I've mentioned this before, but WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (or organization).
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.
For some people, remote working is really not good.
And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...
I’d like to propose a reframing of your scenarios for objectivity:
WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios.
WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself.
Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.
I'm a working parent, with ADHD and only just recovering form depression and stress, and the increased WFH during 2020 has been the only thing that kept me from breaking.
I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder.
So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though.
The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.
>-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy.
I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is.
If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.
> For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture.
In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly.
I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts!
This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.
> -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?
You've focused on the employee and not the employer.
Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities.
I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.
In the article he says he'd be up for 4 days in the office and 1 day work from home after covid. These CEOs just can't let go of the 5 day work week. It's so frustrating. 5 day work weeks don't leave enough time for employees to take care of their personal lives, in my opinion. This results in employees taking more sick days and not concentrating at work because they have to deal with their personal business while at work. I think we need to move to a 30 hour work week. Four 7.5 hour work days would vastly improve working in my opinion, whether it is remote or in the office.
Either that or provide humane vacation time. In the USA you accrue like 11 days of vacation per year. Contrast with many places in Europe such as Sweden where you are entitled to at least 25 days. Not to mention the cultural differences where most jobs in the US will shame you for enjoying your meager time off.
Don't even get me started with "unlimited" vacation policies which are a joke. When I used to interview with companies and they told me they had unlimited vacation, I let them know immediately that I respect their time and dont want to waste it any further because I can already tell I dont want to work with them.
This is why I ONLY do contract work now. Truly unlimited vacation and however many workdays per week I want.
We either need entrepreneurs who are willing to test this as a way to get better talent, or engineers willing to take a pay cut. Either way, it won’t happen at big companies.
This doesn't surprise me. Netflix was always very anti-WFH. When I was there I know of only one team that did it, and that was the OpenConnect team (Netflix's custom CDN). And the main reason that was allowed was because the team was spread all over the world.
The Netflix culture is very strongly built around in-person collaboration.
One interesting way this manifested itself was when the new HQ was built, it had a ton of 2-4 person meeting rooms, more than I've seen at any other big tech company. This was a reflection of the many 2-4 person meetings that were scheduled every day. In the old building, you'd often see a 10 person room being used by two or three people because there were no small rooms left.
Sure you can replicate this on zoom, but it's just not quite the same as sitting across from someone reading their body language.
All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]. From the outside it looks pretty solid, but I understand the reality is that if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go. There is an expectation of drive, and constant commitment (no judgement; it works for them, though I'd never work there!)
WFH naturally allows more flex into your real life. This will not vibe well with Netflix's culture IMO.
I have a friend that works there. He doesn't have "drive" in the sense that he works a lot, but he is good at what he does, likes software development, and thrives there.
One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.
> but I understand the reality is that if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go.
Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.
> All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]
> 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
Scary. From some extracts, it seems more a cult than a company:
> You question actions inconsistent with our values
> You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
> You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
They're taken out of context, but could be interpreted as hints to how the company really works.
>if you are not above average for two performance cycles in a row they let you go.
that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)
Reading the absolute claim in the title ("no benefits at all") makes me dismiss his opinion instantly.
You can claim it's net negative, but not seeing anything positive probably just means you are a workaholic with no life and can't fruit a good debate about it.
Yeah, in my company we are seeing a lot of positive impacts, especially for those who live far from the offices, and are saving 10~15 hours a week from commuting. People can focus more on work, than spend time and energy commuting, and dreading the long commute home
The “principle of charity” would suggest interpreting the title as “no net benefit”.
FWIW I personally think that remote work is hugely beneficial to the employees - but I don’t have enough data to figure out what the net impact is on the employer
I think it’s only a matter of time until people with opinions like his look like dinosaurs. I’ve seen companies where overall productivity has increased and management still want to get everyone back in the office. I’ve noticed there are a few types of people who want to go back:
1. People in more social roles (e.g. marketing) who spend the day working together, joking/laughing/being loud and disruptive.
2. Some management who don’t like spending entire days on zoom (understandable).
3. People who spend most of their time using company money on first class flights all around the world networking/visiting other offices.
4. Older people (50+) who will always believe in the magic benefits of being in the office and don’t want a huge lifestyle change this late in their careers.
I think people either want to or don’t want to WFH for selfish reasons. Just like there have also always been people who don’t want to work from an office for selfish reasons. One option is not going to work for everyone and doing it halfway will not be good either. Do what’s best for the company. Execs need to look at the data - how is output? Morale? Finances? Employee turnover? If it’s improved move to full WFH if not, full office (with a little more flexibility now you know you can trust people).
As long as Netflix continues paying top-of-market they'll have no problem attracting talent regardless of whether they allow WFH. It's the companies that don't pay top-of-market that have to think longer and harder about WFH.
What’s best for the company doesn’t mean it’s best for the individual employees. People need to focus on what’s best for them because we’ve probably all learned at this point that the company puts their needs above your own.
I’m so pleased that someone isn’t afraid to reject the WFH kool aid.
Just because certain personality types work better in solitude doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all.
Others are suffering loneliness, marginalisation, are struggling inside their own heads, are stuck in tiny apartments or don’t have access to outdoor space. If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.
And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.
How does someone in such a high position see things so black and white?
Either way, this world wide work from home experiment isn't even a good one because there's a massive pandemic going on that... Judge wfh after the world is vaccinated.
Reed Hastings just released a management book (written before the pandemic) which is heavy on traditional, in-person management styles. I think the statements in the book make it difficult for him to suddenly welcome remote work on a permanent basis.
In addition, certain (but not all) aspects of the media business such as creating media do work better in person. This is true of many industries, not just media, and may explain some of his thinking.
What I've noticed at my company is, the people who were massive fans of working from home are now the people who are missing the office the most, except for one or two people. Working from home has it's benefits but it's really not for everyone. I, personally, am looking forward to going back to the office full time. I can go to the office just now but without other people there it just seems pointless to go.
I can’t imagine anything more “pure negative” than a business culture with stack racking and firing people who aren’t “keepers”. Netflix’s success is from being first to market, pure and simple, and has nothing to do with a toxic management structure that, from all accounts, is abusive to its workforce.
Stack ranking and the "keepers" test are not the same things. There is no stack ranking at Netflix. i.e. they don't let go of the bottom x percent.
In practice every company does a version of the "keepers" test. The difference is where the bar is for keeping. At the very least companies will fire people that are just plain incompetent. That is deciding the keep line is basic competence.
Why do you think they are abusive to their workforce? They are clear about their culture and pay top dollar for engineering talent. There are no surprises when you join.
Remote working has positive and negative effects. First come the positive, over long term the negatives become self evident.
Hopefully Covid-19 exposed people to the positive effects and there will be more remote work opportunities than before. People frequently working 1-3 days a week from home in many professions might become accepted norm.
I mean its sort of a blanket statement. Do I believe remote work is harder for c suite and writers? Absolutely. Is it harder for engineers? Probably less so.
So glad remote work is simply a bigger undeniable phenomenon that the suits can’t wish away.
Even a four day work week with one day remote for most white collar jobs was a foreign concept until this year. The quality of life improvement for everyone is insane. People have more time to spend with family, cut entire commutes a few times a week, getting that extra hour of sleep, or have that extra hour or two after work, it’s about as close to the mythical European quality of life Americans hear rumors about.
Talking of Netflix, genuinely curious about something...
I know that they have a leadership position today and supposedly hire great engineers, pay them very well and are doing very well in the stock market.
But, in view of numerous other streaming services, purely in today’s context, do they have an engineering edge that is a key strength that will help them keep their leadership position or is that engineering edge no longer relevant and leadership in streaming services would simply be determined by who has the content.
My company has been WFH since mid-March. I've loved being able to just start working instantly after waking up and finishing my morning routine, but one thing I've really missed is the 30minute drive home after work. That period of time was effective in resetting my brain from "work-mode" to "home-mode".
It's been hard going from shutting down my laptop straight to playing with my kids, it seems like I'm part-zombie at first and not as lively as I would be later in the night with them.
I'm going to go against the vibe on this site and agree with him. The next Apple or Google definitely will not come from a remote working startup, and there's undoubtedly a lot of value from in-person collaboration. In a bigger company like Netflix this might be less important. A big part of this is the transfer of knowledge, which isn't as easy over Zoom calls.
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffpip|5 years ago|reply
Is it X articles free per month, or do they allow only crawlers on their sites?
[+] [-] boplicity|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.
For some people, remote working is really not good.
And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...
[+] [-] DeepThoughts|5 years ago|reply
WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios.
WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself.
Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.
[+] [-] moksly|5 years ago|reply
I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder.
So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though.
The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.
[+] [-] somedudetbh|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy.
I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is.
If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.
[+] [-] noahtallen|5 years ago|reply
This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture.
In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly.
I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts!
This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.
[+] [-] srtjstjsj|5 years ago|reply
What's great about WFH is that everyone is equally reachable, so you don't fall prey to proximity bias.
[+] [-] arcticbull|5 years ago|reply
Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?
[+] [-] tuna-piano|5 years ago|reply
Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities.
I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.
[+] [-] onelastjob|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|5 years ago|reply
Don't even get me started with "unlimited" vacation policies which are a joke. When I used to interview with companies and they told me they had unlimited vacation, I let them know immediately that I respect their time and dont want to waste it any further because I can already tell I dont want to work with them.
This is why I ONLY do contract work now. Truly unlimited vacation and however many workdays per week I want.
[+] [-] mathattack|5 years ago|reply
We either need entrepreneurs who are willing to test this as a way to get better talent, or engineers willing to take a pay cut. Either way, it won’t happen at big companies.
[+] [-] dominotw|5 years ago|reply
why not 25 though? I personally think, 20-25 is the sweet spot.
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
(To be fair, I have significant flexibility during a given week and can afford to go on extended vacations.)
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
The Netflix culture is very strongly built around in-person collaboration.
One interesting way this manifested itself was when the new HQ was built, it had a ton of 2-4 person meeting rooms, more than I've seen at any other big tech company. This was a reflection of the many 2-4 person meetings that were scheduled every day. In the old building, you'd often see a 10 person room being used by two or three people because there were no small rooms left.
Sure you can replicate this on zoom, but it's just not quite the same as sitting across from someone reading their body language.
[+] [-] ErrantX|5 years ago|reply
WFH naturally allows more flex into your real life. This will not vibe well with Netflix's culture IMO.
1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
[+] [-] bcrosby95|5 years ago|reply
One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.
[+] [-] pizza234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|5 years ago|reply
that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nytesky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheryou|5 years ago|reply
You can claim it's net negative, but not seeing anything positive probably just means you are a workaholic with no life and can't fruit a good debate about it.
[+] [-] FalconSensei|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghufran_syed|5 years ago|reply
FWIW I personally think that remote work is hugely beneficial to the employees - but I don’t have enough data to figure out what the net impact is on the employer
[+] [-] kjakm|5 years ago|reply
1. People in more social roles (e.g. marketing) who spend the day working together, joking/laughing/being loud and disruptive.
2. Some management who don’t like spending entire days on zoom (understandable).
3. People who spend most of their time using company money on first class flights all around the world networking/visiting other offices.
4. Older people (50+) who will always believe in the magic benefits of being in the office and don’t want a huge lifestyle change this late in their careers.
I think people either want to or don’t want to WFH for selfish reasons. Just like there have also always been people who don’t want to work from an office for selfish reasons. One option is not going to work for everyone and doing it halfway will not be good either. Do what’s best for the company. Execs need to look at the data - how is output? Morale? Finances? Employee turnover? If it’s improved move to full WFH if not, full office (with a little more flexibility now you know you can trust people).
[+] [-] ralph84|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ictebres|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...
edit for possible misunderstanding that I'm critisizing the OP
[+] [-] dan_m2k|5 years ago|reply
Just because certain personality types work better in solitude doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all.
Others are suffering loneliness, marginalisation, are struggling inside their own heads, are stuck in tiny apartments or don’t have access to outdoor space. If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.
And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.
[+] [-] remir|5 years ago|reply
"No. I don't see any positives," he replied
Not even a tiny bit of positive? I would be curious to know Netflix's workers point of view on this.
[+] [-] rrobukef|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tayo42|5 years ago|reply
Either way, this world wide work from home experiment isn't even a good one because there's a massive pandemic going on that... Judge wfh after the world is vaccinated.
[+] [-] ilamont|5 years ago|reply
In addition, certain (but not all) aspects of the media business such as creating media do work better in person. This is true of many industries, not just media, and may explain some of his thinking.
[+] [-] johnnyfaehell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efficax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|5 years ago|reply
Plenty of companies are first to market and don't win the market. Also, Amazon Video predates Netflix streaming and Hulu was out only a year later.
[+] [-] yibg|5 years ago|reply
In practice every company does a version of the "keepers" test. The difference is where the bar is for keeping. At the very least companies will fire people that are just plain incompetent. That is deciding the keep line is basic competence.
[+] [-] laluser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
Hopefully Covid-19 exposed people to the positive effects and there will be more remote work opportunities than before. People frequently working 1-3 days a week from home in many professions might become accepted norm.
[+] [-] thinkingkong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
Even a four day work week with one day remote for most white collar jobs was a foreign concept until this year. The quality of life improvement for everyone is insane. People have more time to spend with family, cut entire commutes a few times a week, getting that extra hour of sleep, or have that extra hour or two after work, it’s about as close to the mythical European quality of life Americans hear rumors about.
[+] [-] yumraj|5 years ago|reply
I know that they have a leadership position today and supposedly hire great engineers, pay them very well and are doing very well in the stock market.
But, in view of numerous other streaming services, purely in today’s context, do they have an engineering edge that is a key strength that will help them keep their leadership position or is that engineering edge no longer relevant and leadership in streaming services would simply be determined by who has the content.
[+] [-] jinonoel|5 years ago|reply
It's been hard going from shutting down my laptop straight to playing with my kids, it seems like I'm part-zombie at first and not as lively as I would be later in the night with them.
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
One of the things I hate the most of the fact people just disappear and things then take way longer to get done.
The best jobs I’ve had is probably what Reed is describing in terms of attendance.
3-4 days in the office, flexible hours and some work from home options.
It’s a good balance and I don’t have to sacrifice some part of my house to being an office.
[+] [-] throwaway45349|5 years ago|reply