[kokanee]

Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.

[Aurornis]

I've been managing remote teams for over a decade. Your management must be doing performance management well. Most remote coworkers and employees I've had have been good, but that was only because the company aggressively pruned people who abused remote work.

Remote job postings attract deadbeats at a higher rate than in-office jobs. There are even New York Times Bestseller books with example scripts of how to negotiate remote work with your boss so you can travel the world, outsource your work to virtual assistants, and respond to e-mails once a week. These people always come in with a "if I get my job done, it shouldn't matter that..." attitude and then they fail to get their job done.

Remote is also the target for the /r/overemployed people who try to get as many jobs as they can and then do as little work as possible at each. Once someone has 3, 4, or more jobs they don't really care if they get fired. They'll string you along with excuses until you let them go. The first time it happens to you, your sense of sympathy overrides your instinct to cut the person and you let them string you along way too long. The 3rd or 4th time you have someone you suspect of abusing remote, you PIP them hard and cut them quickly because you know how much damage and frustration they can bring to the rest of the team.

[SL61]

I think remote work gets increasingly hard to manage the larger a company gets.

My parents both worked for the same Fortune 500 company when COVID hit and the thousands of employees in their branch had to abruptly transition to WFH. Something like 10% of employees just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Lots of people who had been perfectly fine employees in the office ended up getting fired because with WFH they couldn't manage to stay at their desk and get their work done. That division of the company was seriously crippled for about six months.

My own job is with a small business that has been remote-only since before COVID and it's all been great. They've never even needed to "prune" anyone who abused remote work. I guess they're good at determining how reliable someone will be during interviews. We're all adults and there's a high level of trust that we're all doing our jobs, but the team is small enough that it would take a maximum of a single day to notice if someone is slacking.

But when the company gets really large, they sometimes have to manage to the lowest common denominator, and "we're all adults" becomes an increasingly shaky assumption. So I kind of understand where the anti-WFH CEOs are coming from if they were at the helm of a massive company and saw all kinds of chaos during COVID. But I also think small, geographically distributed teams can massively outperform if you hire the right people.

[saagarjha]

There are plenty of books that explain that you can have a Hollywood actor boyfriend too. How many people does this actually happen to successfully?

[xenobeb]

I went into the office for the first time 2 months ago. The worst part was how massively distracting it was.

The people who like going into the office at my work, go in to socialize.

They are bored at home. It literally has nothing to do with being productive.

I am sure this is all a matter of scale though. My place is really small. At the scale of Microsoft I am sure there are thousands of people really gaming the system badly.

[jimbokun]

For some people and some kinds of work, talking to other people is important.

And talking in person is much higher bandwidth for reasons we don’t completely understand.

[mountainriver]

You mean you don’t love the horrible office politics? Where people treat each other terribly to get ahead by any means necessary? Where being “cool” is rewarded instead of actual results?

[ranit]

And remote workers are available for much longer hours than the office workers or comparing to the old times when everybody was in the office.

[drewbitt]

That's the experience I have had too, particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk.

[Aurornis]

> particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk

I mean, that's the point of RTO: These companies want people meeting face to face more and sitting alone at their computers less.

I argue that this means it makes more sense for managers and leaders than ICs as a result.

[mlnj]

Have had the same experience over the last 5 or so years and that too working in early stage startups.

Everyone is free to get their personal lives in order and in turn they organize and execute everything with much more dedication than i've every seen them in a corporate environment.

[basisword]

>> my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.

1. In meetings - working

2. In transit - before and after working hours

3. Having in person chit-chat - working

4. Taking a break - remote workers should also take these

>> I've had the opposite experience

I think it depends on the type of people you're working with. I've found hand-on engineers (i.e. people writing code) are really available and perhaps they shouldn't be. Business-type people are so much more reliably flaky.

[adabyron]

> 3. Having in person chit-chat - working

Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.

Only semi-related but in office at a cubicle is the least productive environment I've ever seen for companies. I cannot personally take a leadership team serious if they care about productivity & fiscal responsibility when they have cubicle farms of more than 10 people in an area.

[tempfile]

Unfortunately this is a strawman. They said remote workers were more available than in-office workers. Not that in-office workers weren't working when they were unavailable.