Autonomous working has proven to be a game changer for myself and others in my team.
I can login and out when I need to (meetings/stand ups I obviously need to factor in) which allows me to take an actual break and go somewhere with my dog when I am feeling bogged down/unproductive.
The ability to do this means that, when I return to the desk, I am refreshed and ready to tackle a problem with fresh eyes instead of glazed over and looking at a clock anxiously waiting for my time to jump on a train and commute to my home.
This rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive — usually people with investments in real estate and retail businesses which are taking a hit from the lack of lunchtime and rush hour footfall.
My manager once said to me “I hired an adult, so I don’t need to hold your hand” and this has resonated with me since. If you cannot trust your staff to do what is best for you then that is your problem for hiring the wrong people. It isn’t the problem of an entire industry.
The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together.
If your work can be done in isolation and doesn't require a team to deal with any uncertainty, then by all means work fully remote. However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together.
I think it's telling that you talk about 'looking at a clock'. If that's how you spend your office time, then indeed there might be something off. E.g. a controlling manager who wants their minions to be visible and on the clock.
Personally I work one or two days from home. Some team members more, a few even fully remote (but it's noticable that they are more task oriented and less included in any new concepts/roadmaps/designs/etc). The majority of the people spend the same one or two days together in the office where all kinds of formal and informal interactions happen that further the collaborative creative process.
> This rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive
This sort of perspective is killing any real chance of having a productive conversation about the topic. There's a chance a person very similar to you simply disagrees with you on a very complex topic. There's pros and cons to the office and WFH alike. You clearly do well with WFH, and have good reasons for it. A junior engineer like me did not, so I have a different perspective.
The next exhaustive part of the debate (which you didn't bring up, I'm simply anticipating), is the retort that my team just didn't do WFH correctly, or that Covid was a confounding factor.
> My manager once said to me “I hired an adult, so I don’t need to hold your hand” and this has resonated with me since. If you cannot trust your staff to do what is best for you then that is your problem for hiring the wrong people. It isn’t the problem of an entire industry.
I’m not sure I agree. Our industry isn’t full of people that have more integrity than the general population, and “your problem for hiring the wrong people” is short sighted, or even victim blaming. I’ll share this recent HN post:
The perceived productivity gains have always been complicated because they're anchored in a time when people had nothing better to do.
The other side of it, and it's complicated in the same way, is the industry collectively made a lot of bad decisions working from home in 2021, and we're paying for it now.
I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else.
It makes literally 0 business sense to be forking out anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand per employee per month to give them a space to work, when that can just be avoided.
The amount of cost and overheads involved; from insurance to upkeep to rent to OHS - a work space is probably the next biggest expense for a company after salaries. One that can be pruned with very little pushback. And unlike an employee, that’s an expense that’s usually on much, much longer terms (decades in a lot of instances).
No alleged productivity gains are worth the time / cost, other than managers wanting to see the kingdom they rule over or they sit to gain from paying that money somehow.
> I assume he’s got either direct or indirect links to commercial realestate; as an owner or investor or something else.
This isn't necessarily the case.
Most of the people calling for an end to remote work do not, I suspect, fall into this category—they're managers and execs of all kinds of companies.
What they get out of it isn't more money. It's more control. It's a return to a world where "verify by eye that the employee has their butt in their seat" is an acceptable method of "managing". It's a validation of their worldview that employees are all lazy slackers who are constantly looking for ways to defraud the company.
And underlying all of that, it's simply a return to the world they knew before. This new world, where workers get to work remotely and be responsible for themselves, is Different, and therefore Confusing and/or Scary.
I agree, but shouldn't we expect to see some 100% remote businesses eat the lunch of the old dinosaurs in their highrises? I would think that would be the best proof.
The full quote is a bit narrower than the title implies;
> "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
There are two points here - firstly he's talking about 'full remote' so hybrid work is still on the table, and secondly he's talking mostly about startups rather than established companies. With those caveats in mind what he says is a lot less controversial. But still a little.
Where it's disappointing (to me) is that it seems he's just ... giving up. He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems he's defaulting to the not-much-better-for-creativity-and-far-worse-for-other-things 'solution' of working in offices. That's kind of rubbish. Sam Altman is a clever guy who has a ton of experience working in startups, and the suggestion that he hasn't ever seen one work well and can't think of anything other than 'everyone in the same room' isn't very exciting.
What's especially sad is that he said this stuff while he was in an office. Surely that's the most creative place!
I bet he also advocates for open office plans as well - after all, you need to maximize the team's communication and collaboration in order to maintain your level of creativity. Of course we all know this is rubbish.
We also know there's a need for teams to be able to come together. We've discovered it's best to have set times and of course ad-hoc times to collaborate - to essentially come together the way we did back when we were in the office. And yes, today's tools allow us to do that. Being remote and never coming together save maybe for a daily standup is just as bad as working in a cubicle all day and never interacting with your team.
Either way, remote teams work and work well - even in startups. In fact, prior to the pandemic the environment in which I saw the most remote teams was in startups. It's strange people are now saying that's the worst environment for remote teams. Makes me think they have another agenda.
It is just part of the Silicon Valley lore. You know how all those successful start-ups were all started in big office complexes. It is just more creative that way.
It has been obvious for a while now that the optimal workplace was designed in the 18th century.
>Where it's disappointing (to me) is that it seems he's just ... giving up.
His job isn't to solve the remote work problem but to run a company effectively. Given the current job market and glut of engineers looking for jobs solving the remote work problem won't provide much if any competitive advantage. That may change in the future but right now isn't the future.
I agree that the title of the article is misleading, and that Sam Altman is not dismissing remote work entirely, but only for startups and only for full remote.
I think that remote work is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and that different roles and tasks may require different levels of interaction and synchronicity. For example, some activities where there is a lot of ambiguity or uncertainty may benefit from more collaborative and tighter feedback loop, while others may require more independence and concentration. Some aspects of in-person communication, such as non-verbal cues and implicit knowledge, may be lost or distorted online.
In one side, you have something like game development where outside of some indies who have been successful working remotely, you have many examples of failed or delayed projects due to remote work issues. Devops? Oh yes, let me do that from Florida or North Dakota, if you have the infrastructure and culture to support it.
Remote work has its advantages and opportunities, but also its drawbacks and risks. I think that startups may suffer from remote work if they are not careful and intentional, rather than optimistic thinking that they will figure out along the way.
> He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems
I hate this mindset (and I enjoy remote work). It's not his job to solve remote work for everyone. He probably (definitely) has other topics he's more interested in.
The era of remote work is not over. It’s just arrived. We overshot the equilibrium point by a lot during the pandemic height and that will regress back to something closer to long term trend.
No matter how much the HN crowd vociferously defends remote work, it’s simply an inferior mode of operation for many creative jobs.
People are not machines. We’re evolved to congregate and share space, to read body language, share meals, interact with zero latency.
Those things are valuable, and barring some huge leap in technology, we give them up when we go remote.
For some jobs and work cultures, those things don’t matter as much — those companies can self select into remote work and save on office costs.
But for American engineers especially, the more you encapsulate yourself into an interface of pull requests and slack messages, the more you’re handing power to corporations in the long run.
I can and have hired quality developers in EU, GB, and South America at heavily discounted rates because without an office, what’s the difference?
Even interviewing and managing people in Asia is much easier as a result of zoom, slack, figma, etc.
I find it so odd that American software engineers don’t see this. Time zone is not a moat, I promise you.
I read it as this guy failed to build a distributed team that would meet his expectations and now extrapolates it to the entire industry. I have heard similar conclusions from a founder who invested a lot of money in a big fancy office in a great location only to discover that half of the team prefers full remote. The team was ready to work this way, the founder was not.
> He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that the reporting is terrible, not that the guy is an idiot and can not stick to a consistent thought process in the course of a single 30 minute panel at a conference.
Well, it is kind of funny when a millionaire tech bro tell me that remote work doesn't work to build some silly food delivery applications, when those silly applications run on top of an open source stack that was always heavily built on remote and async settings.
I don’t think that allegory works. That open source stack wasn’t built for the startup. Rather, the startup had a pick of hundreds of open source options and chose the one that worked best. Because there’s no collaboration or relationship between the startup and the OSS projects, of course there’s no need for them to communicate.
But I don’t think anybody would argue that a startup doesn’t need to communicate with it’s employees.
Most of the companies that are declaring remote work as a failure weren’t able to establish good processes and culture on this new setup. Most of these companies are also control freak with low-trust attitude on their employees. Personally, it’s far from be a failure and being over, and likely one of the best equalizer (democratize opportunities) and productivity booster that happened in the industry. However it’s certainly not easy to adopt and integrate correctly.
Every company, big or small, was able to leverage MS Teams or Zoom just fine.
It is only in manufacturing and similar sectors where you need on-site due to the nature of the work. Software Engineering for Web, Desktop, etc. is easily remote-friendly.
The problem goes beyond "low-trust" attitude or productivity.
Guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are Lord Farquad/King Joffrey in real life. The typical corporate setup is a pyramid and these guys have placed themselves on the top. What on earth is happening in the office that is going to magically improve company performance? Is it the slow internet, the persistent disruptions (... i mean collaboration?), the long tiring commutes, or the power-hungry management? Oh yea, its the power-hungry management. Ya see, we work in their castle but the kings don't feel important unless we send them praises (unwillingly) and endure them breathing down our necks. How can they assess our performance without monitoring us?
Tbh, its not even about remote work. You can have miserable remote work experiences too. But it makes it so much harder for these psychos to abuse you and get anything out of it when you're comfortably sat at home. I wouldn't mind going to the office if the concept of a boss ceased to exist. Make it opt-in and arrange with your coworkers what/when/how you'll deliver.
Edit: In Sam Altman's case he is saying early stage startups/products need people to grind together more closely. Again, that's true for physical products but not for Web/Desktop/Software.
Quite the opposite. Several divisions in my organisation and others in our group have decided to gradually move to a model where about half of us work from home for the medium term, and that number is expected to increase over the next five years.
They are already saving a significant amount of money by giving up our old offices. The mode of engagement between staff and across teams has obviously changed and continues to do so, but productivity is back to pre-Covid levels. We meet in person when there's a real need, say once a week or two.
Even allowing for the possibility that the contents of the article are true (which I seriously doubt ... it reads like sloppy reporting and cheap sensationalism) this is one man's view, biased and coloured by his own interests.
Why can’t anyone see this for what it is? It’s about power.
The problem these organizations have is not that they have people working from home - they don’t really care about that, the problem is that the type of person who runs a company craves the power, and they don’t feel like they’re wielding it when everyone works from their laptops and over zoom.
It’s not about the money nor is it about the product. Very few tech companies have never cared about the product after they weren’t startups anymore. No, it’s about having power over others, and control.
They have to make big financial decisions about what to do with office buildings, for one, and need to make sure that if they pay for the offices, that they get value from them.
It's risky to drop the buildings and then need them later
>The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone
The idea has always been there, it was never new, and it didn’t go anywhere and I don’t think it’s going anywhere either.
And then the article says
>and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
Followed by at the end
>He also worries some might be freeing up time by using A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4—time that his company isn’t utilizing.
So, I think the technology IS too good for remote work that companies couldn’t tell if they’re properly enslaving their employees or not, that they fear those employees are still maintaining the required productivity output without being miserable for once.
Let’s see what the classics say about this. Mr Conway says, that an organization creates a system in its image. Thus, if the system needs to be very distributed, so does the organization. So unless there is a singular monolithic thing built by a focused local team, a singular monolithic team makes no sense. And a team that’s not like that benefits little from their physical location, as a large chunk of their work is non-physical communication anyway. Even when the other team sits in the same building, who’s going to spend 10 minutes going to another floor when they can just message?
Office architecture is seen as ideologically driven. People like open offices so we do those. People like working from home (or office), so we do that. But office structure is as much part of the architecture of your enterprise as is database or microservice structure. It should aid progress toward a particular goal of the organization and not be subject to any hype in any direction.
There's also quite a lot of these "remote work doesn't work" posts from C-level execs, board members, etc...that live far away from their company's headquarters. The dissonance is funny.
If every organization feels like for improving org outcomes bringing workers to the office is absolutely crucial, then that org should bear the cost as well. The org should pay for gases, pay for time in commute, pay for car and cover it's insurance. For people who moved to colocate with the org, org should pay for their rents too. After all, it's the orgs decision to call workers for it's own profits, why should a worker be paying for this unnecessary expenses when the alternative of remote is very much feasible.
Allowing workers to work remotely or in-office is the choice of the organisation. Since, it's a choice... It should come with a price tag associated with it.
Alternatively, of govt as well feel that workers are needed back in the office, all of the above expenses should be allowed to claim back during taxation.
My simple question is how fair is it for workers to pay for the luxury choices made by their respective employers?
I guess the market will reach an equilibrium. Over time, if workers prefer WFH, they will demand a premium to work in person, so employers will end up paying.
Remote work threatens the foundation of the commercial real estate market. Expect a huge push to get people back into the office - especially if there is softness in the job market.
Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them.
Uh huh right, discovering hidden talents, not micromanagement, no sir!
> Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction
Having spent a considerable number of hours in the last year explicitly doing work with / training junior staff... That's just silly.
Start open streams of your work. Give short presentations. Invite junior people when you do something interesting. It's really not a lot of effort and in-person is definitely not required.
When you actually look at the claim Altman can defend from his own experience, it's not that remote work doesn't work for "the tech industry"; it's that remote work doesn't work for early stage startups. But most of "the tech industry" is not early stage startups. Most of the people working in the tech industry could still be working remotely, while at the same time the small fraction of them that are working at early stage startups could be working in person in an office (or hangout space, or whatever), and the tech industry would do just fine.
Unfortunately, when I look at Altman's track record as a pundit (as opposed to as a startup developer), this kind of schoolboy error is what I usually see.
> He further added that OpenAI’s some of the best talents are working remotely. He said, "some of our best people are remote, and we will continue to support it always, so please don't let hating SF stop you from applying to OpenAI! I don't like the open air fentanyl markets either.”
The above line seems to contradict the part about '..worst mistake of the tech industry'
Hypocrisy from the guy who is both publicly an AI doomer with a stocked AI apocalypse retreat and an AI firm CEO promoting his product as either near or actually being AGI?
[+] [-] makingstuffs|2 years ago|reply
I can login and out when I need to (meetings/stand ups I obviously need to factor in) which allows me to take an actual break and go somewhere with my dog when I am feeling bogged down/unproductive.
The ability to do this means that, when I return to the desk, I am refreshed and ready to tackle a problem with fresh eyes instead of glazed over and looking at a clock anxiously waiting for my time to jump on a train and commute to my home.
This rhetoric that remote work is bad for business seems to always come from people whom I suspect have an ulterior motive — usually people with investments in real estate and retail businesses which are taking a hit from the lack of lunchtime and rush hour footfall.
My manager once said to me “I hired an adult, so I don’t need to hold your hand” and this has resonated with me since. If you cannot trust your staff to do what is best for you then that is your problem for hiring the wrong people. It isn’t the problem of an entire industry.
[+] [-] jochem9|2 years ago|reply
If your work can be done in isolation and doesn't require a team to deal with any uncertainty, then by all means work fully remote. However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together.
I think it's telling that you talk about 'looking at a clock'. If that's how you spend your office time, then indeed there might be something off. E.g. a controlling manager who wants their minions to be visible and on the clock.
Personally I work one or two days from home. Some team members more, a few even fully remote (but it's noticable that they are more task oriented and less included in any new concepts/roadmaps/designs/etc). The majority of the people spend the same one or two days together in the office where all kinds of formal and informal interactions happen that further the collaborative creative process.
[+] [-] DiggyJohnson|2 years ago|reply
This sort of perspective is killing any real chance of having a productive conversation about the topic. There's a chance a person very similar to you simply disagrees with you on a very complex topic. There's pros and cons to the office and WFH alike. You clearly do well with WFH, and have good reasons for it. A junior engineer like me did not, so I have a different perspective.
The next exhaustive part of the debate (which you didn't bring up, I'm simply anticipating), is the retort that my team just didn't do WFH correctly, or that Covid was a confounding factor.
[+] [-] soulofmischief|2 years ago|reply
Or you're just a bad manager.
[+] [-] DougN7|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767280
Remote work only makes sense when everyone has integrity, but that seems less and less likely in my experience, sadly.
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
The other side of it, and it's complicated in the same way, is the industry collectively made a lot of bad decisions working from home in 2021, and we're paying for it now.
[+] [-] _s|2 years ago|reply
It makes literally 0 business sense to be forking out anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand per employee per month to give them a space to work, when that can just be avoided.
The amount of cost and overheads involved; from insurance to upkeep to rent to OHS - a work space is probably the next biggest expense for a company after salaries. One that can be pruned with very little pushback. And unlike an employee, that’s an expense that’s usually on much, much longer terms (decades in a lot of instances).
No alleged productivity gains are worth the time / cost, other than managers wanting to see the kingdom they rule over or they sit to gain from paying that money somehow.
[+] [-] chris222|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danaris|2 years ago|reply
This isn't necessarily the case.
Most of the people calling for an end to remote work do not, I suspect, fall into this category—they're managers and execs of all kinds of companies.
What they get out of it isn't more money. It's more control. It's a return to a world where "verify by eye that the employee has their butt in their seat" is an acceptable method of "managing". It's a validation of their worldview that employees are all lazy slackers who are constantly looking for ways to defraud the company.
And underlying all of that, it's simply a return to the world they knew before. This new world, where workers get to work remotely and be responsible for themselves, is Different, and therefore Confusing and/or Scary.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flappyeagle|2 years ago|reply
Your bias is clouding your judgement.
[+] [-] onion2k|2 years ago|reply
> "I think definitely one of the tech industry's worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn't need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. "I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
There are two points here - firstly he's talking about 'full remote' so hybrid work is still on the table, and secondly he's talking mostly about startups rather than established companies. With those caveats in mind what he says is a lot less controversial. But still a little.
Where it's disappointing (to me) is that it seems he's just ... giving up. He's suggesting that there are problems with remote work for creative teams, but rather than think of ways to solve those problems he's defaulting to the not-much-better-for-creativity-and-far-worse-for-other-things 'solution' of working in offices. That's kind of rubbish. Sam Altman is a clever guy who has a ton of experience working in startups, and the suggestion that he hasn't ever seen one work well and can't think of anything other than 'everyone in the same room' isn't very exciting.
What's especially sad is that he said this stuff while he was in an office. Surely that's the most creative place!
[+] [-] taylodl|2 years ago|reply
We also know there's a need for teams to be able to come together. We've discovered it's best to have set times and of course ad-hoc times to collaborate - to essentially come together the way we did back when we were in the office. And yes, today's tools allow us to do that. Being remote and never coming together save maybe for a daily standup is just as bad as working in a cubicle all day and never interacting with your team.
Either way, remote teams work and work well - even in startups. In fact, prior to the pandemic the environment in which I saw the most remote teams was in startups. It's strange people are now saying that's the worst environment for remote teams. Makes me think they have another agenda.
[+] [-] crypot|2 years ago|reply
It has been obvious for a while now that the optimal workplace was designed in the 18th century.
[+] [-] marcinzm|2 years ago|reply
His job isn't to solve the remote work problem but to run a company effectively. Given the current job market and glut of engineers looking for jobs solving the remote work problem won't provide much if any competitive advantage. That may change in the future but right now isn't the future.
[+] [-] eamq|2 years ago|reply
I think that remote work is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and that different roles and tasks may require different levels of interaction and synchronicity. For example, some activities where there is a lot of ambiguity or uncertainty may benefit from more collaborative and tighter feedback loop, while others may require more independence and concentration. Some aspects of in-person communication, such as non-verbal cues and implicit knowledge, may be lost or distorted online.
In one side, you have something like game development where outside of some indies who have been successful working remotely, you have many examples of failed or delayed projects due to remote work issues. Devops? Oh yes, let me do that from Florida or North Dakota, if you have the infrastructure and culture to support it.
Remote work has its advantages and opportunities, but also its drawbacks and risks. I think that startups may suffer from remote work if they are not careful and intentional, rather than optimistic thinking that they will figure out along the way.
[+] [-] ambicapter|2 years ago|reply
I hate this mindset (and I enjoy remote work). It's not his job to solve remote work for everyone. He probably (definitely) has other topics he's more interested in.
[+] [-] flappyeagle|2 years ago|reply
No matter how much the HN crowd vociferously defends remote work, it’s simply an inferior mode of operation for many creative jobs.
People are not machines. We’re evolved to congregate and share space, to read body language, share meals, interact with zero latency.
Those things are valuable, and barring some huge leap in technology, we give them up when we go remote.
For some jobs and work cultures, those things don’t matter as much — those companies can self select into remote work and save on office costs.
But for American engineers especially, the more you encapsulate yourself into an interface of pull requests and slack messages, the more you’re handing power to corporations in the long run.
I can and have hired quality developers in EU, GB, and South America at heavily discounted rates because without an office, what’s the difference?
Even interviewing and managing people in Asia is much easier as a result of zoom, slack, figma, etc.
I find it so odd that American software engineers don’t see this. Time zone is not a moat, I promise you.
[+] [-] ivan_gammel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitzar|2 years ago|reply
I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that the reporting is terrible, not that the guy is an idiot and can not stick to a consistent thought process in the course of a single 30 minute panel at a conference.
[+] [-] elzbardico|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 542458|2 years ago|reply
But I don’t think anybody would argue that a startup doesn’t need to communicate with it’s employees.
[+] [-] ReDeiPirati|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dapperyapp1234|2 years ago|reply
Every company, big or small, was able to leverage MS Teams or Zoom just fine. It is only in manufacturing and similar sectors where you need on-site due to the nature of the work. Software Engineering for Web, Desktop, etc. is easily remote-friendly.
The problem goes beyond "low-trust" attitude or productivity. Guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are Lord Farquad/King Joffrey in real life. The typical corporate setup is a pyramid and these guys have placed themselves on the top. What on earth is happening in the office that is going to magically improve company performance? Is it the slow internet, the persistent disruptions (... i mean collaboration?), the long tiring commutes, or the power-hungry management? Oh yea, its the power-hungry management. Ya see, we work in their castle but the kings don't feel important unless we send them praises (unwillingly) and endure them breathing down our necks. How can they assess our performance without monitoring us?
Tbh, its not even about remote work. You can have miserable remote work experiences too. But it makes it so much harder for these psychos to abuse you and get anything out of it when you're comfortably sat at home. I wouldn't mind going to the office if the concept of a boss ceased to exist. Make it opt-in and arrange with your coworkers what/when/how you'll deliver.
Edit: In Sam Altman's case he is saying early stage startups/products need people to grind together more closely. Again, that's true for physical products but not for Web/Desktop/Software.
[+] [-] korginator|2 years ago|reply
They are already saving a significant amount of money by giving up our old offices. The mode of engagement between staff and across teams has obviously changed and continues to do so, but productivity is back to pre-Covid levels. We meet in person when there's a real need, say once a week or two.
Even allowing for the possibility that the contents of the article are true (which I seriously doubt ... it reads like sloppy reporting and cheap sensationalism) this is one man's view, biased and coloured by his own interests.
[+] [-] piloto_ciego|2 years ago|reply
The problem these organizations have is not that they have people working from home - they don’t really care about that, the problem is that the type of person who runs a company craves the power, and they don’t feel like they’re wielding it when everyone works from their laptops and over zoom.
It’s not about the money nor is it about the product. Very few tech companies have never cared about the product after they weren’t startups anymore. No, it’s about having power over others, and control.
[+] [-] 8note|2 years ago|reply
They have to make big financial decisions about what to do with office buildings, for one, and need to make sure that if they pay for the offices, that they get value from them.
It's risky to drop the buildings and then need them later
[+] [-] AHOHA|2 years ago|reply
The idea has always been there, it was never new, and it didn’t go anywhere and I don’t think it’s going anywhere either.
And then the article says
>and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups."
Followed by at the end
>He also worries some might be freeing up time by using A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4—time that his company isn’t utilizing.
So, I think the technology IS too good for remote work that companies couldn’t tell if they’re properly enslaving their employees or not, that they fear those employees are still maintaining the required productivity output without being miserable for once.
[+] [-] andreskytt|2 years ago|reply
Office architecture is seen as ideologically driven. People like open offices so we do those. People like working from home (or office), so we do that. But office structure is as much part of the architecture of your enterprise as is database or microservice structure. It should aid progress toward a particular goal of the organization and not be subject to any hype in any direction.
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|2 years ago|reply
edit: Like, I'm only half snarky. He ran like one ok company and then got pretty much coronated into OpenAI.
edit: edit: Like really. It was a company that let you share your phone location. Revolutionary unicorn to the moon on steroids for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt
[+] [-] jxf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lio|2 years ago|reply
-
1. Swoop in, make a lot of aggressive noise, shit on everyone and then fly off to the golf course.
[+] [-] RestlessMind|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway02sfv|2 years ago|reply
Allowing workers to work remotely or in-office is the choice of the organisation. Since, it's a choice... It should come with a price tag associated with it.
Alternatively, of govt as well feel that workers are needed back in the office, all of the above expenses should be allowed to claim back during taxation.
My simple question is how fair is it for workers to pay for the luxury choices made by their respective employers?
[+] [-] o_nate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] observer987|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|2 years ago|reply
Like this is the smart persons problem, being successful at one thing, does not make you an expert on any number of other things.
For example, being an AI luminary does not make your opinion on working conditions or or cars, or whatever else you happen to have an opinion on.
[+] [-] danielbln|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|2 years ago|reply
Having spent a considerable number of hours in the last year explicitly doing work with / training junior staff... That's just silly.
Start open streams of your work. Give short presentations. Invite junior people when you do something interesting. It's really not a lot of effort and in-person is definitely not required.
[+] [-] AHOHA|2 years ago|reply
Sounds like a poor management style to me
[+] [-] pdonis|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, when I look at Altman's track record as a pundit (as opposed to as a startup developer), this kind of schoolboy error is what I usually see.
[+] [-] ripvanwinkle|2 years ago|reply
The above line seems to contradict the part about '..worst mistake of the tech industry'
[+] [-] yumraj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatyesaid|2 years ago|reply
Article isn't that clear.
[+] [-] gammarator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flangola7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
Who would expect that?
[+] [-] ulizzle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acapybara|2 years ago|reply