and "respect" all the time. Yes. It's true. But... you seem to be suggesting that I am faking it here? Why?
My coworkers aren't reading this. They don't know my HN handle. I have never mentioned my employer on HN. What incentive would I have to be false here?
I've worked on a number of crap, toxic teams over 20+ years. This one's good.
I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the replies here. I make an offhand remark about my current team being a pleasure to work with, and I have multiple replies suggesting that there is something fishy afoot?
"The Lake Wobegon effect, a natural human tendency
to overestimate one's capabilities"
Oh, cool. Because I say my coworkers are good and I enjoyed spending a few days with them, maybe I'm overestimating my own abilities. Great. Very cool. Nice thing to say about a stranger.
I've never ever had such absolutely bizarre replies on HN. I can't remember the last time I had such bizarre replies anywhere.
Don't let it bother you man. It's just an example of cross-cultural confusion crossed with some blunt HN mannerisms (to put it politely).
The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).
How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"
How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."
Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)
It's hard to wrap my mind around somebody thinking a stranger is "bragging" or "uncouth" or "sycophantic" because they think their team is smart and fun to work with.
Saying they are "fun" is obviously my personal opinion. How could it be anything else? Of course it means I think they are fun and not it is a universal truth that everybody thinks my team is fun.
As for smart, aren't most/all engineers "smart?" I hardly thought that calling a group of engineers "smart" would be controversial.
Some people are just very grumpy that they have to go back to the office.
So here comes along this guy that loves going back to the office. Fuck that guy! He must be faking it, he's lying to himself. It's that fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work. It's because of these kind of people that I'm forced to go back! :)
I'm European and I know the fake US thing, but I didn't read that in your post.
I think there was also a misunderstanding. I'm not returning to the office. It was just a one week visit. I am back to working remote. I live 500mi/800km from my office. I will not move there.
fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work
Are you from America? I do not understand this statement. I have lived in America my whole life and everybody complains about their jobs 99% of the time. Maybe a person might lie to their boss about being happy. But nobody lies to their friends or strangers about loving their jobs. I mean, wtf? That's what people think Americans do?
But as a European looking at US culture, there is definitely a difference between this "positive thinking" attitude. I guess that's what the first response to your post was referring to.
Respectfully, I was not addressing you, and I think you are reading very different things into my comment than I intended. The connection in my mind was that the Lake Woebegon monologue always ended with "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I did not agree with this characterization, and I gently took someone to task for making what I considered a bigoted statement.
I have no opinion on your subjective assessment of your current or prior teams. I'm not sure what about my response merits being called bizarre. If I inadvertently touched a nerve, please understand that it was not my intention.
I did the same and it was as unbelievably worthless as I recalled from before the pandemic. You know what really stands out in the office? How sad it all is. The frowns on the subway, the fake smiles in the office, the pretending, the posturing. Bleh. I'm resigning.
I miss in-person activities, especially going to lunch with coworkers, trying a new restaurant, or one of our old favorites. Remote has become pretty old.
People whose common ground in life is that they both liked the weather or got good deals on big houses - at least this is how I understand geographical community in a remote-first world - would seem unlikely to produce nearly as engaging of lunch conversation as coworkers. And coworkers at lunch were not famously engaging to begin with.
the opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.
How are you going to build more meaningful relationships with a collection of people that’s essentially random (neighbors) vs. one with a lot of built in common ground (coworkers)?
it used to be incredibly common, in fact normal, to be friendly with your neighbors… dine with them, hang out with them… this has changed dramatically in the last 30 years
yup — I’m a bit old school and keep trying to do this. It’s very “hard,” you can face rejection, but it’s way more interesting than living in a bubble of your work place.
dang, I think you are the best moderator I have ever known, but respectfully strongly disagree with who you've fingered as the "flamewar-style" poster in this conversation.
I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable.
Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share.
However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.
I made a point not to single out one poster. Like most online conflicts, it was a co-creation.
Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC.
The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic.
If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here.
The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad.
[2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience.
There are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads.
* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.
I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.
People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.
> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.
I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.
I still find the replies to my personal experience very baffling. I didn't say what anybody else should be doing; I didn't present it as a universal truth.
It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.
I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.
At this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail.
Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.
It’s loss aversion. Many people perceive office environment to be unpleasant for various reasons (long commute, psychopathic coworkers, noisy, lack of privacy) and so now they have tasted freedom they have a strong negative reaction to losing it.
Resentment from people who have been held mentally hostage by their socialite coworkers who wander around interrupting others for a significant portion of their day.
I enjoyed one single week of office work after four years of being fully remote, and plainly expressed my preference to continue being remote a majority of the time.
I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well.
You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.
That’s not how this works. There’s an extreme bias toward butts-in-seats. “Everyone should do what’s best for them” is a nice sentiment, but not how the world works at all.
There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.
Companies succeed by hiring the best people and setting them up to do great work.
I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well.
A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses.
“My team” are in London, Chicago, Dallas, Cochin, and Bangalore and I’m in Seattle. Commuting to the office just makes it harder to get in early enough for the morning Zoom calls.
Same here. Everyone was "happy" and "proud" about our remote performance and now they force us back to the office 50% of the time. Many people seem to see it as a great leap forward, but I don't. One of the company value is supposed to be "independent"...
This week I was supposed to go, not see my kids in the morning, waste 2 hours in the train, expose myself to Covid, just to sit alone in an office and discuss through Teams because the rest of the team was not even there. What the actual f**. I just couldn't go.
“My morning routine is well-oiled. I drink a big glass of water, do some exercise, hit the shower, meditate for a few minutes, read a few pages, take some notes, and write a few more paragraphs of my next book.“
What is it for you now? Morning routines are a dream of the past for me.
Set terms yes, bu the terms are very unreasonable, impractical and paradoxal, they imply unnecessary suffering that actually degrades work performance, the very thing good managers want to keep up. Sacrificing performance for control is the signature of bad management and a bad employer.
Your terms of employment are negotiable. If you don't like them then you are always free to discuss them with your employer. You should never assume that your employer is able to dictate terms, or even that they want to. Most companies want their staff to do good work and are happy to come to an arrangement that benefits everyone.
Are you implying that renegotiating terms isn't an available option, and the only way to deal with an unpreferable situation as an employee is to switch jobs?
I am trying to make sense of your comment but I don't really get this attitude either :)
You know your employers benefits of you too, right? That's why they employ you. They don't give you charity or hire you of the good of their heart. They hire you because you bring them more value than you cost.
So I don't get this subservient attitude you have to employment. This should really be a two way street.
Surely it’s equally ridiculous that your kids would leave the house for school. Or that they would ever move out just to do their own Zoom jobs. But at some point we’ve got three generations who have rarely if ever the left the house and have spent their whole lives Zooming from separate rooms. Some kind of sci-fi dystopia.
Half my friends say they work less than 1 hour a day remote. Literally attend standup, complain they are somewhat blocked or investigating something and then just work on personal projects or just game. The rest are doing chores because their spouses are not considering them working because they are "home". All kinds of chores from pick up the kids to take the dog to the vet.
Whoever says overall productivity increases, is probably talking about very disciplined individuals.
That may be the case, but if you're prone to dicking around and generally not working, there are plenty of ways to not work while your butt is sitting on the company's chair.
If I had a dollar for every person I've seen randomly browsing Facebook or similar at the office, I wouldn't need to work anymore.
Now I understand that not all people are the same towards work and motivation, and I particularly sympathize with the spouse thing. So I think the broader issue here is management attempting to impose a single One True Way for everybody, which doesn't seem to exist.
I also think that the spouse thing may be somewhat a question of habit. As in, after a while, the spouse may end up appreciating that your being at home doesn't mean you're free to do whatever. But you're still able to go start laundry when taking a five-minute break, which is still extremely valuable and couldn't be done from the office.
of course you can waste time in the office as well, from people joining every meeting and asking "but does it scale" to people playing table tennis, but in general its harder to do than remote
It's pretty easy for people to come into work and get nothing done.
Roll in at 9:30 and complain about traffic. Spend until 10 easy getting settled in for the day: making coffee, slowly sifting email, recollecting the weekend with others, bathroom break, etc. Now its the first meeting, totally irrelevant to anything you do so you zone out. Suddenly its lunch time. Another hour goes by. It's 1pm now. Check email. Another meeting. Check instagram. 3:30pm. Let me fire off that one email. Wow look, 4:35pm, better leave now to beat traffic.
I've seen people make respectable careers out of this.
While I completely agree with the point you are making, Recollecting the weekend with others counts as a type of bond building work so I would not count that time as unproductive.
It’s much easier to schmooze in the office than at home but it’s possible at home if you have good relationships with your colleagues, so when you’re not in meetings, slacking or doing slack huddles to talk about your weekend are good for morale and so good for productivity.
Granted this can completely be abused but I think it’s an important distinction.
Imo if people can get away with doing that now you gotta wonder about these sleepy managers of yours who aren't checking if the team has a pulse. Chances are they were probably only good for 1 hour of actual work when they were in the office too if that's the state of affairs.
> Whoever says overall productivity increases, is probably talking about very disciplined individuals.
That's a very simplistic view of productivity. The kind of work most people here are doing cannot be measured in hours. I can be in an office for 10 hours, bash my keyboard, blabber away in meetings and not produce anything useful. Conversely, I could spend the whole day sitting in the garden and come up with an idea to solve a problem that has been plaguing the company for months.
If people are working an hour a day and still getting their job done then great. If they aren't getting anything done but it's not being noticed then that means they never had a job to do anyway. Being remote doesn't change anything.
> The kind of work most people here are doing cannot be measured in hours.
I feel almost all dev work I do today is bashing my keyboard doing boilerplate garbage and transforming one thing to another and dealing with accidental complexity of the modern 'best practices'.
My work probably can be measured in hours. Good for you if you have something difficult enough to think about, but I am not sure most people have the luxury to work on interesting things.
> The rest are doing chores because their spouses are not considering them working because they are "home"
I finally addressed this by blocking out the hours of 3-5 on my schedule for “personal time” and then working after that. It meant I could push personal chores and errands into that window no matter when requested.
Actually my schedule is so cross time zone that it wouldn’t matter so much but locking in the time helps manage it (I also have time blocked out for truly personal things like reading HN).
There is no one size fits all. I’m a believer that office time should be optional. If I was an employer I want to get the most from my people. I want to empower them with the tools they need to get the best work done they can. If that is them working at home. Fine. If it’s having a dedicated space (office) that I pay for. Fine. They are adults and can figure out what works best for them. Why would I as an employer know how best all of my employees can work best.
Individuals may be able to make good decisions for themselves (though, reading this thread, I believe some WFH advocates may just be doing what's convenient, not what makes them happier in the long term), managers need to weigh what's best for the team or the company as a whole. The outcome might be the same, but not necessarily.
I love having lunch with co-workers. It’s a great way to connect. Even though at my office only about 30% of folks are back, it’s roughly the same group each day. So I’m happy being back even if all meetings involve Zoom. At least getting a conference room for all the zoom calls is not too hard :)
Even though at my office only about 30% of folks are back, it’s roughly the same group each day.
This an area where companies will see problems with reopening offices - the people who aren't there (eg remote hires who work hundreds of miles away, people who choose not to return, people who still need to isolate, etc) will feel far less included, will see that their prospects at the company are worse, and ultimately are much more likely to leave because the social aspect of Slack will die off. Maintaining inclusion in a partially remote company is incredibly hard.
i foresee this as the main problem with a distributed, hybrid workforce.
in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.
any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)
I love that I get to work from home [1], yet I still get together with some coworkers for lunch once a week. Yes, we don't work for the same department, but we used to regularly go out for lunch before the pandemic. It also doesn't hurt that we all live closer to each other than we do the office.
[1] I "work" from the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida office. My manager is in Tampla, Florida, and my two other team members are in Reston, Virginia and Seattle, Washington [2]. There's a push from upper management to get people back in the office in May, but there's no way I'm going in. No point to it.
[2] Due to our company being bought out by a larger company, and the rest of my team basically retiring at the end of 2020.
This is exactly the case for my company. Since the pandemic started the majority of our engineering hiring has been remote, because why pay Bay Area salaries when you have perfectly great developers willing to work out of Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Portland or really anywhere else in the same-ish timezones.
Now that our HQ has fully opened up and local employees are being asked to come back, how do you deal with the dynamic of up to 50% of your team not being in the same building? What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
We are in a place where we get very few of the advantages of in-person collaboration while having to bear all the drawbacks.
> What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way there’s no burden of having a meeting just to discuss something?
Sorry if that comes off rude. I’m just genuinely curious what you’d need to meet about.
Slack is slower. You can cover far more in a face to face meeting (or a video call) in less time.
This is easily provable too. Have a 30 minute call with someone, and then have a 30 minute Slack chat with them. It becomes very clear that Slack doesn't work as well for that sort of comms.
Slack is brilliant for asynchronous stuff, or very short chats, but it doesn't work for longer things.
Slack was just an example though. It could be a google doc. It could be anything written down.
In what instance is talking about something better (I guess we’d have to define better but just assume better = retention) than reading about something? If I’m reading about it I can always read it again. In a meeting I’m going to forget 90% of it the moment I walk out the door (or end the zoom meeting).
In a collaboratively edited doc (which we should do more of, not less), the 6th person in read a different doc than the 2nd person, yet they both “read the doc”
That dynamic is much reduced in a synchronous meeting because everyone’s at the same meeting.
> Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it?
One of my frustrations with working remotely is things that used to be a two-way discussion on a whiteboard or a live demo become a one-way broadcast of something prepared in advance.
There are 'virtual whiteboards', certainly, but none of them are any good.
Have any of the pro-RTO folks on HN experienced this phenomenon? There's definitely a contingent here who do not prefer remote work, curious to read what they think of going back into the office only to have to continue to call in order to collaborate with coworkers.
Even before COVID all my collaboration with teammates was done online. (We use Teams now) I'm at the main site for my company; my boss and all my close collaborators are at a satellite location that's not within driving distance; my boss's boss is down the hall from me.
For me, the act of leaving the office at the end of the day is an effective "off switch" that I don't have while my work station and my gaming station is the same chair in the same room. And the office is an effective procrastination temptation blocker that I don't have when I'm at home and surrounded by all my toys, dirty dishes in the sink, and dirty cloths in the hamper.
WFH is the worst case scenario of "taking work home with you", which really isn't the way I want to live my life.
I have a laptop exclusively for work and one exclusively not for work, and at the end of the day the work one gets closed and put away until the next working day.
Junk like HN serves well enough for endless procrastination in or out of the office. Having my toys near me has been no worse - if anything my personal projects have suffered because they largely got attention during the commute.
I prefer working from the office, even if it’s empty. 99% of my interactions continue to be remote but I like to have somewhere that isn’t my home office to do work. I don’t like being _that_ much of a hermit.
I'm not sure it will matter at FAANG. For > 15yrs meetings always had video conferencing for other offices or team members at home etc... So it's not that much different except at home I can turn off my camera if I'm disheveled. I suppose it's also easier to blow off the meeting at home.
We’ve been in-office since early August 2021. It’s been great. Since we have two offices, we dial in every day for our daily meeting.
The rest of the time we talk in person and sync up after. We’ve found it quite enjoyable so all of us come in every day.
We’re in HFT so if an action would leave money on the table, we’d prefer the alternative that grabs the cash.
In this case, we started this office because part of the team was remote in SF and expressed an interest in being in one. It costs a lot per year so we didn’t make the decision lightly.
I’ve been going into the office 3 days per week, and often times, it’s just me and the office manager in the office out of our ~200-employee company. We’ve been hiring remote-first for a while, so that maybe the way it is until our lease ends.
Like the other commenter, I just like having a place to get work done that isn’t my home. The plus side of an empty office is that I can take Zoom calls at my desk. It does get rather irritating to have to find an empty call room or conference room when others show up.
There’s something good about seeing people in person. Even if a 4 person mtg, 2 are on zoom but me and another are in the same room. It’s nice to be in the room with the other person, and talking.
I would prefer NOT to go into office, but I don’t think it’s totally pointless. Beyond what I mentioned above, it’s great for 1:1’s. Go for a walk with someone, or have a coffee.
My ideal would be to go in when I want, which would probably net out to 1-2x per month.
I prefer going to the office at least a few days a week, because (a) I like to socialize with other humans, and (b) I want to get out of my "home office", aka corner of the living room. I work with a distributed team, so I definitely don't go in to collaborate. In fact, on days with a lot of meetings, I'm more likely to work from home.
The needless socialization at the office killed my productivity. I don’t need to be interrupted and I don’t need an hour lunch. I socialize off-hours with real friends and family. Work is for (more effective) working
That doesn't sound fun. Find a new job? I can tolerate having to come into an office if that's part of the job - but it's either safe enough to do so without masks & zoom or it is not, and should still be remote.
Because in some countries it’s mandatory to wear masks in offices (indoor environments with lots of people), so they force people to come in, sit with their masks for 8 hours, not allow physical meetings (or going to other desks), forcing you to eat at your desk just so that you can do Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings :-) Insane, I know!!!
I don't understand why we continue to legislate all these rules around cars, but yet companies that are perfectly capable of employing a remote workforce are allowed to mandate that people drive to the office to sit on a computer.
I guess it's more fun banning shit than it is building a world where we don't _need_ to drive _ANY_ car to an office. Or, a world where I can simply get on a trolley/etc to go where I need to.
My only 2c is that the WFH vs office conversation often seems to pretend that there aren't a ton of businesses with desk workers where many of their colleagues can't feasibly work from home -- manufacturing for example. It's not even only the people physically building the products who obviously have to be there, but even mechanical engineers have a reason to.
My job is to build software to make the lives of the people building our product better. I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
That said, I do appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home for house maintenance, deliveries, family stuff, etc.
Beyond all that, going into the office (or factory really) is energizing. Too much time at home and I get reminded of CGP Grey's "spaceship you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
> I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
there's a balance. I would consider being on site as a special case; do it when needed. This means the workplace needs to plan it out, and know ahead of time when it is going to happen.
Yes, and that's why hybrid doesn't make much sense - even if you have 80% in office and 20% remote, then you have to have 100% of the processes/costs/downsides of remote work (because almost everyone needs to work as if you were remotely), but you get only 20% of the benefits of remote work.
Isn't it pretty standard to have video conferencing equipment in conference rooms or are there actually companies where people literally sit in a meeting room and dial in with Zoom from their laptops? Sounds pretty silly, and easy to fix with minimal cost.
Or just their desks. It’s a terrible experience to have the people in the conference room using a room camera and the remotes at least for an interactive discussion. It can make some sense if it’s basically an internal meeting but one person say couldn’t travel or missed a flight. But everyone on their own laptop if anyone is was a practice many teams followed pre-pandemic.
my company turned off all our conference room video conference hardware to force people to dial in individually. the argument being that the remote people have less representation if theyre a small box on a screen vs everyone in the room
As a mid level computer programer working under policy of work from office at least few days even at peak of covid I see that company is happy when employees are more available remotely for work issues after hours. But when it comes to normal work hours remotely there is lot of hedging mainly because with so many leaving they do not want anger by explicit calls on this.
So they like to save all the money by utilizing benefits of online resources. Never flying for mid level employees for any face to face meeting, get togethers etc. No tech conferences, no in-person training and so on. At the same time office is best way to collaborate with team distributed over 4 cities. Doing 5 webex sessions in a day apparently require office to do quality work.
Afaik many people who either see best intention or that management is listening their remote work demands are deluding themselves. Management are simply waiting to get great employee churn over so they can announce everyone get back to office if they want to keep their jobs.
Even pre-pandemic the majority of the people I work with were overseas - before we had Zoom or Hangouts I was on conference calls. The only compelling reason to go into the office was that it was closer to my kid’s school so less commute time to drop him off/pick him up each day. But now he is remote also so it’s no longer an benefit. I’ve only been to the office once in the past three years - to rescue my plants and clean out my desk.
Cheers to the facilities person that went around watering all the plants. Has to be awesome having a forty story skyrise to yourself.
(I think there is a security guard and a HVAC engineer that still go on site also - I believe the building has to still be cooled to control mold and keep the pumps and values involved from freezing up).
While we as employees have more leverage to work remotely than we've ever had because of the pandemic, companies still have power to dictate work location and they know it.
It would not surprise me if down the road we get some kind of leak or revelation saying that top management of many large corporations colluded to force everyone back into the office. Of course that's just speculation at this point, but it really does feel like there's no good reason to force people back other than justifying their office space expense and a reason for middle management to exist.
The pandemic has let the cat out of the bag in terms of working remotely and being productive. But some c-level executives are stuck in the past and want to return to it.
"Employees Are Returning to the Office, Just to Sit on Zoom Calls"
Yep my team is split between 2 sites and works with teams in various other sites. We may have some meeting rooms set up, but we will still be using video calls predominantly.
Haha you would think. These actually are the new teams.
I've been in my current position for two years. During that time: I've had 4 managers. The team structure has changed majorly twice (lost about 1/3 of the team because they got reorg'd to a different team/project, then lost 1/2 to posting or leaving the company). We also had app ownership change majorly 3 times.
They're having such a hard time retaining and finding people that they're having to combine teams with 50% losses to make one whole team, start a new office in a new region in the hopes of using a new labor market, start up an offshore team for owning mature products (prod support), and they're finally investigating full/permenant remote jobs to see if they can get more people that way.
It is for the survival of managers at the lowest level, especially in locations with high wages.
Top management considers all workers to be equally capable and replaceable. Management at the lower levels requires people to manage at their location (direct superior always at the same location). With full remote work there is no reason to employ people in locations with non-minimal wages. If there is no employees in a location there is no manager managing them either.
It is not managers belief to be able to more easily watch what their employees are doing in a real office. It is just a matter of securing their own job.
Exactly this, thank you. Lower/middle management exists only to manage people. Most managers aren’t that good in managing remote workers and not having any “real” work to show to their superiors they really need people back in offices so as to show that they’re working themselves. We’re living in rapidly changing times and the working landscape is changing and will change even more.
This is the fundamental problem with hybrid. It's the worst of both worlds, as it forces a regression to the most-accessible, which will always be video calls.
I think a lot of the forced-hybrid environments are a result of companies waiting for their commercial leases to die.
That said, I remember sitting on a lot of conference calls in the office pre-pandemmy, so... isn't video better?
This was literally what used to happen pre-pandemic as well with international teams. The pandemic just made people realize how weird it was for work to be associated with a place.
This is the fundamental problem with hybrid. It's the worst of both worlds, as it forces a regression to the most-accessible, which will always be video calls.
I think a lot of the forced-hybrid environments are a result of companies waiting for their commercial leases to die.
I work at a FAANG. I know many people that immigrated across the world to work at a FAANG. Who am I to complain about driving across town? So I go into the office. I may not like it but reality is that promotions come easier to those that go in. So I burn 2 hours a day and $300/mo in gas driving in.
Interference between Zoom calls (being in different or the same one) is the killing factor here. Specially when not everyone is back, or there are more people from outside participating, and that it has become the new normal. One Zoom call in a work room may be ok (if people there is quiet and don't care a lot of the lone participant speaking from time to time while using headphones), but two or more cause trouble, at least without special microphones.
And even if in some workplaces are rooms for phone and now Zoom calls, that too many people use now Zoom calls make them insufficient.
I was on Zoom or Meet most of the time for years before the pandemic. Teams were geographically spread. Clients, vendors could be anywhere. I've never had an official WFH job but I also haven't had a colocated team since maybe 2010. Ironically enough my current company is very localized but I have barely set foot in the office due to pandemic.
I had a job before covid that involved sitting at a desk and being on Skype calls all day. Most people were in the same building but the buildings were large and meeting rooms were scarce so they were rarely used. This isn't anything new, unfortunately. Doesn't make it any less stupid, though.
Of course us plebs don't have any autonomy and the masters needs to remind us of that.
There is only one reason to have people in the office, that is so that you can observe them (and own their soul).
If certain people have a need for face to face interaction, that is an exception not the rule.
This is what I did for years before March 2020. Maybe I'll go in once in a while to get out of the house, but maintaining two development workstations is a drag.
Unless there's an office pizza party or a real scheduled brainstorming session, it's not worth physically being there.
Yes this is what I do with my team spread across multiple offices....outside of tech it appears to be a lot harder to push for WFH/remote... I am in financial services.
we need to target specifically the lack of social element in remote work, not remote work itself. remote work has to change cities and create an ecosystem around it, like the office did. We haven't even started, are there startups working on it?
