Many of us were remote, and now many of us are being asked to come back? Knowing office workers all work with remote people in other offices, and there’s not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago, what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the office? Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.
I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
> Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
What about being a scrum master would give insight into what hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that process improvements came out of these conversations?
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big employers that utilize dense downtown construction? Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly concerned with how downtown livability is?
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
I can think of lots, and not to sound argumentative but I find it really hard to believe - I guess you must be using a really high bar for "meaningful". The examples that come to mind are things like, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"
Looking back though, I think the important thing is not physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk: grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements, comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings, you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but I think the solution is not returning to the office, the solution is pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
I have seen "meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen", and I do find Zoom calls kind of irritating. I think the real issue is that this tech has exposed the fact that urban planning in the US is awful unless you're in New York City or something similar.
People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense.
Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that build rapport and build on ideas that come up on conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs to hook a random thought into successful action.
I like having casual talks about nothing in particular without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for growth in many aspects.
I’m a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It just doesn’t happen.
The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor in most meetings, frankly.
Let’s dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company that can do it should be and any that isn’t should go the way of the dodo.
Probably depends on what kind of problems you're working on. If your problem to solve is "Raise this KPI X percent until Y", then probably yeah, wouldn't matter too much.
But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their offices in order to facilitate random meetings between people:
> However, almost as many fruitful interactions described in the book can be traced to architectural features. Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate the building were included intentionally, so that chance encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, “a physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
> In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to investigate the effects of inter-office communication. They convinced their employees to where sociometric badges for the duration of the experiment and identified three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by about $200 million.
I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way, companies definitely should play around and see what works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
Remote work is here to stay. I don’t agree that there is nothing that comes out of casual interactions at a physical workspace. This is where relationship building happens. I firmly believe that it is possible to build strong relationships in a remote or hybrid workplace. It just needs to be done intentionally. And naturally, it takes a different form than casual hallways conversation.
Where are you a senior director? I just want to know where to never apply for a job.
That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably invisible to you because you don’t take the time to get to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of these environments?
Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've implemented in companies comes from employees having beers together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things should be".
I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and another person who wasn't really in the conversation overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire buildings were built with this in mind.
> I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work.
If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres more to life (and business) than that.
Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and depressing.
It’s interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways, and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
"There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes."
I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong, there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.
I scored most (if not all) of my career-defining opportunities from hallway convos after a meeting, or chatting while waiting for coffee to brew, so YMMV.
This seems wild to me. It seems like the company and managers are doing something wrong if all your advancement is coming from random unofficial chats.
Moreover, personally I'd prefer it stays this way. When I take a break and go to the kitchen to get a coffee, it is also a part of mental hygiene - I need to clear my mind as it needs some rest, too. So the last thing I want is someone bothering me about a merge request or some planned feature. A weekend trip, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.
Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career.
Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.
Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.
Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.
The exact story of my career and many people I worked with. There's one guy I know who's had companies fighting over him because he was so great to work with.
I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.
I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.
It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.
I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.
I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.
I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.
The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.
Not every person works in a company organized this way, even IT people. In all my working years and all companies, I always had managers that were technically inferior to me (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.
Man I feel ya. I hear all these idealic work life experiences and I'm like...man my first job I did 18 hour days and got essentially bullied by the 2nd in command. Next job, spent the entire time w seniors throwing spanners, yelling abuse, threatening to lock me in toolboxes and leave them in the sun (mine workers hate uni students it seems). 3rd job, forced to work w asbestos w zero health gear. Called worksafe basically got laughed at. Walked out of that one.
My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.
Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.
If so, it's far from just him. I've never personally observed any of that, either. You have "work friends", but those relationships are work relationships and don't translate to outside of work.
If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.
Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.
So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.
> If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve a realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet, it feels like there was hardly any progress in the last 15 years.
Personally, participating in a remote meeting is very noticeably more demanding for me than an in-person meeting.
> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.
Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.
Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled). Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it’s called closing the laptop lid and walking away.
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life
Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know, reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
I gasped when I read this sentence. I wish I had a blood pressure monitor to get an idea of the effect. What an incredible perspective. Amazing how we can massage things in our minds into a shape we can accept.
Biking 10-15 minutes to work on a protected bike path is an order of magnitude better experience mentally and physically, speaking from personal experience.
I can do that on my own without the need to be compelled by anyone, and in fact I walk to the office every morning (I work remotely, but go to a co-working space), with the difference that I have the freedom to do otherwise at any given moment.
Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really, really good for my mental health.
For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear, I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when arriving home.
Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride whenever I want instead to the office.
Me as well. I intentionally chose to live within a 30 min bike ride and biked as much as I can. That’s how I got fit. That said, companies don’t pick their office location based on how close it is to where most people live. In all major cities and especially in the Bay Area, commute is a nightmare you just have to deal with rather than do something with it.
Get yourself a short bike commute. I did pre-pandemic and it was amazing. I’ve never had a commute longer than 30 minutes by bike in my professional life. I always much preferred living in the smallest cheapest apartment I could find near a place with a lot of jobs.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I love reading things like this, because it tickles my hypocritical funny bone.
Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this, then there's no reason to do so.
Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data -- things I wanted management to support because I believed it would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office creates better connections that leads to higher productivity" -- that management is all-in on enforcing.
I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack of trust.
> I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be about offices.
I heard the opposite, but I haven't seen any proof in any direction. What I read is that office space in NYC is still expensive, but occupation rate is lower than ever.
I think this boils down towards being extrovert and introvert. you seem to cheering lots of "people interaction" and thrive on it while "the remote crowd" can get by just doing work without the need or pressure for in-person interaction.
From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird, twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the recent lay-offs)..
I'm with you 100% but we're fighting an uphill battle. For the couple of years pre-Covid, I alternated between a 15-mile bike ride (each way) and a walk->train->walk commute. It was wonderful, and great for my mental and physical health. I felt like a part of the city.
At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked, because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not) communication with coworkers.
Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same. I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to ignore.
More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty office.
All these commenters are unfairly picking on you. There IS value in personal connections and it is different when you have been in the same physical space with the other person instead of an avatar that can send texts and emails.
Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen are boring and feels like more work.
I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule, but I actually miss having stronger connections to my coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single location is an excellent alternative
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I’ve literally never seen this. I’ve seen people sit around and gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We can’t think about work for 8 hours straight.)
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on
That’s the exact opposite of my experience. The first few months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions were made that we’d be back in the office in a few weeks. But as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But that’s just my office, not everyone else’s.
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
> if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something else to create that space, like hang with your family or friends.
I don’t think the “bad for younger/junior people” thing is speculation. My team had an intern who was toiling away at something for two+ weeks that I resolved for him in 10 minutes the one day I went to the office for that month. It was slightly mentioned in stand ups and even meetings, but remote work doesn’t mean less meetings and frankly people (myself included) have even more divided attention during remote meetings because it’s easier to multitask and tune out things that aren’t immediately relevant to your work. That happened a bit before, but it happens much more often in the remote era.
I think remote is better for personal focus, but at a small cost to team focus.
>> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
> That’s total speculation. When I was first hired out of college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends were people I met in real life around town.
These are not the same thing, although you aren’t the only one in this (frankly depressing) thread making this mistake. You don’t have to be completely best buds with your mentor, including outside of work.
Spontaneous discussions and networking don’t work as well online because it requires more intent to talk to the other person. That spontaneous networking is more important for junior rather than senior people.
Being “in the kitchen” is a sign someone is probably not really working on something at that moment, and therefore may be open to conversation about something other than work. That signal is almost always missing online, and therefore doesn’t happen.
> everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
I've personally found mentorship is much easier remote since you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.
I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation. Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us. It's helped us both tremendously.
The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate ignorance by senior member of the team.
And because of the more private nature of remote communication, I've found colleagues are much more willing to open up about concerns and frustrations they have about the office.
Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide, but some of my best working relationships have been founded remotely.
>There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything actually profitable for company happening there.
The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the communication system of choice isn't that worse.
The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho, but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)
> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party, half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session) that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes
If your business success is predicated on random encounters, then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a lack of planning and communication.
If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs then your business will work equally well in person or remote (or a hybrid).
For the purpose of enabling more “spontaneous connection” in a remote environment, could managers not simply foster an environment in which bandying around ideas in Slack or Teams is just encouraged?
I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere can be crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new ideas, but I see no reason why it has to be that way.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
> That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor leadership.
This whole "spontaneous collaboration in a shared space" thing was a myth started by Google to sell the idea of open office layouts, and something the rest of the industry latched on to after that. This is not how software development works.
"for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc"
To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally think networking is toxic since it effectively means that outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.
I remember when I first started my career, my boss told me "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines. Otherwise, I don't care when you're here."
I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs. Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by being there together.
I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.
At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache IMO.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can be very hard to quantify or understand.
I think there's some value in actually meeting one's teammates, but I've found that the collaboration I have works just fine if they know they can IM me to talk when they're having issues. I have lots of people from many different departments who just know what kind of things to IM me for. I don't always have answers for them, but I can usually point them to someone who does.
When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work stuff.
> you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life
May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death. Very pleasant!
In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these threads tag senior executives and managers within the company who have followed insights from threads into new cost improvement or even revenue generating ideas.
These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway conversations and even if they did would likely not develop further than a couple remarks without forcing people to creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in asynchronous fashion.
The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the conclusion you must come to is that we don’t need offices. Accept it.
> There’s a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
I call bullshit.
This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it doesn’t match reality.
In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter. At most you’ll ask a question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In 2023, that happens over Slack.
I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the office that would have been a Slack DM remote.
At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.
Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.
And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.
Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.
This goes away, if they have better management and coordination. They’d be in the same mess even if they were physically conference rooms. Unless you somehow think that people spontaneously drop by meetings they’re not invited to
I should add - now that I've googled you - you and I work in very different areas of 'IT'. The problems I imagine you deal with need a lot of quiet dedicated focus time; while my problems need me to be able to wrangle a dozen cats into something like a coherent strategy that sometimes involves whiteboards, sometimes coffee and sometimes vodka. That's a people problem that requires people solutions, not technology products marketed as people solutions.
But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but I sat next to an ML guy for six months once troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.
You'd be amazed what people say in open plan offices thinking they can't be heard.
But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.
> In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter.
This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.
I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I guess I'm a remote work Hipster.
That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have been realized if so.
Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add up.
I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of experience in an office setting and never have had a serendipitous unscripted moment.
> Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add u
Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before covid
This. I think of this every time I hear the "spontaneous connection" argument. Decades ago, this was true, but it hasn't been true anywhere I've worked for at least 15 years.
Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.
I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)
I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems.
There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong problems, solving more general problems than needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc. To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you work on and getting feedback from other people, including questions you yourself did not think of.
Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021 after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no sign of any decay in productivity.
It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective work? I’m not so sure.
Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person, so we have periodic “off-site” retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home office.
>Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more effective when done in person
Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the organizers take.
I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those.
Some key components for me are:
- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up
- Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better.
- Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.
I think you're thinking "brainstorming and creative collaboration activities" implies something corporate organized. But it can also refer to actual brainstorming and creative collaboration that happens spontaneously and organically when smart people happen to talk to each other.
I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.
Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business.
It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.
Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.
Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
I believe for every person out there like the parent poster there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow. It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity and respect.
I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year?
It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are “the company is the employees, we all work together in office” and “the company employs labor to solve our customers problems, and the company does this in the most cost effective way possible”.
> I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think you’re seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe it’s Portugal. Pick your choice, they’re all 1/2 cost or less of SFBA/NYC, and if you’re all remote locale doesn’t really matter.
> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
> Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus more negotiating leverage. It doesn’t mean they’re better at the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain space dedicated to “how do I retain this employee” and less brain space dedicated to “how can I make my customers happy and grow my business” which is a losing trade. The winning play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales, and if the people you hire don’t work out then fire them quickly because you’re paying top if market and there is a lot of talent liquidity in that band. It’s the Netflix model, but global. Not really a new playbook.
Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same access to capital. There is no country even close to the US in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are the exception, not the norm.
I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
Yea. It could be! It’s my job to work really hard and have a huge impact so that option seems like a bad idea. I expect to one day be fired or demoted for someone better who can help the company grow more than I can.
I worked at an American company (smallish ad tech) that was fully remote and the CTO was a citizen of a LATAM country while CEO and most engineers (but not all) were USA based. Worked great.
The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.
My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."
It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.
And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we can get done in a day.
Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online meetings.
That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.
But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.
Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees, so we were all in the office every day. That was nice, because if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote employees, and I'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.
I really don't care - whatever works for you. But there are two things I observed, due to which I believe remote work will not be default work mode in the long run.
* There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).
* There's group that prefers to work from the office for various reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).
* Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that some additional people decide to join as they feel they are missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction.
* Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.
Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not attack on your life choices.
It’s usually the executive class of employees making these decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board and others that they report to. They also work differently than almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by other peoples desks and quickly having an impromptu conversation.
They’re pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive and don’t really care that you can accomplish your job just as easily remotely. In their mind, it’s not best for the company.
They’ve also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on hold because it couldn’t fully or appropriately be decided without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you’re unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.
I think it’s mostly this! And it’s not necessarily malicious - the exec folk have lost sight of the way most people work. To them it’s “obvious” that the office is better, because it IS better for their type of work.
Managers schedule VS makers schedule.
Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that they don’t have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So they just can’t understand why RTO isn’t popular!
Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020, while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in full RTO, just hybrid.
1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design, or business analyst. Even in the minimal case creating visibility for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure requires management.
2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated employees are providing childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it becomes a distraction.
3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then came to work in a hybrid setting.
I’m not an employer. I’ve worked in academic research as a software engineer and research scientist for 20+ years. I don’t think great research can be done without some kind of regular in-person collaboration. Serendipitous, chance interactions are part of this. But for me, there’s no substitute for whiteboarding in the same room. Now of course we also need lots of time to do focused work by ourselves.
I think that in our field people work better together - more collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better solutions delivered.
I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of the home.
I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but everything I’ve seen since supports my feelings above. I’ve seen less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.
I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though office was the focal point. I don’t think being asked to go back to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any way unreasonable.
That does not require being in person, pretty much the entire OSS community demonstrates that.
Honestly I’m beginning to find “we need to be in person to collaborate” to be a red flag for unable to communicate and “will interrupt people working all day”
Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+ employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the whole:
“Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer, and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more likely to provide access to new information.”
Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon to productivity because it’s an extension of the autonomy that helps the workers thrive…
…if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation.
Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave.
I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable.
So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.
Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the performative part of office politics most of the stage is unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech teams... Management and middle management without the meetings and performances to prove their need and value require everyone in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business to be profitable and succeed.
So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an emoloyment advantage at that point.
For those who are replying with "all my projects were remote before anyway" or "I was on video conference before fully remote work too!" - how many of these co-workers on video were at another office site, or had worked at an office site before "going remote?"
Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting, but they were either at another office site where they still had a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.
In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team. There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind, or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers would rather let remote employees go than learn something new" take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique experience IMO.
Fully remote teams didn't come out of Zeus head fully formed in March, 2020. There was less of them, but they existed.
I consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well between locations as it does inside each location. It's much better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.
People need social connections with their peers to work together successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--if you already have an office space--to bring people together in the office once or twice a week.
Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.
I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.
To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.
Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).
I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.
One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.
So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.
Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.
Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.
This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).
>In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch.
Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.
There are many people who have never developed social connections outside of school or work and unilaterally decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if they can’t socialize outside of such an environment surely no one else can. If they can’t see a person as a person if they’re not face to face surely no one else can.
It’s unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant cost savings for the employer.
Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you state in your comment, like for example, middle management feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
Companies can make this more appealing by holding the meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and by making the week before vacation for half the group and the week after for the other half, with the option to stay in the same hotel at the company's expense.
This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a much nicer carrot than usual.
No. It's a lot easier to hire someone to watch the kids on a regular basis, and also they go to school during the day. I can hire people to pick them up and watch them after school, and then help them after work with homework and chores and such.
But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than regularly scheduled babysitting.
When I owned a business, that’s what I did. Everyone worked remotely, except for me and a couple of people. I had a small coworking space simply because working out of my shoebox sized apartment was not fun. I hired everyone from the local area & occasionally had a meeting in the coworking space.
For background, at least half, or more of the company is fully remote. It’s so many, that the transition to remote work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a year. It was called “All Hands”.
I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning, but everything always felt a bit phoned in.
I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was more social than anything.
My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts, circus tents, and airplane hangers. There’s pride on the minds of these oligarchs.
Yes, all-hands like that 100% are primarily about social and unplanned factors - getting people to see and talk to people they'd otherwise not meet and talk to.
That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager) is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.
OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The peers you describe aren’t in the same place as yourself even if you’re both in some office.
I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD
More important role of those connections is that they promote inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold them back from moving on.
People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have social interactions outside of the office.
What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the office as their social life, and they’re taking the position that their inability to socialize out of work is important enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the office on people who don’t treat the office as a fun zone for personal sustenance.
That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the office. But not really something employer would care about - they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.
Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any superfluous social connection, it’s just a job, not a tribe or family. One should be both polite and effective; this does not make you friends.
The inability to support remote work signals the employer cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is managing from emotion instead of data.
Team cohesion is important as far as being able to work collaboratively to finish a project, but it’s not clear that requires being in an office every day for 8+ hrs
Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.
Opposite for me. At home I start working when I wake up and often don't stop until the evening. When I go into the office I have to get ready and commute, and then at the office there are so many distractions - our campus has fantastic fitness facilities and I'll often spend a few hours each day over there. So, at home I probably work for 10 hours. When on campus I probably get 4 hours of work in, if that. Plus, I am so much more productive at home. I have a quiet private office with a much faster internet connection and better equipment. On campus, people don't know how to shut up, so it is hard to get work done with people around me discussing things that have absolutely nothing about work - the other day, 2 people spent an hour discussing how much butter is in Danish cookies! Right next to me!
It is always the employees telling these stories, but how managers are supposed to know if they are really working? When they are at the office the see it with their own eyes.
Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.
Person you replied to said they spent hours in the company gym during office hours. Either they are delivering what's expected of them anyway, or the manager has no idea what to expect regardless of in-office or remote working.
They also mentioned avoiding other distractions: That's the main feature of remote for me, after many years of wearing headphones all day in various offices.
Same here, started my first fully remote job semi-recently. I've got a nice quiet area to work and the worst interruption I get is maybe my dog drops in for some pets. The productivity and satisfaction remind me of when I was way younger and used to code for fun before it became a job, so I actually kind of enjoy it.
Like maybe I go afk 30-45 mins here or there when I normally wouldn't in office. But for me, I put in more hours overall. A key to this was learning to not have my personal laptop open to the side, and avoiding distractions like social media and idle browsing.
YMMV of course, I think it can really depend on the person and their life situation. But the same could be said of anyone remote or not when it comes to productivity. It's on the managers to measure if things are getting done or not, which is the most important thing.
> But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this regard.
That hasn't been my experience. With a home office, it's hard to tear myself away from work. Commuting is a waste of my time, and a "clean break" ends up costing my employer several hours a day. I'm salaried, so that isn't a monetary cost, but I've seen a real benefit to productivity.
Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7 availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.
With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I’m 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one admitted it when he quit. I don’t like to micromanage so give developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term integrity as we like to pretend we all have.
> I believe most employees simply put in less hours when working from home
From my experience and observations I've gathered from my teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to wait until Monday.
Over the past 2 years many studies have actually shown the opposite. People work during what was their commute time, they work when they are sick, during lunch break.
I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is totally in the dark.
I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out to prevent eye, neck and wrist strain, or to blow off frustration with a difficult issue. That isn't abusing WFH, it's using time wisely. I can't speak for the people ghosting, but doing chores is not abusing WFH.
You may be surprised to know that one can do meal prep and pay attention to sprint refinement at the same time. For me, having something to do with my hands while talking helps to keep me focused.
You're supposed to be actively participating in refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and other things of that nature. You can't do that with raw chicken on your hands or while walking to the fridge to get veggies.
The fact that this has to be explained to people is why there's a push to return to the office.
Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding showing up and putting in hours like it was PR.
If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment contract, time shouldn't matter.
Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately just took longer than expected.
And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.
Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.
I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A much smaller temptation than all the entertainment options in your house and abound.
Expecting people to pay attention during meetings and not be a ghost during a day is crunching developers? Give me a break. We're all highly paid professionals. It's not unreasonable to be expected to act like it.
If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.
I’m unsure why an engineer would want to be back in the office. There are a lot of distractions and unnecessary stress.
From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it look like they are collaborating and getting work done.
From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people in the office.
I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote environment.
Here at ardour.org "head office" (my home in a small village in new mexico), we just had a 5-6 hangout of myself and the other main developer. We have spent years collaborating online on this large project, but in those few days we were able to resolve some high level design issues (well, we hope we resolved them) that have proved resistant to online discussion.
This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at least occasionally.
I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.
The script is something like this:
Person1: Arg! This thing!
Person2: What ya working on?
Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.
Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out on this interaction.
Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a family/roommates etc...
I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in my line of work.
I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.
Pre March 2020 almost none of my meetings in the preceding 5 years included a single remote person. I liked that better for working. I felt more connected to my colleagues and more in tune with what was happening around the firm.
Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.
Junior and some mid employees seem to do worse - at least in the small amount of data I've seen since the pandemic. This is likely part culture, which emphasizes individual performance rather than team performance. If you're a netflix-style organization that only hires seniors then this is less important.
Well, the recent graduates will be fine because they've spent the last couple years learning remotely and getting work done. You have to develop that skill.
Sadly, the biggest employer motivation is some have very long leases and don’t want to look stupid to the board for having signed up for useless office space with a decade still on their lease.
Others are motivated by ego, being able to walk down isles watching their minions tools away.
However, never meeting people IRL definitely reduces collaboration and performance on highly iterative and collaborative projects compared to everyone going and meeting IRL.
Meeting at least quarterly for 3-4 days can make things work, but time in an office is better. Again, if you work on a team. If you are and IC, quarterly if probably fine or entirely remote might be fine too.
I can't speak directly for the people you're actually asking. I'm involved in these meetings at my workplace. I don't agree with the call to bring everyone back to the office even though I like working from an office. I've been fully remote since before the pandemic but I like seeing coworkers. I'd like to think I can "see it both ways." I voted against bringing people back but I lack the all important "C" or "V" in front of my title so my opinion carries little weight.
From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time. Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000 communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I don't mean 1 on 500/5000 presenting, I mean the exchange of ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you. If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to 1 to 500 or so.
If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel to.
I think that within a few years this question is going to be much more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces, and 3d and VR shared spaces.
My assumption is that within say five years the question is more often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR collaboration space.
We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing research or enterprise devices and software that have most of these capabilities already.
Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the office. They will either think it's essential or a total distraction.
>Nearly every meeting I’ve had in an office since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote. Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.
We're in a situation now where almost nobody knows anyone in their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who aren't badging in.
Of course to control better and coordinate effort for the profit better!
There is no but in the most of coding business. We all know we have access to the information needed on the internet. This is something aimed for PROFIT. Not for your lives to make better!
Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...
In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.
But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office. But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.
I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3 days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive in a sense of getting stuff done.
Managers don't have much idea what employees are doing, them being on site gives them a feeling of things being in control. It is not that surprising, if you think about it business on all level is just a guessing game, and people try to take the reduce their uncertaincies.
Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of problems it’s useful to have people in the same room until we have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people, not leaving their home caused significant issues in their performance. People aren’t solitary creatures, so for some - the office fills that role. For others, home office works perfectly well. There isn’t a yes/no answer here. I should perhaps add, that coming to the office was always voluntary in my company, way before Covid.
Sorry but in my opinion you can't beat free styling with Excalidraw and a bunch of nerds leaning back in their own basements and home offices thinking deeply and being critical of ideas.
The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a meeting or book a meeting room.
Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.
Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem, upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.
> Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting together in front of a whiteboard and drawing.
I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every day?
Ha the good old tale of people gathering around the whiteboard to solve hard problem.
IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any team that requires a lot of communication.
If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do, and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal, and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living and wages are lower.
On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to succeed but it makes it less likely.
Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to communication problems.
I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for everybody.
Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD, your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.
That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.
I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for. There are reasons people work together in offices and not from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are efficiencies that happen.
I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.
My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--count your blessings. I have no office to return to!
> That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean their own toilets.
By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a residential bathroom too!
Because there are people who can self-drive and get themselves to work and become productive without having to be reminded/ridden.
Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).
Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.
I remember an interview of Blockbuster long time ago who claimed that their business will never go out of business because people come to their store for the people connection, chatting with employees, walking around the isles searching for videos, and ultimately the experience of even going to the store.
I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they were wrong about the whole thing.
I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote work.
I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.
Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.
Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.
The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy. How does where I do that task make a difference?
I think the return to office thing is just a cover for incompetent management.
I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it’s interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost universally pro-remote) with candidates I’ve talked to when we’ve listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones, explicitly want an in-person office culture.
I dislike remote work, because I live in a small apartment which means I don't have a special room for work and that leads to the fact that my work and my free time sometimes aren't clearly separated anymore.
I also think that there are people who are good at remote work and people who aren't, the people who aren't mostly abuse wfh, while the other group strifes in it.
It is much easier to perform the display of “valuable manager” when you can hover over people.
Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.
It's a combination of the following:
1. Hr and management Karen's/Joe's looking for control
2. People who hate their families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from them.
3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize it was all a mirage anyway.
At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday. Just keep all the in office days together.
I don’t think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working from home and how companies operate hasn’t shifted enough to leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.
Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to management over
Traditional employers want their employees back in the office since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working, lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep
I'm not answering this directly as an "employer" but just a few imperfect observations...
Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH or be entirely remote fall into this group.
Many people so need social connections and interactions to be productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the office interaction is integral.
So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it must work better for everyone').
Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work, location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).
(Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate that there are many sides to this)
Not an employer but I noticed that after 2 years of working remotely I feel like I have enough. Not just enough of working remotely. Enough of working at all.
Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more then 2 years so that just might be me.
Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional connection. I don’t like that.
Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause, if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya. It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do with profit,loss and expenditure.
What do you mean exactly? Is there a conspiracy from people who own commercial real estate to force people who lease that space to renew their leases? Are employers stuck in a sunk cost fallacy where they just can't conceive of letting something they paid for go to waste until their lease is up?
For many (most?) it’s fairly clearly about demonstrating power over the plebs. For some there’s making it look like their investment in shitty open plan offices wasn’t a waste of money.
Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it’s BS in this case as well.
Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of course they’re taking the position that their socializing /lack of non-work life is more important than everyone else’s life.
Also chatty coworkers isn’t productive, especially in open plan offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix, only with an exciting new plague option as well.
Well, see 4 years ago we invested in this new office building with lots of open office space and small conference rooms with shiny whiteboards. Now it's all empty and we need to make sure we can tell corporate it was a good decision. Therefore, we need as many butts in seats as possible asap.
I'm not from the US (EU) and we're doing hybrid model (wfh if you want to, work from office if you want to, combine both as you see fit, no requirement to notify anyone on your preferred model).
I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.
I never cared about office and having to work from the office, but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they are from the office.
TL;DR:
1. people work less efficient from home
2. it takes a lot longer to receive information
Maybe does not apply to high-tech companies but I personally witnessed fintech company employees slowdown almost to halt. They stopped working and did not finish many of the tasks unless managed in person. Majority of employees find ways to watch netflix/hulu/youtube even on company laptops (or play games). They miss the first minutes of meetings, you can hear them eating stuff and plate sounds in the background while talking to them. Unless the employees are career driven, they stop working and find ways to do bare minimum to get their paychecks. That's why.
20 years ago I was on a lot of conference calls early or late in the workday, offshoring my job to a time zone 11.5 or 10.5 hours off, or with sysadmins 1 hour off.
The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.
That’s the sort of thing that isn’t immediately obvious, but becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional about having regular company meetings in a single location. That is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or SF?
Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
Edit: full disclosure, I’m not an employer but I sympathize and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now I’m not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used to do hybrid but now I’m really enjoying the separation and am loathe to work from home, except on weekends.
I’m also an Urbanism nerd and don’t want to see cities revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening, destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem; people will miss having nice cities to visit, but don’t make the connection that there is a “use it or lose it” aspect to great shared spaces.
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