After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion:
* Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.
* In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next".
For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.
TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
true.
> For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2
Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say?
No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...
So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves.
Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself.
Take the call from your desk then?
No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.
My best experiences working remotely—both during the pandemic and with folks in other locations before that—has been with research-oriented work. The reason? We had the time and space to work and communicate the way that made sense to us. We had plenty of shared pair/group sessions to work out design ideas and experiments, iterate on the system, debug trickier issues... etc. Everything else we could do well asynchronously. Since this was longer-term, more speculative work, we didn't have to worry about tickets or product/management breathing down our necks every day.
On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect.
So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.
I think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding.
Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people.
To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.
I don’t think in-person is better if you don’t know what you need to build. I’ve experienced teams where people were totally without direction despite being in-person. I think in-person just makes it easier to look like you are busy when you have no direction, and remote lays the fact bare.
In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build..
Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then?
It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful.
The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
My anecdotal evidence is different.
I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person.
However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day.
So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.
1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity.
2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.
> * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase.
I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.
I suspect what your describing is less the cause but a symptom of the real case.
In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be.
And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.
> implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ?
For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient.
Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace.
Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.
My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s Dilemma” - once a company has found product market fit and is generating profits, everything is fine-tuned for that purpose. The company’s reason for existing is to generate profits from that one thing that really worked out.
Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale.
If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.
How often are entire teams at the same building ? Like the other person mentioned - you're going to meet in conference rooms with video - this was norm pre COVID.
I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.
Your experience matches mine, where yeah, it could work even in situations where it commonly fails if there was "just" better management... but... well, yeah.
EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.
I don't think it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days.
There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold.
IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.
> "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute."
Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above.
While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.
> You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.
OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)
I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?
In person makes no sense for any FAANG, because they are geographically distributed. All you do is come into the office to sit on video calls all day with people in other locations, unless you're at a very low level and your influence is very limited to just your team.
I'm curious if you've considered that there is a pretty major cost difference between the two options? (at least for the company) Would you conclude that In Person is much better , in excess of the additional costs ?
I think that's only one of many models where remote work works out. The other that I've seen function well across many companies is remote work where team members are highly skilled and have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on. This essentially lets every domain expert identify what the biggest pain points are in their field and then figure those out. You don't need top down dictatorship for this to work, but you do need a clear vision of where you want to be.
Quick search on this thread didn't reveal the word "flame" (as in "flame war"), so I can´t resist: That's what the remote vs on-site debate is. About as interesting and ultimately inconclusive as Emacs vs Vi. Neither is universally better. It depends, _primarily_ on the people involved and their preferences. My advice would be to try and work with people that are on the same page about this with you - if possible. If everybody can muster the level of acceptance and respect for their colleagues required to make a hybrid environment work, that'd also do the trick.
What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others.
If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).
It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations.
And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.
Worked from home ~5 of my ~10 years in development.
Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc.
I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving toward being mildly depressed.
Returning to office restored my excitement for my work. I credit my colleagues and the process of working toward a big goal with other people. We really underestimate how important this is for mental health.
If you're in office and you now what I mean, show some love to a fellow co-worker. You gotta admit it's nice to see each other.
After trying both for years I don't really know what we're talking about here.
I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.
Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.
> It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.
A lot of 'management' doesn't build communication or workflows more advanced than that. And when people are never more than a short walk away, they don't have to.
Slack is just the online version of that. A noisy conversation always within earshot. One that you can usually ignore, but should still be a little aware of what's going on overall, and occasionally you get pulled in to the larger conversation.
While I enjoy this whole debate in HN about remote Vs in-person, the point here majority seems to be missing is that the sole attendance is used as a threat for performance review. Effectively a joke. If Google had a problem with people and teams hiding behind a monitor not doing much, I'm sure you can recall a pre-pandemic world where this was also the norm when in the office.
Now that my company has started enforcing RTO, I noticed patterns in some of my colleagues, such as arriving late and leaving early, leaving the laptop in their desk disappearing for a long while, not answering messages for hours with nowhere to be seen, and very vague status updates when asked.
It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.
This is just another form of layoffs, I think. The problem is that many other execs will follow. It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason.
>It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason
There's absolutely a rational reason: many people in management went into management because they enjoy having power over people, and they can have more power over employees who are physically in office.
A friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week.
Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.
I've mentioned this in another WSJ just five days ago:
"For context, Fortune, WSJ, FT, etc. have all been consistently over the past 2 quarters churning out several opinion articles on the topic of remote work."
It is an obvious concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to save commercial real estate investors who were caught with their pants down now that several companies are not renewing leases.
It's not just commercial real estate. Those are all print publications bought as physical products by commuters. They're looking at through-the-floor print sales and panicking.
The correct formula is remote with team summits but FAANG is too cheap and dysfunctional to manage that. Travel is cancelled due to perpetual "headwinds" and the budget is strictly used by high level middle management to bounce around the world and vigorously agree with each other.
"A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”"
It's also being said that HR will get involved if you haven't badged into your designated office in the last 30-60 days. That's the real threat.
There are many people at Google who are splitting their time between their desk location and somewhere else. Some are supercommuters - moving their families to a home in another state and coming back periodically for face-to-face meetings. Others are digital nomads, working remotely part time and on-site part time.
It's unclear if there's a tenable solution for those people.
I put in the last thread that I find having an attendance score rather interesting for a company that is so proud of how well OKRs work for them.
That is, I can see some reasons to want more visibility into what people are working on. And when. That is exactly what they pitch OKRs for solving, for as long as the goal is getting achieved, you don't have to measure other things.
Instead, this is what happens when you have bean counters look at the system. Everything starts looking like a bean to be counted. You can't, with a straight face, tell me that attendance counts, but lines of code doesn't. Or all sorts of other countable things that we all, as an industry, claim to agree is a bad idea to count.
The title is essentially clickbait. From the article:
> Google is the latest company to tighten its return-to-work policies to get workers to commute more often. In an internal email, the company said it could make office attendance an element of an employee’s performance review if they did not comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Why, yes: if you don't come to the office as often as your employer wants you to, you'll get in trouble.
people are getting so hung up on remote vs office as though it's either or.
Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people.
Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.
Well nothing can be done about that, Google's trying to force people back and it's gonna do what it's gonna do. Unless people get together an exert their voice.
Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen.
But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.
Back in the day, Google understood that the reason they offered perks like microkitchens, onsite meals, and so on was that they weren't competing against other companies offering similar perks... They were competing against their own employees, making the decision to work for themselves by freelancing or starting a competing company.
It will be interesting to see how the workforce responds to what appears to be a Google increasingly convinced that their employees are dependent upon them for success.
I attended a HR conference a few months ago with several Fortune 500 company heads of people, etc. Most of the sentiment in the room was that WFH flexibility is valuable but so is collaborative time in office. Some more 'forward-thinking' leaders were all in on remote though it was clear this was the minority.
The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they knew most employees wanted more flexibility. I think most companies will go back to 3 days a week in office and 2 days remote. Remote companies will continue to hold an advantage on attracting talent.
I would strongly suspect a division between hierarchical and egalitarian mindsets on this, and would be fascinated if there's any research on it. My gut suspicion would be that a hierarchical mindset would value exerting control over the outcomes of that control, and that an egalitarian mindset would value giving autonomy over the costs of that autonomy. In fact, I think that's likely to be such a strong influence that haggling over the value of "collaborative time in office" is going to be a fig-leaf over the underlying drivers. Not a small part of that is because when you look at the argument it just falls apart: you can tell me to be in a room with someone else; you can't dictate that the result of that proximity is going to be any sort of useful collaboration. Whereas if I have the flexibility to choose to be in that room when it is useful to both of us and we have something defined to get done, the outcome of that collaboration is far more likely to be positive.
If the argument was about discovery rather than collaboration I'd have far more sympathy, but "we need to force our employees into physical proximity so they'll work together" - which, when you unpack it, is all that is being said - is a more revealing position than the pro-office-mandate crowd might want to lead with.
I think it's relatively well known that heads of people/whatever fancy name HR peeps come up with for themselves are generally sociopathic scumbags, so it's not surprising to me that this was the case.
[+] [-] extr|2 years ago|reply
* Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute.
* In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next".
For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses.
TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.
[+] [-] 72f988bf|2 years ago|reply
true.
> For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2
Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say?
No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO...
So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves.
Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself.
Take the call from your desk then?
No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.
[+] [-] tikhonj|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect.
So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.
[+] [-] beoberha|2 years ago|reply
Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people.
To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.
[+] [-] bart_spoon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|2 years ago|reply
Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then?
It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful.
The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.
[+] [-] angarg12|2 years ago|reply
My anecdotal evidence is different.
I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person.
However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day.
So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|2 years ago|reply
Remote Work is better if
1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity.
2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other.
This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase.
I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.
[+] [-] RHSeeger|2 years ago|reply
In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.
[+] [-] Stranger43|2 years ago|reply
In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be.
And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|2 years ago|reply
I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ?
For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient.
Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace.
Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.
[+] [-] ttul|2 years ago|reply
Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale.
If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.
[+] [-] moonchrome|2 years ago|reply
I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.
[+] [-] majormajor|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.
[+] [-] x86x87|2 years ago|reply
There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold.
IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.
[+] [-] rco8786|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhaynayar|2 years ago|reply
Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above.
While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.
[+] [-] eecc|2 years ago|reply
OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)
[+] [-] datadeft|2 years ago|reply
I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?
[+] [-] jedberg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Etheryte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhd2|2 years ago|reply
What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others.
If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).
[+] [-] jleyank|2 years ago|reply
And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.
[+] [-] rubicon33|2 years ago|reply
Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc.
I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving toward being mildly depressed.
Returning to office restored my excitement for my work. I credit my colleagues and the process of working toward a big goal with other people. We really underestimate how important this is for mental health.
If you're in office and you now what I mean, show some love to a fellow co-worker. You gotta admit it's nice to see each other.
[+] [-] mduggles|2 years ago|reply
I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.
I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.
Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.
[+] [-] dogleash|2 years ago|reply
A lot of 'management' doesn't build communication or workflows more advanced than that. And when people are never more than a short walk away, they don't have to.
Slack is just the online version of that. A noisy conversation always within earshot. One that you can usually ignore, but should still be a little aware of what's going on overall, and occasionally you get pulled in to the larger conversation.
[+] [-] IlPeach|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angarg12|2 years ago|reply
It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choeger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
There's absolutely a rational reason: many people in management went into management because they enjoy having power over people, and they can have more power over employees who are physically in office.
[+] [-] iovrthoughtthis|2 years ago|reply
This is absolutely another form of layoffs. Google get the double benefit of 1) loose head count 2) only keeping dedicated* people.
They do loose people with the highest agency as they will be the first to leave.
* Those dedicated people could also just be most in need.
[+] [-] mylons|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gunshai|2 years ago|reply
Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|2 years ago|reply
"For context, Fortune, WSJ, FT, etc. have all been consistently over the past 2 quarters churning out several opinion articles on the topic of remote work."
It is an obvious concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to save commercial real estate investors who were caught with their pants down now that several companies are not renewing leases.
[+] [-] regularfry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siliconc0w|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinewurst|2 years ago|reply
"A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”"
[+] [-] bsimpson|2 years ago|reply
There are many people at Google who are splitting their time between their desk location and somewhere else. Some are supercommuters - moving their families to a home in another state and coming back periodically for face-to-face meetings. Others are digital nomads, working remotely part time and on-site part time.
It's unclear if there's a tenable solution for those people.
[+] [-] taeric|2 years ago|reply
That is, I can see some reasons to want more visibility into what people are working on. And when. That is exactly what they pitch OKRs for solving, for as long as the goal is getting achieved, you don't have to measure other things.
Instead, this is what happens when you have bean counters look at the system. Everything starts looking like a bean to be counted. You can't, with a straight face, tell me that attendance counts, but lines of code doesn't. Or all sorts of other countable things that we all, as an industry, claim to agree is a bad idea to count.
[+] [-] euiq|2 years ago|reply
> Google is the latest company to tighten its return-to-work policies to get workers to commute more often. In an internal email, the company said it could make office attendance an element of an employee’s performance review if they did not comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Why, yes: if you don't come to the office as often as your employer wants you to, you'll get in trouble.
[+] [-] andyish|2 years ago|reply
Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people.
Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.
[+] [-] quantum_state|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batmaniam|2 years ago|reply
Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen.
But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|2 years ago|reply
It will be interesting to see how the workforce responds to what appears to be a Google increasingly convinced that their employees are dependent upon them for success.
[+] [-] Zaheer|2 years ago|reply
The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they knew most employees wanted more flexibility. I think most companies will go back to 3 days a week in office and 2 days remote. Remote companies will continue to hold an advantage on attracting talent.
We've recently improved our remote filter on Levels.fyi Jobs - give it a try and lmk your feedback as well: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs?workArrangements=remote
[+] [-] regularfry|2 years ago|reply
If the argument was about discovery rather than collaboration I'd have far more sympathy, but "we need to force our employees into physical proximity so they'll work together" - which, when you unpack it, is all that is being said - is a more revealing position than the pro-office-mandate crowd might want to lead with.
[+] [-] _tdd2|2 years ago|reply