I've been working 100% remotely for about 6.5 years now. Overall I love it. However, there are very real drawbacks that have taken me awhile to fully realize.
For me, the primary one is that it's _way_ too easy for everyone to get deeply frustrated with each other. Social interactions and chit-chat lead to a better understanding of people and a more accurate mental model of what people actually mean when they say something.
Written text is the majority of remote communication. That's both good and bad. It's a much lower bandwidth form of communication than face-to-face in terms of being able to pick up intent and understand the context of someone's mood/etc in what they're saying. The same goes of communication over webcam. It's higher bandwidth than written text, but still lower than in-person.
When you're fully remote, you'll much more commonly misinterpret folks intent. You'll also more commonly have your intent misinterpreted.
At least in my experience, this tends to lead to a much higher rate of frustration and more frequent extreme misbehavior when everyone is remote.
I don't have an easy solution. Occasional in person meetings help a lot, but they're hard to do well, and easy to do poorly. Having 200 people in the same room for 2 days doesn't really help the situation, as there's zero time to get to know anyone.
This is a big one that it took me a while to fully appreciate
I've found that even just turning my camera on in Zoom meetings makes a difference. Joining the standup call a little early, having "face to face" chitchat, builds up a small buffer of rapport that significantly improves empathy and perceived intent
Especially if you need to have a conversation where there might be some existing friction/tension/frustration, doing it over video instead of text or just audio will hugely increase the good-faith nature of the conversation
And of course, the occasional in-person hangout helps too, if you happen to be in the same city as your coworkers. What's important is that you each form an impression of the other as a human being, and not just as a faceless mechanism in the org that may be helping you or getting in your way at a given moment
I've spent a lot of effort trying to be present in Zoom now that we've gone all remote. I've invested in a decent setup. I connect using ethernet on my work laptop so there aren't any latency concerns. I have a high quality headset so there's no feedback and good quality audio. I have a nice camera and some lights to make sure my face is illuminated. I rely a lot on whiteboarding at work, so I try (and find this to be a huge pain point, I'd love alternatives) to use an old Wacom tablet to draw in GIMP (well Seashore, but I dislike both) to whiteboard over Zoom. Whiteboarding still gives me the most heartburn in my setup.
I still find it hard to build new connections over Zoom but I find that by putting effort into being present over Zoom that I connect much better and others are encouraged to have smalltalk with me before/after meetings.
Although I've had the same observation, I've been observing it long before I started working remotely: I'd drive 30-45 minutes into an office and then spend the day emailing or IM-ing people in different cities, countries and continents. It's been over 20 years since even most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis were anywhere near the same physical location as I was.
I’ve been remote a little over 9 years now. When I read a message that sounds a bit hostile, or the tone sounds a bit off, I reread it in an intentionally happy voice. Sometimes this helps me reframe it. Failing this I simply reach out on a video call.
I remember the epics fights I would get into with my online irc buddies when I was a youngun
Remote work is not a panacea, there are tradeoffs. Investing more effort into building remote relationships is definitely worth working at home and not having to commute.
agreed, really good point and I use “be nice twice” as a way to try to avoid it. The other aspect is I try to avoid participating in the “social media of work,” which I guess is like the resulting meta-community created by having work built in a Slack with text-based communication.
People get themselves into the dardnest trouble over a work Slack thread they just couldn’t drop.
Regarding too easily getting frustrated over messaging, I have only one rule to avoid that and it's been working well for me -- Whenever any message threads that requires more than back and forth once over, hop on a Zoom call.
I've been working remote for about a year now and haven't had this issue. Maybe that's because 90% of our communication is done during meetings where we have tone to convey intent
Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time.
Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.
What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work.
YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.
Pretty strong chance the “noticers” are on-prem, not remote, and may be (literally) prejudiced.*
Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture.
Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. …
- Excalidraw+
- Microsoft Whiteboard
- Samsung Flip2
- Microsoft Surface Hub
… and (b) experimenting with elevated telepresence beyond just the green/yellow/red dot:
- https://www.remotion.com/
You have to be radical about this: “If it didn’t happen in [remote-first tool], it didn’t happen.”
This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?”
The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira.
In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands.
> I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success
I'm on an all-remote team right now and I totally miss the level of ambient information I used to have when working with a collocated team in a good environment.
On the other hand, a lot of collocated teams, especially at larger companies, have bad enough environments that they're essentially remote workers as far as communication goes. I've visited plenty of teams in open-office environments where all the coders are packed in, hunched over wearing headphones all day, while random people blather loudly nearby about things unrelated to the coding, and key people for their project are scattered across the building. Or farther.
If I could have a properly collocated team with dedicated space and the correct layout for collaboration, I'd love that. But I'd still prefer all-remote over the average BigCo setup, where space is set up for the convenience of managers and office planners, not the actual work.
We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things.
I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on that one issue more in person than when remote. When it comes to some topics it's just much faster and the result is more complete in person.
I wouldn't assume the in office workers get more done because they go to the office, correlation != causation.
It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.
Whenever I see this sort of comment I feel bad for the remote workers because it's always an indicator that the company doesn't properly involve or support their remote workforce. If the in-person members are vastly more productive, it's because the team has processes and culture that makes it harder for the remote employees to be productive.
My mileage does vary - in my experience, I often wonder what non-remote people are even doing. Remote is blowing them out of the water. I think on-prem workers tend to chit chat more, go to lunch, come in a bit late, leave a bit early, do happy hours, and generally socialize a lot more (not to mention commutes!). I see largely the opposite as you, with remote workers doing the bulk of the work.
On prem might get the bulk of the credit though - politics are ... evolving with remote workers.
I've seen this too in an organization that that didn't put much thought into the remote side of things. How to enable the remote folks to _be_ productive and how to facilitate communication. I felt it was obvious for onsite folks to look more productive when meetings were mainly in person and decisions were made synchronously.
My team is about 40% remote. About 25% nonlocal remote. If I had to pick my top 5 performers, two would be remote non local, one would be remote local. And two would be onprem. Seniority, past experience, action-orientation, and conscientiousness are the determoning factors it seems.
there are now numerous unicorn startups and public companies that have been fully remote from day 1. All the most important open source projects have been developed by remote contributors.
95% of cases where I see people complaining about remote work is because the company basically changed nothing about how they operate day to day when Covid started, they are a normal company trying to work remotely. Obviously that is going to fail miserably. Hybrid model is the worst of both worlds
I can see the difference between remote and in office being passion.
I like remote because I don’t want to be all in on work. I don’t care enough about my company to even write up an expensive bug I noticed. I just let it waste my org’s money.
I can see those who actually give a shit being more likely to go into the office.
I don’t think your remote workers would be more productive in office. I wouldn’t be. I just stare dead between the eyes in the same meetings I just nap during when I am remote. Rather, highly productive and engaged people are just less likely to want remote.
> Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.
Working remote requires a number of changes, and it may even require training that your company isn't providing, because as you clearly have guessed, in-person interaction is more natural.
But how this looks to me, is that your company is doing a great disservice to the remote workers by not provided them with the tools and comms to be fully productive. You are letting them sort it out for themselves when they may not know how to, which is... bad.
Claiming you're doing better because "monkey brains" is just silly. Many things take practice, including clear communication over video and text.
I am convinced that in office software teams produce more and better code overall than remote ones do. I am remote now and go to my office about a week every two months, and those weeks tend to be ones I can rally the team to get big initiatives done. I put in the same effort when I'm remote but it just doesn't work out the same. You can blame tooling, you can blame the company not being remote-first or remote-forward or whatever, but I honestly believe the reason there are so many champions for remote work is simply because people want to do it and it's easier or more comfortable for them.
> we also get the most important projects and are paid the most
Seems like this would drastically affect motivation and therefore output. Sounds your company may have a self fulfilling prophecy about remote work being less productive.
I'm replying to myself here - might be a bit gauche, but I read all the replies carefully and most were quite reasoned and thought provoking. Thank you! Hacker News for the win.
"A study conducted on the main campus of a Fortune 500 company found that just 10 percent of all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than 500 meters apart. This suggests that once companies span multiple floors, buildings, or campuses, they’ve already lost much of the collaborative value of being “in the office” together."
This point often seems to get missed. If you're at a large company, you're often working with people on different floors, buildings, offices, countries. I want to be co-located with the people I work with often just isn't an option at larger companies even if many people come into an office.
Remote work is not perfect, but it's better than going to my office without windows (yeah, you heard right).
I don't do creative work or programming, as I work in HelpDesk, so I don't see the reason for going back to my bunker. It seems most of my coworkers have the same beliefs because as my company started threatening with going back to the office previous to thos summer, people left, and many became pretty hostile.
In my case it takes a <10 minute walk to get to my office, I don't have to spend too much time nor money, but at home I have a cushy place, two large monitors, and over everything else, I hear birds and see nature while at work.
I have to take some mandated breaks (collective agreement). In my office it was dead time, I couldn't do anything interesting. At home I wake up and do some house chores.
When my journey ends, I just get up, pack some stuff and go to the beach or go meet friends. I have way more energy than when I worked at the office.
I'm clearly not "top talent" but having tried this, I can't just forget it.
Companies say there's a lot of intangible benefits while working at the office, and I say there is a lot of intangible benefits while working at home, at least for me. I didn't even know I was to have that much energy and do so much stuff instead of laying in the sofa because I was tired.
Agree that WFH is ideal for cases such as yours where you're not working on the actual construction aspect (where more interaction is helpful for solving problems and/or better ideas).
I never really understood why people say productivity and socializing is difficult remote. It's difficult because people aren't putting thought into it. At my last big-co job the leadership just kept waiting for 'covid to be over' and not improving our remote work culture.
Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do.
My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model and are EXTREMELY collaborative. Every meeting has a note taker, we use Figma and Figjam for white boarding with incredible efficacy. We essentially have near the same level of documentation as a major enterprise with only 30 staff.
Socializing is encouraged via huddles in Slack and I can communicate with anyone in the company if I need to. Collaboration and new ideas disseminate differently online, but as a leader I have made it a goal to make sure we are not putting barriers up online, and actively encourage 'water cooler' talk.
Meanwhile we have had no problem sourcing candidates since we can pull from anywhere in the world, we have some incredible people all over the world that we would not have gotten otherwise.
I think it really depends on what kind of 'worker' you are. Some people can take a task, go off by themselves, and work independently for hours or days at a time to complete it with little or no interaction with others. These people are highly productive in a remote setting.
Others require constant interaction with others in order to accomplish much of anything. They need a barrage of ideas and help coming at them constantly and in every direction. While modern remote tools can help with this, an in-person office seems more ideal for this kind of worker.
In the late 90s, I worked for a startup making disk utilities (PartitionMagic). I got married and my wife was doing a residency program in another state. I was able to negotiate a remote work arrangement with my company, even though dial-up connections at the time made things hard to collaborate.
They gave me a new project to design and implement (Drive Image - a disk backup program). I would fly back to the office every couple of months and show them the latest version that I had completed. I did this for almost 2 years and was very, very productive. It helped that I was the only one on the team for most of that time (they didn't assign someone to help me until sales of the product reached several million $).
It’s possible that some companies will pay significantly more to keep all of their employees in office all of the time. But they’ll be paying 2-3 times: higher TCO, more expensive real-estate, and more scope for the (fortunately few) “I’m have people skills damnit” careerist middle managers without technical chops (higher payroll and worse mechanism design).
The A16Z model sounds about right to me: flex work with low real-estate burden, spend some of the savings on frequent, family friendly off sites.
I know this is controversial, just like, my opinion man.
The better headline would be "Remote Startups will win the war for top talent among employees who prefer to work remotely"
Not quite so sexy. Sure some; probably even most software devs prefer remote/hybrid work, but there are still plenty of incredibly talented people out there who prefer being in the office every day.
Remote work is great once a project has been scoped out and responsibilities have been assigned. You get to work on your own terms and be very productive, because let’s face it, modern open space offices are horrible places to get work done.
But, if you are not an entry level employee, your objective is to find work. That means socializing with people in the company to understand where the opportunities lie, collecting subtle clues, show your human side to gain trust. A zoom thumbnail on a scheduled call cannot do any of these.
One last thing. I have not found anything as effective for problem solving as having X people in the same room staring at a whiteboard and scratching their heads at the same time.
If the work is not obvious, it's almost certainly not important.
If you can't communicate, changing where people are located won't help.
Please don't lock me into a room to stare at you while you slowly gather your thoughts. My time is important. Gather your thoughts and then present them. Don't make me babysit you.
One interesting spin on this is the question "what new competitor would you be most afraid of? 100% remote, hybrid or in person team?"
The poll I saw overwhelmingly had "in person team" as the competitor that is most dangerous.
Talent isn't just about hiring the right people, but getting the most out of them. With 100% remote you're also selecting for people that want to be more comfortable or unsupervised. It could be a good or bad.
This thread has interesting debate, and makes me think these are the core questions which I wonder how others feel:
- Who believes most work friends are actual friends that by and large want to be there as well?
- Who builds and maintains friends at work for 90% career management, and the other 10% are cool people you enjoy working with and then you stay in touch with 1-2 of them once you leave a job?
- Who views the work socialization as actual socialization versus career management requirements?
My experience with a relatively successful path in tech is that most friends at work aren’t actual friends, that 90/10 split is true, and that work socialization is for career management.
It feels like the remote work debate is partially about if work fiends are actual friends and it’s worth bringing everyone in-office to support that truism, and then if remote work enables the same level of career management abilities IMO it does and it’s easier to do so. For instance, Leading in slack is a lot easier than leading vs the ex-athlete with a MBA in meetings who projects confidence.
Idk why but I can't help but think remote-first feels so dystopian. I joined and left a job that was 100% remote, and tbh I barely remember working there. I can barely remember names or anything I did. It was like Severance. Now I'm hybrid, and feel way more "connected" (whatever that means).
There are so many forces pulling in so many directions. The world is being re-shuffled. Ultimately, I don't think it will favor labor at US/FAANG talent prices.
- Young workers typically want to socialize with other young workers
- Older workers prefer to be alone, with family, etc. Have funds for larger homes and at-home amenities
- Nearly everyone hates commutes
- Cities are expensive and small, but exciting. Rural is large, open, inexpensive, but can be socially boring
- Office REITs want a return to the office because that's how they make their income
- Cities want a return to the office to support their tax base and economies
- Offices and cities are a huge tax on companies
- Some managers like to manage in person
- Extroverted roles may tend to prefer in person
- Physical work (hardware), whiteboarding, etc. are harder to do remotely. (Or impossible. You can't passage cell cultures remotely.)
- Much of the time spent in the office is wasted / distracting
- Remote work allows greater flexibility of running errands, doing chores, multi-tasking, childcare, ...
- Workers will tend to choose remote work over onsite work if the pay is the same
- It's expensive to live and work in California, not so much in middle America
- The pool of talent stretches far beyond America. Fungible remote workers means you can pay $50k for someone in another country to do the job of a $300k+ FAANG worker.
From a purely economic perspective, it seems like remote work will win out. But that entails drastic and cascading changes to everything. Labor will move beyond expensive American borders and become much cheaper for companies to hire and replace.
Remote startups may win the war for top talent (in the short term) but who will win on productivity and by extension revenue? I guess we will all see that in the next 24 months.
My productivity went at least 10x when the pandemic happened.
- No commute
- No 1 hour lunch (walking, buying, eating, cleaning up)
- Not in an open-desk office where I'm constantly interrupted
- Meetings are much more focused and I can hop between meetings quickly
- Easy to do chores if necessary during the day and then work extra hours at night to make up
- Office politics much reduced, output is easier to measure by necessity and people's output is much more clear
Additionally I was forced to double-down on socialization outside of the office, reinforcing relationships that exist no matter what company I work for, further reducing my aversion to jumping ship.
Big win for working 100% remote, at least for me, is that it suddenly makes it possible for me to potentially work for any IT company in my entire country without having to switch cities or commuting. That's the deal for me. The moment a job description says 4 days remote, 1 day at the office... that already kills it (e.g., imaging living in Frankfurt and working for a Berlin-based company... or living in Seville and working for a Barcelona-based company)
In Vancouver I used to spend anywhere rom 80 to 120 minutes commuting one way to downtown core from the suburbs. It was brutal. You then get to the office, have to make quick small chat, settle down, get coffee, go to the bathroom, and another hour has passed before you are reading emails. meetings and then its lunch time. come back and you settle down again, go to the bathroom, meeting. 4 hours remain to get work done but you can't leave at 5 because of traffic. so you stay behind.
Those times I save I directly deliver in value working remote. I can work more hours and I can be more efficient since I'm not tired. not to mention the ridiculous tax and rent costs due to property prices that do not reflect local wages adding to the stress.
yeah, NO THANK YOU. I get local recruiters hitting me up and not only is the salary here ridiculously low, they are either hybrid or require showing up at the office. Vancouver recruiters are a special breed: they won't list salary ranges, and get angry when you ask for it, require 2~3x the work experience for the same position elsewhere, and 40~50% haircut when we have the highest living cost in the region. There's a reason why most of its workforce in tech do not speak English at the office, they rather have new immigrants who can put up with this toxicity, and the management exploits them. Modern day colonialism.
I don't like working remote. I like working in an office. I find it more productive when my coworkers are right by me. Software development done well is an interactive, creative process. It is easier if you and I work together and can brainstorm on a whiteboard, or over lunch, and reduce the friction. And then go off to our respective cubes to hack it up and then share our work. That's the process I've found works best for teams.
But I want to work at what I'm doing, for the startup that I'm contracting for, in the space that I'm doing work in. And that's not here (they're not "anywhere" really) and all the local (southern Ontario, west of Toronto) companies suck, underpay, and are generally mismanaged.
And I'm not moving and giving up the life that I have I have so I can be where the interesting work is. I've done that once already in my 20s -- left my parents and siblings to go to the only place in Canada where the tech industry was really a thing (at the time) -- and I won't be made to do it again.
Canadian tech companies have been profiting from underpaying their engineering staff (relative to the US market) for a couple decades. Now they will suffer because they have to compete with remote. Recession might change this, but for now I intend on taking advantage of this.
So, remote it is. It's not perfect. But I'm not going to drive almost 2 hours a day to get underpaid by some mediocre local company run by mediocre management and mediocre investors. There's a larger world out there, accessible to me for the first time ever.
[+] [-] jofer|3 years ago|reply
For me, the primary one is that it's _way_ too easy for everyone to get deeply frustrated with each other. Social interactions and chit-chat lead to a better understanding of people and a more accurate mental model of what people actually mean when they say something.
Written text is the majority of remote communication. That's both good and bad. It's a much lower bandwidth form of communication than face-to-face in terms of being able to pick up intent and understand the context of someone's mood/etc in what they're saying. The same goes of communication over webcam. It's higher bandwidth than written text, but still lower than in-person.
When you're fully remote, you'll much more commonly misinterpret folks intent. You'll also more commonly have your intent misinterpreted.
At least in my experience, this tends to lead to a much higher rate of frustration and more frequent extreme misbehavior when everyone is remote.
I don't have an easy solution. Occasional in person meetings help a lot, but they're hard to do well, and easy to do poorly. Having 200 people in the same room for 2 days doesn't really help the situation, as there's zero time to get to know anyone.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
I've found that even just turning my camera on in Zoom meetings makes a difference. Joining the standup call a little early, having "face to face" chitchat, builds up a small buffer of rapport that significantly improves empathy and perceived intent
Especially if you need to have a conversation where there might be some existing friction/tension/frustration, doing it over video instead of text or just audio will hugely increase the good-faith nature of the conversation
And of course, the occasional in-person hangout helps too, if you happen to be in the same city as your coworkers. What's important is that you each form an impression of the other as a human being, and not just as a faceless mechanism in the org that may be helping you or getting in your way at a given moment
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|3 years ago|reply
I still find it hard to build new connections over Zoom but I find that by putting effort into being present over Zoom that I connect much better and others are encouraged to have smalltalk with me before/after meetings.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jherdman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tra3|3 years ago|reply
Remote work is not a panacea, there are tradeoffs. Investing more effort into building remote relationships is definitely worth working at home and not having to commute.
Excellent insight.
[+] [-] dogman144|3 years ago|reply
People get themselves into the dardnest trouble over a work Slack thread they just couldn’t drop.
[+] [-] quantisan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adverbly|3 years ago|reply
It's the majority of office comms too...
[+] [-] nabakin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
[+] [-] jiveturkey|3 years ago|reply
Isn't RTO pretty easy?
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|3 years ago|reply
Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time.
Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.
What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work.
YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.
[+] [-] Terretta|3 years ago|reply
Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture.
Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. …
… and (b) experimenting with elevated telepresence beyond just the green/yellow/red dot: You have to be radical about this: “If it didn’t happen in [remote-first tool], it didn’t happen.”This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?”
The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira.
In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands.
> I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success
* There it is.
[+] [-] wpietri|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand, a lot of collocated teams, especially at larger companies, have bad enough environments that they're essentially remote workers as far as communication goes. I've visited plenty of teams in open-office environments where all the coders are packed in, hunched over wearing headphones all day, while random people blather loudly nearby about things unrelated to the coding, and key people for their project are scattered across the building. Or farther.
If I could have a properly collocated team with dedicated space and the correct layout for collaboration, I'd love that. But I'd still prefer all-remote over the average BigCo setup, where space is set up for the convenience of managers and office planners, not the actual work.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things.
I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on that one issue more in person than when remote. When it comes to some topics it's just much faster and the result is more complete in person.
[+] [-] nend|3 years ago|reply
It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.
[+] [-] chrisfosterelli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilbetron|3 years ago|reply
On prem might get the bulk of the credit though - politics are ... evolving with remote workers.
But your experience doesn't match mine at all.
[+] [-] barbazoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ren_engineer|3 years ago|reply
95% of cases where I see people complaining about remote work is because the company basically changed nothing about how they operate day to day when Covid started, they are a normal company trying to work remotely. Obviously that is going to fail miserably. Hybrid model is the worst of both worlds
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|3 years ago|reply
I like remote because I don’t want to be all in on work. I don’t care enough about my company to even write up an expensive bug I noticed. I just let it waste my org’s money.
I can see those who actually give a shit being more likely to go into the office.
I don’t think your remote workers would be more productive in office. I wouldn’t be. I just stare dead between the eyes in the same meetings I just nap during when I am remote. Rather, highly productive and engaged people are just less likely to want remote.
[+] [-] raydev|3 years ago|reply
Working remote requires a number of changes, and it may even require training that your company isn't providing, because as you clearly have guessed, in-person interaction is more natural.
But how this looks to me, is that your company is doing a great disservice to the remote workers by not provided them with the tools and comms to be fully productive. You are letting them sort it out for themselves when they may not know how to, which is... bad.
Claiming you're doing better because "monkey brains" is just silly. Many things take practice, including clear communication over video and text.
[+] [-] bbarn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davemp|3 years ago|reply
Seems like this would drastically affect motivation and therefore output. Sounds your company may have a self fulfilling prophecy about remote work being less productive.
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vocram|3 years ago|reply
the kind of work those systems track is assembly line tasks. They can’t measure alone the strategic impact employees have on a company.
[+] [-] juve1996|3 years ago|reply
These are very specific numbers - how do you measure this?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
This point often seems to get missed. If you're at a large company, you're often working with people on different floors, buildings, offices, countries. I want to be co-located with the people I work with often just isn't an option at larger companies even if many people come into an office.
[+] [-] spaniard89277|3 years ago|reply
I don't do creative work or programming, as I work in HelpDesk, so I don't see the reason for going back to my bunker. It seems most of my coworkers have the same beliefs because as my company started threatening with going back to the office previous to thos summer, people left, and many became pretty hostile.
In my case it takes a <10 minute walk to get to my office, I don't have to spend too much time nor money, but at home I have a cushy place, two large monitors, and over everything else, I hear birds and see nature while at work.
I have to take some mandated breaks (collective agreement). In my office it was dead time, I couldn't do anything interesting. At home I wake up and do some house chores.
When my journey ends, I just get up, pack some stuff and go to the beach or go meet friends. I have way more energy than when I worked at the office.
I'm clearly not "top talent" but having tried this, I can't just forget it.
Companies say there's a lot of intangible benefits while working at the office, and I say there is a lot of intangible benefits while working at home, at least for me. I didn't even know I was to have that much energy and do so much stuff instead of laying in the sofa because I was tired.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearjaws|3 years ago|reply
Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do.
My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model and are EXTREMELY collaborative. Every meeting has a note taker, we use Figma and Figjam for white boarding with incredible efficacy. We essentially have near the same level of documentation as a major enterprise with only 30 staff.
Socializing is encouraged via huddles in Slack and I can communicate with anyone in the company if I need to. Collaboration and new ideas disseminate differently online, but as a leader I have made it a goal to make sure we are not putting barriers up online, and actively encourage 'water cooler' talk.
Meanwhile we have had no problem sourcing candidates since we can pull from anywhere in the world, we have some incredible people all over the world that we would not have gotten otherwise.
[+] [-] didgetmaster|3 years ago|reply
Others require constant interaction with others in order to accomplish much of anything. They need a barrage of ideas and help coming at them constantly and in every direction. While modern remote tools can help with this, an in-person office seems more ideal for this kind of worker.
In the late 90s, I worked for a startup making disk utilities (PartitionMagic). I got married and my wife was doing a residency program in another state. I was able to negotiate a remote work arrangement with my company, even though dial-up connections at the time made things hard to collaborate.
They gave me a new project to design and implement (Drive Image - a disk backup program). I would fly back to the office every couple of months and show them the latest version that I had completed. I did this for almost 2 years and was very, very productive. It helped that I was the only one on the team for most of that time (they didn't assign someone to help me until sales of the product reached several million $).
[+] [-] benreesman|3 years ago|reply
The A16Z model sounds about right to me: flex work with low real-estate burden, spend some of the savings on frequent, family friendly off sites.
I know this is controversial, just like, my opinion man.
[+] [-] mooreds|3 years ago|reply
Will wages in, say, Lagos or Buenos Aires rise to SF/NYC levels? Or will the reverse happen?
Economics says that it depends on the value of the labor, but cost of living matters too (or at least, has in the past within say, the USA).
I think this essay https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... shows evidence that says the answer is "yes", that we'll see a weird fracturing of labor markets.
[+] [-] TOMDM|3 years ago|reply
The better headline would be "Remote Startups will win the war for top talent among employees who prefer to work remotely"
Not quite so sexy. Sure some; probably even most software devs prefer remote/hybrid work, but there are still plenty of incredibly talented people out there who prefer being in the office every day.
[+] [-] whatever1|3 years ago|reply
But, if you are not an entry level employee, your objective is to find work. That means socializing with people in the company to understand where the opportunities lie, collecting subtle clues, show your human side to gain trust. A zoom thumbnail on a scheduled call cannot do any of these.
One last thing. I have not found anything as effective for problem solving as having X people in the same room staring at a whiteboard and scratching their heads at the same time.
[+] [-] vorpalhex|3 years ago|reply
If you can't communicate, changing where people are located won't help.
Please don't lock me into a room to stare at you while you slowly gather your thoughts. My time is important. Gather your thoughts and then present them. Don't make me babysit you.
[+] [-] bko|3 years ago|reply
The poll I saw overwhelmingly had "in person team" as the competitor that is most dangerous.
Talent isn't just about hiring the right people, but getting the most out of them. With 100% remote you're also selecting for people that want to be more comfortable or unsupervised. It could be a good or bad.
[+] [-] dogman144|3 years ago|reply
- Who believes most work friends are actual friends that by and large want to be there as well?
- Who builds and maintains friends at work for 90% career management, and the other 10% are cool people you enjoy working with and then you stay in touch with 1-2 of them once you leave a job?
- Who views the work socialization as actual socialization versus career management requirements?
My experience with a relatively successful path in tech is that most friends at work aren’t actual friends, that 90/10 split is true, and that work socialization is for career management.
It feels like the remote work debate is partially about if work fiends are actual friends and it’s worth bringing everyone in-office to support that truism, and then if remote work enables the same level of career management abilities IMO it does and it’s easier to do so. For instance, Leading in slack is a lot easier than leading vs the ex-athlete with a MBA in meetings who projects confidence.
[+] [-] frankfrank13|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|3 years ago|reply
- Young workers typically want to socialize with other young workers
- Older workers prefer to be alone, with family, etc. Have funds for larger homes and at-home amenities
- Nearly everyone hates commutes
- Cities are expensive and small, but exciting. Rural is large, open, inexpensive, but can be socially boring
- Office REITs want a return to the office because that's how they make their income
- Cities want a return to the office to support their tax base and economies
- Offices and cities are a huge tax on companies
- Some managers like to manage in person
- Extroverted roles may tend to prefer in person
- Physical work (hardware), whiteboarding, etc. are harder to do remotely. (Or impossible. You can't passage cell cultures remotely.)
- Much of the time spent in the office is wasted / distracting
- Remote work allows greater flexibility of running errands, doing chores, multi-tasking, childcare, ...
- Workers will tend to choose remote work over onsite work if the pay is the same
- It's expensive to live and work in California, not so much in middle America
- The pool of talent stretches far beyond America. Fungible remote workers means you can pay $50k for someone in another country to do the job of a $300k+ FAANG worker.
From a purely economic perspective, it seems like remote work will win out. But that entails drastic and cascading changes to everything. Labor will move beyond expensive American borders and become much cheaper for companies to hire and replace.
[+] [-] weakwire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seibelj|3 years ago|reply
- No commute
- No 1 hour lunch (walking, buying, eating, cleaning up)
- Not in an open-desk office where I'm constantly interrupted
- Meetings are much more focused and I can hop between meetings quickly
- Easy to do chores if necessary during the day and then work extra hours at night to make up
- Office politics much reduced, output is easier to measure by necessity and people's output is much more clear
Additionally I was forced to double-down on socialization outside of the office, reinforcing relationships that exist no matter what company I work for, further reducing my aversion to jumping ship.
In summation, WFH forever, I'm never going back
[+] [-] danwee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|3 years ago|reply
For nearly every business, good enough is definitely good enough.
So the question to me is for average to slightly above average employees, will remote companies "win"?
[+] [-] upupandup|3 years ago|reply
Those times I save I directly deliver in value working remote. I can work more hours and I can be more efficient since I'm not tired. not to mention the ridiculous tax and rent costs due to property prices that do not reflect local wages adding to the stress.
yeah, NO THANK YOU. I get local recruiters hitting me up and not only is the salary here ridiculously low, they are either hybrid or require showing up at the office. Vancouver recruiters are a special breed: they won't list salary ranges, and get angry when you ask for it, require 2~3x the work experience for the same position elsewhere, and 40~50% haircut when we have the highest living cost in the region. There's a reason why most of its workforce in tech do not speak English at the office, they rather have new immigrants who can put up with this toxicity, and the management exploits them. Modern day colonialism.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
But I want to work at what I'm doing, for the startup that I'm contracting for, in the space that I'm doing work in. And that's not here (they're not "anywhere" really) and all the local (southern Ontario, west of Toronto) companies suck, underpay, and are generally mismanaged.
And I'm not moving and giving up the life that I have I have so I can be where the interesting work is. I've done that once already in my 20s -- left my parents and siblings to go to the only place in Canada where the tech industry was really a thing (at the time) -- and I won't be made to do it again.
Canadian tech companies have been profiting from underpaying their engineering staff (relative to the US market) for a couple decades. Now they will suffer because they have to compete with remote. Recession might change this, but for now I intend on taking advantage of this.
So, remote it is. It's not perfect. But I'm not going to drive almost 2 hours a day to get underpaid by some mediocre local company run by mediocre management and mediocre investors. There's a larger world out there, accessible to me for the first time ever.