[HN Gopher] No evidence that chance meetings in office boosts in...
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No evidence that chance meetings in office boosts innovation
Author : remt
Score : 302 points
Date : 2021-06-24 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| king_magic wrote:
| Personally, I've always felt the "chance
| meeting/collaboration/innovation" argument against remote work is
| total bullshit.
|
| My current fully remote team of the past year is leaps and bounds
| more collaborative and innovative than any of the in-person teams
| I've worked with in office environments for most of my 16 year
| career.
|
| IMO, it's deeply backwards thinking by executives who are scared
| the world is changing.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| I don't think it's executives. A lot of executives in large
| companies don't seem to be in touch enough to really notice if
| most people went remote.
|
| I always assumed it was middle managers who are worried they
| can't justify their jobs if they aren't standing over someone's
| shoulder.
| king_magic wrote:
| Yeah true - I see the same hesitancy at the middle management
| level too.
| kesselvon wrote:
| The "random encounters" thing is always funny to hear from
| executives, because they are rarely anywhere but in back-to-
| back meetings.
| bambax wrote:
| Creativity does not arise spontaneously from chaos, people
| bumping into one another at random. If one thinks of creative
| occupations: composers, writers, painters... one doesn't
| visualize big open offices, but rather a single individual
| concentrating on one job at a time, in silence.
|
| There are writers rooms and painters workshops where workers can
| collaborate on the same project at the same time, but just
| because you run into Linda from accounting or Tom from marketing
| will probably not help your creativity or give you unique
| insights about the problems you are grappling with. A walk in the
| park is more likely to help.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| The benefits probably depend a lot on the size of the company...
| many of these 'serendipitous' conversations I have had were in
| fact network effects, but technological - I accidentally found
| out about someone else's skunkworks project we found useful, or
| some new piece of technology developed just a row or two over we
| never knew about.
|
| I would imagine the is less true in small companies, some because
| of the size, but also because of the homogeneity of focus - you
| have to have a different environment, a different work biome for
| the output to diverge enough to take advantage of this.
| regularfry wrote:
| In a small company you're likely to wear more hats, though, so
| while the focus of the org is smaller, your piece of it is
| bigger.
| ghaff wrote:
| The opposite is true as well. At a large company, spread across
| floor, buildings, and locations, the only in-person
| "serendipitous" conversations you're going to have are with a
| fairly small slice of the company. That seems a pretty shaky
| foundation for innovation to depend on.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| Yeah, one interesting thing in the article was an offhand
| comment about how too much openness actually was
| counterproductive because people put on headphones, so didn't
| actually interact. Here probably, there is a 'right' amount
| of mixing with disparate groups. In the (admittedly only two)
| large groups I've worked in, you really needed to interact
| outside your local group to get anything useful done anyways.
|
| Actually, this reminds of the network effects section of
| 'Where good things come from' (Steven Johnson), which
| actually points out there is a right amount of 'edge' density
| - too little and you don't see outside your local group
| enough for ideas to flow; too much and ideas flow but don't
| tend to die before they can reach critical mass.
| iammisc wrote:
| I hate blanket statements like this. Maybe some people can work
| this way over slack / meets / whatever. I personally cannot. I'd
| rather be in an office. No amount of expert opinion is going to
| change that, for me.
| acheron wrote:
| Great. Don't force everyone else to conform to your
| preferences.
| iammisc wrote:
| I'm not forcing anyone. Right now I see a major push by
| companies to stop using offices for cost savings. The
| incentive for businesses is always to have people WFH.
|
| This externalizes costs for basic infrastructure. If some
| workers want that... that's fine, but I don't.
| tolbish wrote:
| Would you have the same opinion if your company covered
| those expenses or used the savings to pay you a higher
| salary?
| CPLX wrote:
| I have some evidence.
|
| I once had a chance meeting in an office that boosted innovation,
| when I overheard a colleague doing a regular task in a way that
| could be done more efficiently, and communicated this to them.
| I'm sure of it, as it actually happened, and I was there.
|
| I have now, using the awesome power of science, falsified this
| headline.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| i disagree. i used to run into people all of the time in the
| kitchen that provided new insight into problems
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| I'm sorry. This does not constitute a randomized, controlled,
| double-blind study. You cannot know anything until you've
| passed that gantlet. Nothing worth knowing is actually true
| until this step has been achieved.
| ngc248 wrote:
| or in the loo and afterwards while washing hands :).
|
| On a serious note, chance meetings are just one way that
| innovation happens. Not all innovations are created equally
| jmpman wrote:
| At least 2 patent ideas came to me while zoning out in an "all
| hands" meeting. Nothing like the sound of management white noise
| to cause my brain into a fight or flight mode, and the only way
| to escape is through imagination. Harder to do that in a virtual
| "all hands" as you can get called on at any time.
|
| And my daily appreciation of bad coffee. Is that a hint of rust
| and burnt beans I'm tasting?
|
| Those are the only reasons to go into the office.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Companies do so many other things to bury innovation that
| worrying about the lack of spontaneous hallway meetings should be
| item #237.
|
| So many innovations don't get done for lack of authority to spend
| $20 on some Lambda functions or the unwillingness of departments
| to own small things or a need to manage future expectations (I.e
| we can't improve this too much as we can't match that later).
| Encountered all three.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| So true.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > a need to manage future expectations (I.e we can't improve
| this too much as we can't match that later)
|
| Can you elaborate on this (to the extent you can publicly say)?
| I'm curious in what circumstances are companies opting to forgo
| innovations.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The team didn't want to improve too much as they saw no way
| to repeat the improvement so they didn't want to raise the
| bar and be unable to clear it next cycle.
|
| A more concrete example of this was where a friend of mine
| built a system to automate a report and did something in
| record time.
|
| He didn't share it and sat on the report for a few days as he
| wasn't that proficient with SQL at the time so didn't want to
| give the impression that things could be done that quickly
| and make that the expected norm.
|
| So the company itself would have liked the innovation. The
| employees were concerned about the new problematic
| expectations it might create.
| heythere22 wrote:
| https://archive.is/Ro9l4
| languagehacker wrote:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
|
| (disclaimer: I don't want to go back into the office)
| stopnamingnuts wrote:
| This made my day.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to
| gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised
| controlled trials
|
| Not sure this is the study you wanted to link to.
| HPsquared wrote:
| He's referring to the "no evidence that..." statement. Some
| things are difficult to prove by experiment.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| This is a spicy read, thank you for the link.
|
| My favorite bit:
|
| > It is often said that doctors are interfering monsters
| obsessed with disease and power, who will not be satisfied
| until they control every aspect of our lives (Journal of Social
| Science, pick a volume). [...] The widespread use of the
| parachute may just be another example of doctors' obsession
| with disease prevention and their misplaced belief in unproved
| technology to provide effective protection against occasional
| adverse events.
| xyst wrote:
| Wow, if that's all it takes to get published then I will start
| pushing put trash papers to pump my CV.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If you only published joke articles with this level of snark
| I think you'd have a great career.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is an utter classic.
|
| The follow up, where someone actually did conduct a randomized
| controlled trial where people jumped out of airplanes without a
| parachute, is similarly amusing:
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
| amackera wrote:
| I love this, a lot:
|
| > Conclusions: Parachute use did not reduce death or major
| traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first
| randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the
| trial was only able to enroll participants on small
| stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious
| extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding
| the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community,
| randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a
| lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the
| applicability of the results to clinical practice.
| josh_today wrote:
| In line with most of the comments here and to reiterate them with
| my perspective:
|
| Innovation is boosted by creatively thinking development teams
| who are able to efficiently think, design, develop, and deliver
| product which solves challenges for customers who in turn can use
| the newly innovated product to increase profits.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| That really depends on the company culture. When "innovation"
| only flows top-down (execs->PMs->BAs->devs) with no way up then
| yeah. But as a PhD student I can have many more ideas, and of
| higher quality, during a half-hour lunch break with colleagues
| compared to a whole day thinking by myself - and I have the
| freedom to pursue any of those ideas on my own terms.
| xwolfi wrote:
| How much money are you making vs cost, on implementing your
| innovations?
|
| In a big company, you increase the bottom line by millions by
| profiling a 10 yo application for a few days, the exact
| opposite of innovation (studying someone else's old crap).
|
| So dream and pursue, but when you want to build, expect to
| grind a bit.
| greesil wrote:
| Yes but what is your profiler is a piece of crap, and the
| innovation is to modify it to suit your needs better? And,
| you take that engineer out to lunch who knows the most about
| it and pick their brains and come up with ideas.
| greesil wrote:
| Lunchtime with colleagues is always the best for making silly
| ideas workable. If anything, the open office plan discourages
| conversation because shhhh some people are actually trying to
| get work done.
| leetrout wrote:
| Exactly this. Open floor plans always punished me for
| gathering folks around my whiteboard and talking through
| things and bantering like we would at the water cooler and
| companies want things to be as quiet as a library
| curun1r wrote:
| I've said this in other threads on this topic, but shared
| lunches are so important. There's something about eating
| together that taps into our primitive brains and creates an
| entirely different dynamic. It's like we subconsciously see
| the people we eat with as part of our tribe.
|
| Lunch is, IMHO, the biggest loss when going full remote. It's
| also somewhat of a magic bullet for fixing individual
| communication breakdowns. As a manager, when you see two
| people failing to coordinate, especially across teams, just
| have them eat a few lunches together. Offering to have the
| company pay is usually enough to make it happen. For a few
| tens of dollars, you establish a relationship with very low
| communication friction. It's ridiculously good value for the
| company.
| pitched wrote:
| https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/jhN7nc
| frumper wrote:
| this site is amazing, thank you for sharing
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| As remote becomes more normal, I bet "scientific consensus" will
| shift to favoring it as well. Funny how the science follows the
| status quo ;)
| [deleted]
| ferdowsi wrote:
| > "The idea you can only be collaborative face-to-face is a
| bias," he said. "And I'd ask, how much creativity and innovation
| have been driven out of the office because you weren't in the
| insider group, you weren't listened to, you didn't go to the same
| places as the people in positions of power were gathering?"
|
| This is exactly it; this whole near-mystical thinking about
| "hallway conversations" isn't encouraging serendipitous
| innovation, it's encouraging the political gamesmanship that
| businesses have been accustomed to.
|
| I think that we will look back at the billions/trillions spent on
| office space in the world's most expensive cities as one of the
| biggest misallocations of capital in history.
| weimerica wrote:
| > This is exactly it; this whole near-mystical thinking about
| "hallway conversations" isn't encouraging serendipitous
| innovation, it's encouraging the political gamesmanship that
| businesses have been accustomed to.
|
| I would have to push back in that, in my experience, those just
| turn into private off-the-record chat groups among the in-group
| - and that this is something of an innate part of the human
| tribalism that cannot and will not be suppressed.
| brnt wrote:
| > I think that we will look back at the billions/trillions
| spent on office space in the world's most expensive cities as
| one of the biggest misallocations of capital in history.
|
| Status symbols _are_ an efficient allocation of capital, for a
| select few.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >think that we will look back at the billions/trillions spent
| on office space in the world's most expensive cities as one of
| the biggest misallocations of capital in history
|
| What was the alternative?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Invent multiway video calling 150 years ago, of course.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It can work both ways: people playing games can potentially
| divide and conquer audiences more easily in video calls.
| pitched wrote:
| I've noticed this too. It's a lot easier to talk about
| someone behind their back if you're behind a locked, sound-
| proof door (which is what Zoom meetings are).
|
| It feels a lot to me like the "Old Boys' Clubs" are stronger
| remote, not weaker, because of this. They don't have to hide
| biases when remote, it's hidden by default.
| andreilys wrote:
| Depends on the company, but I've observed that information
| now flows a lot freely because of public Slack channels and
| documents.
|
| Before there was a lot of tribal knowledge, and side
| conversations but now the level of transparency has
| increased dramatically.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Their respective permissions models mean Confluence and
| Slack made information more available, while Teams and
| SharePoint make it less available.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| 100% true. I think we're still collectively in a honeymoon
| phase with remote work. Yes, we know it has its benefits,
| but also has numerous insidious downsides, including
| further insulating and reinforcing existing groups within a
| company. One way to combat this specifically though is if
| everyone is remote.
| majormajor wrote:
| > "And I'd ask, how much creativity and innovation have been
| driven out of the office because you weren't in the insider
| group, you weren't listened to, you didn't go to the same
| places as the people in positions of power were gathering?"
|
| How does remote work avoid insider groups, or people not being
| listened to, or meetings you aren't invited to?
| [deleted]
| LordHumungous wrote:
| I don't have evidence to back it up, but I believe that the
| ability to use a whiteboard boosts innovation.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > the ability to use a whiteboard boosts innovation
|
| Beneath this simple statement is a career's worth of questions
| worth investigating. Oral and written communication are just
| two modes of conveying information and sharing ideas. Edward
| Tufte, for example, has made his career in exploring other
| modes, neatly summed up in the title of his most famous work,
| "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".
|
| Engaging the visual/spatial functions of the brain, even if you
| can't draw more than wobbly trapezoids and shaky, uneven lines,
| can enrich thinking in ways I don't think we fully understand.
|
| I'm not sure what all the barriers are to an inexpensive shared
| whiteboarding tool that's as natural and effortless as a dry-
| erase pen on a whiteboard. Everything we have now feels
| unnatural without a lot of practice, is far too clunky to be
| worth the effort, and/or is too expensive and flakey.
|
| I think part of it is that they begin with a draw/paint tool,
| rather than cutting it down to the extreme simplicity of
| whiteboard. Would whiteboarding be as popular and useful if you
| had to pick up a "draw a square" tool, then switch to "draw a
| line" tool? Can we make the pad/stylus for "draw lines" have
| better haptics and a more natural hand/eye connection?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I suspect it may even be the opposite. When offices rely
| primarily on social networks as their source of creativity, it
| means that you've got to be well-integrated into the social
| network in order to successfully promote your ideas. This creates
| a major risk of curtailing contributions from anybody that isn't
| buddy-buddy with folks on the hierarchy.
|
| If, as is the case at most places I've worked, this hierarchy is
| dominated by upper middle class white men, this may have the
| effect of severely limiting the company's ability to make good
| use of the creativity of a large portion of its staff.
|
| I haven't worked anywhere that does this, but I strongly suspect
| that a company with a more organized approach to incubating ideas
| would be able to do so more successfully. It would put the
| company in a better position to mitigate this and many other ways
| that good ideas slip through the cracks.
| visarga wrote:
| Your ideas could have stood up on their own without the jab at
| "upper middle class white men". When you judge groups like
| that, you put too much diversity into a little box guaranteeing
| bad conclusions.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's not a jab; it's a simple statement of fact. That's what
| I've seen in my (entirely US-based) career so far. And I'm
| not personally the kind of person who's interested in
| euphemism and beating around the bush purely for the sake of
| euphemism and beating around the bush.
|
| Note that what I was suggesting was not anything like,
| "Ignore white dudes and only talk to everyone else." I was
| saying, "A less informal system may be less impenetrable to
| people from other social backgrounds." Presumably, in such a
| situation, white men would still tend to be a plurality of
| voices, because that's just how the workforce demographics
| work out in the US. But, even given that, why _wouldn 't_ you
| want to make sure you're also doing a good job of giving full
| voice to folks who come from the other 2/3 of the population?
| Even if we frame it in purely mercenary terms, wantonly
| underutilizing employees' talents is probably bad for
| business. And relying on invisible, socialization-based
| mechanisms tends to have a poor track record in that
| department.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > In a survey by Future Forum, a research group at Slack, Black
| office workers were more likely than white workers to say they
| preferred remote work, because it reduced the need for code-
| switching (changing behavior in different contexts) and increased
| their sense of belonging at work.
|
| On the flip side, people used to talk about how people without
| spacious houses were disadvantaged by zoom because they didn't
| have dedicated home office space. These comments were typically
| paired with observations that minorities were disproportionally
| affected in this way.
| judwaite wrote:
| How does the cost compare to single use plastics? This is the
| only question that matters. These innovations are a dime a dozen.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| I wonder how this scales to a level of a city. Large cities tend
| to have larger innovation, which is partially attributed to the
| ease at which ideas can move between companies through job
| changes, serendipitious encounters, and a build-up of local
| business infrastructure.
|
| Would these sorts of agglomerative effects still occur in cities,
| if remote work is the norm and people don't have to be so
| concentrated? Or might these effects be amplified at the national
| level, because people can communicate more freely? I'm interested
| to see how this plays out over the next years.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This article is heavy on quotes but very light on actual data.
| This is a trend that I see in media (mainstream and otherwise),
| where they take something that is by nature very difficult to
| study, find some researchers or limited studies that fit their
| narrative, and then report it as gospel. It's really not that
| hard as a reporter to essentially start with the conclusion you
| want to end with and then to back into that with cherry picking
| supporting research.
|
| And I _really_ take issue with the racial angle that feels like
| it is basically part of every single NYT article these days. A
| lot of the issues reported here feel valid, but just zooming back
| out (maybe pun intended?) for a second, this reporter seems to be
| arguing that actual face-to-face interactions are so fraught with
| racism that minorities need to be "protected" by remote work to
| be on equal footing. If that _is_ the case then we should address
| the root cause, not put everyone in their home office "safe
| space".
|
| And to clarify, I'm not even commenting on the pros/cons of in-
| person interactions. I'm just commenting on yet another media
| piece that cherry picks some research and quotes to make their
| own opinion sound like it has more backing than it actually does.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Does it require scientific study? If your company has their
| shit together then they already have data on how this affects
| their bottom line. Ask the people who work in that area then.
| It's not "science" but it's not useless either.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does it require scientific study?_
|
| Yes. There are smart people with compelling anecdotes on both
| sides of the debate.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I was more talking about the article itself. Does it
| require a scientific study to poll experts and distill into
| an article?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's a good thing to study it scientifically, but
| also to be extremely conservative in the application of
| results. Some _very_ thorny problems just off the top of my
| head:
|
| 1. Monitoring/counting "spontaneous interactions" is
| extremely difficult.
|
| 2. Simple "counting" of spontaneous interactions seems like
| exactly the wrong approach, because one would probably
| expect that 99% of interactions would be mundane but then
| 1% would be important.
|
| 3. How do you define "innovation"?
|
| 4. One might suspect that the benefits of in-person
| interaction would show up on longer timescales rather than
| shorter timescales. For example, this article is long on
| pointing out that how in-person interactions can be
| detrimental to minorities and women, but my opinion (not
| fact, just opinion) is that basically all of my closest
| business connections were formed in person. Now that I'm
| late in my career remote vs. in-person is not as critical
| to me because I have a strong network, but right out of
| college it was critical, and my career would have suffered
| greatly had I not forged those relationships early. I got
| _every single_ one of my jobs after my first through my
| network that started in my first job (not necessarily
| directly, but often times through the "hey, I heard from
| someone they are looking for XYZ, and I heard you might be
| looking" channel).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > basically part of every single NYT article these days
|
| I don't even click on NYT articles any more (and no, I didn't
| read this article either, just curious about the comment
| section).
| hnews_account_1 wrote:
| There is only one agenda in this article, which is that return
| to work is an oppressive measure imposed by CEOs on employees.
| The NYT writes _exactly_ what will sell. You and I are simply
| not its audience. The racism etc is just being co opted.
|
| They want all their middle income job readers to feel comforted
| by the arguments made and studies cited. It's a shitty
| transition to go back to an office. I'm sure a lot of
| workplaces are going to abuse that notion and provide very bad
| workspaces. But you generalize on scale for such topics only
| when you know your audience is absolutely not discerning.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > The NYT writes exactly what will sell. You and I are simply
| not its audience.
|
| The amount of articles about living in tiny apartments (not
| to say pods), eating bugs and renting as opposed to owning is
| just disturbing. The way they all happen at the same time and
| seem to answer issues raised by other articles by other
| publications is just scary.
| kesselvon wrote:
| It might be the narrative but it's not incorrect. It's just
| another front in the continual war between labor and
| management
| spookthesunset wrote:
| "Labor vs. management?" Tech workers get paid salaries that
| literally put them in the 1% income bracket. Like give me a
| break people. We do work. Work isn't all roses and
| sunshine.
|
| I always suspected tech people live in an extremely
| privileged bubble but holy cow did this last year really
| open my eyes to how detached they are.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I don't think most tech workers are "literally in the 1%"
| if you look at it by average income in the area where
| they work, and if you don't assume Google L6 as typical
| of a software engineer. There are plenty of product
| managers, lawyers, business people, HR, etc that are
| making salaries similar to software engineers, often the
| same or more, and often being able to go home at 5 on a
| regular basis.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| What a grossly unnuanced view of tech workers. We're not
| all in the 1%. Tech salaries cover a very wide range.
| Some of us have to do 80+ hours weeks during months long
| crunches. Do not put down people's efforts to improve
| their working conditions just because you're fine with
| yours.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Tech salaries cover a very wide range. Some of us have
| to do 80+ hours weeks during months long crunches.
|
| Sounds like it's time to switch company or location!
| frockington1 wrote:
| Seconding the other comment, its time to find a new job.
| There is no reason you should be putting up with that in
| the current job market
| UncleMeat wrote:
| And Google made 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019.
| So despite getting paid oodles of money, engineers are
| still failing to capture the full value of their labor.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The highest paid tech worker is still closer in class to
| the janitor than they are to the VCs paying their salary,
| even if they think themselves better than both.
| gnicholas wrote:
| It's true that the salary of a tech worker making
| $400k/yr is closer to that of a janitor making $40k/yr
| than it is to a VC making $4m/yr.
|
| However, the lifestyle of the $400k/yr worker is probably
| closer in most important aspects to that of the VC than
| the janitor. Both drive expensive cars, live in expensive
| houses, and can set up their kids for success. They don't
| worry about the cost of food (even organic/local/etc.) or
| worry much about health care.
|
| Put another way, there are probably some $40k/yr janitors
| who would give their left arms to be making $400k/yr. But
| I doubt there are any $400k/yr tech workers who would
| give their left arm to be making $4m/yr.
| acchow wrote:
| I think the concept you're looking for is "discretionary
| income", which I do believe the VC may have 20x more
| discretionary than the tech worker, who may have 50x more
| discretionary income than the janitor.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > But I doubt there are any tech workers who would give
| their left arm to be making $4m/yr
|
| I'm a software dev, I don't make 6 figures. I'd probably
| give my left arm to make $4m/year, I could afford a robot
| arm with that I'm sure.
|
| $4m/year means I could retire before I'm 40 and live the
| rest of my life with the lifestyle I have now with
| comfort. Even missing an arm that sounds way better than
| toiling in software for another 25-30 years.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The majority of tech workers are not making $400k/year.
| gnicholas wrote:
| For sure. GP made a claim about the highest-paid tech
| workers, and I responded to that claim.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I meant to imply a range that peaks at the highest. Maybe
| that construction isn't as common and implicit as I
| thought.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah I figured you didn't mean the actual highest paid
| individual, and from past HN discussions I've seen that
| there are some folks making over $500k/yr at FAANG. I
| picked $400k because it's not uncommon for that to be the
| total comp for mid-career FAANG tech worker. But I could
| be wrong -- I'm a bootstrapped founder who used to be a
| Silicon Valley lawyer, so my information comes from
| friends or HN discussions.
| [deleted]
| eweise wrote:
| Most tech work is not close to the 1% income bracket
| which for California its $659,503. Its probably around
| $100K.
| guenthert wrote:
| > Tech workers get paid salaries that literally put them
| in the 1% income bracket.
|
| Don't be silly. Well earning tech workers in SV make it
| into the top 15% (at the lower end its difficult to
| purchase a home where they work). Top 1% would be
| >$500k/a for a household, which is exceptionally rare for
| a techie. Not everyone is a rock-star developer working
| for Uber.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > at the lower end its difficult to purchase a home where
| they work
|
| If the upper crust high income tech dudes are priced out
| of housing in their own city... imagine what it must be
| like to not be a SV tech worker living in those cities?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Hell. It's horrible.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Which is why the upper crust tech workers and the non
| tech workers have more in common than they think.
| xtracto wrote:
| You are completely right, considering only the USA, to be
| Top 1% you should earn $308,558 a year according to
| https://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/
|
| Now, for the world, you've got to make $58,000 USD yearly
| to be in the 1%
|
| https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-
| am-i?income=...
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _Top 1% would be >$500k/a for a household, which is
| exceptionally rare for a techie_
|
| You're comparing individuals to households. You're right
| that not many tech workers make $500k/yr, but you're
| comparing that _individual_ salary against the top 1% of
| _household_ incomes.
|
| Plenty of tech workers make $250k/yr and are married to
| people who make similar wages in tech/law/medicine/etc.
| That's not to say that most tech workers live super
| comfortable lives, especially in costly areas like SF/SV.
| But it's not appropriate to look at the salary of single
| workers and compare it to household income statistics.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Plenty of tech workers
|
| Would like to see the actual numbers of that. It
| certainly _feels_ right, that high earners would self-
| select for high earning partners, but wondering what the
| reality is. It also _feels_ like there are more single
| tech workers than married couples.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Maybe top 10% for the vast majority. There are also alot
| who are paid less.
| Frondo wrote:
| There isn't a tech labor salary on the planet that would
| make me suddenly be comfortable with at-will labor -- no
| matter how much they're paying me, when they can pull the
| plug at any time and I have no process to seek recourse,
| that's not right.
|
| If I'm giving up my one non-fungible resource, my time,
| it had better come with protections beyond the smile of
| the manager who insists they've got my back when they're
| really looking for the right place to stick the knife; if
| you haven't been burned by that one, that too is a kind
| of, as you put it, extreme privilege.
| ysavir wrote:
| So if I want to go back to working in an office, does that
| automatically make me a manager? I should ask for a raise.
|
| While there might be a "war" between people that want to
| continue WFH and people wanting to return for an office,
| portraying it as "management vs labor" is unfair to many,
| many people who are part of the conversation.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The topic is not management vs. labor, but how it's
| explored is certainly that way. You're pro-office, say
| your management wants to get rid of the lease and make it
| completely remote. Do you get a chance to weigh in
| against that? Either way, the mechanics of this topic,
| like so many others, is disproportionately weighed in
| favor of management.
| hnews_account_1 wrote:
| This is what happens when you do not translate what you
| have read into the right context. There is always a
| stratification in the society and injustices arise due to
| it. Such a broad statement however, is not useful for
| actually understanding society. Labour constitution in 2021
| is vaaaaaaaastly different from that of 1921 (I cannot add
| enough a's to emphasize how vast).
|
| Further, there is no point delving into that entire
| argument when you have just made up this strawman and
| inserted it into a conversation about workplace attendance
| requirements. You assume that broader context applies
| directly to this problem. It does not. The person who wants
| you back in office, in many cases, is your immediate
| manager. Is he also "management" when he has is only one
| degree closer to the CEO on a (generally) 6-7 step ladder?
| Or did you just transpose workplace hierarchy from the days
| of factory work and just make a go with it because you
| cannot be bothered to tax your brain to see how it is
| entirely different? I'd wager it's the latter.
| pnutjam wrote:
| As a racially ambiguous guy with a white name and who sounds
| "white"; I've definitely seen how remote interactions are
| better. People react in subtly different ways.
| kbuchanan wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. I can't help but feel with each new
| article like this that many journalists are watching _their own
| WFH opportunities_ slip from their fingers.
|
| (FWIW, I'm a fan of fully remote companies; this article just
| doesn't pass as anything but opinion.)
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Work is work, my dudes. And in a tech company that means
| teamwork and collaboration.
|
| I don't care what anybody says, zoom and slack are not even
| remotely close to face to face interactions. Sure it may not
| always seem that way to a developer who just wants to write
| code and not care about anything else, but there are lots of
| important roles besides developer in any tech company worth
| its weight. Not many of those roles are very amenable to
| working from home full time. Even developers working on a
| team, I'd argue, can't contribute 100% working purely from
| home. Good developers do way more than just write code. They
| mentor, help shape the product with UX and business people,
| etc. All that requires face time.
|
| If devs want to work remote, I highly recommend becoming a
| contractor / consultant. Remote and contract work go together
| like peas and carrots. You get fed largely spec'd work, don't
| really need to care about office politics, etc... There are
| plenty of cons... you also become your own collection agency
| cause dudes can take months paying you. But if remote is what
| you want, contracting is the best.
|
| Anyway, this became kind of a ramble.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I cannot agree with your thesis. There are fully remote
| companies (using Zoom and Slack primarily) with hundreds of
| people generating well over $100M in ARR worth billions of
| dollars. You are free to your opinion, but the data doesn't
| support your conclusion. Teamwork and collaboration can and
| does work fully remote, whether you're in engineering,
| bizops, product, or customer experience. Entire legacy
| enterprises went remote virtually overnight due to COVID
| and continued to hum along for well over 15 months.
|
| Remote skills are the new "computer skills." If your org
| sucks, yeah, remote isn't going to work. That's not an
| issue with a remote operating model, it's because your org
| sucks to begin with (whether that's due to ineffective line
| managers, failure of executive leadership to cultivate the
| appropriate culture, what have you). If your org sucks, I
| recommend voting with your feet.
| jclardy wrote:
| I'd also say that this past year was a bad example of
| remote. Of course remote isn't going to work for an org
| that is used to everyone in office up until March 2020.
| You break everyone out of so many habits - no more
| commute time, no more prepared food, no more
| professionally cleaned workspace, no "built-in" work/home
| separation. Those factors alone are going to bottom out
| productivity while people figure things out.
|
| Remote really requires a specific type of person, and a
| curated environment. Having a "place' separated just for
| work is a huge boon, and many people used to going into
| an office just don't have that. I think that is
| ultimately why orgs built around remote work perfectly
| fine - the people working there are already in the habit
| of creating their work/home separation, used to making
| their own meals, used to keeping their own desk clean
| (Without outside social pressure to do so.)
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Yes there are some remote only companies and it works for
| them. Like most of life it is hard to determine if they
| are outliers or something meaningful. I mean I could
| point to Yahoo, who yanked back all their remote work
| because people were slacking off.
|
| Not all companies are gonna be remote only. If you want
| fully remote, go find a place that is fully remote. They
| have existed for quite some time.
|
| Personally I think we are gonna rapidly revert right back
| to the mean, which is what life was like back in 2019.
| The idea that this last year is somehow gonna usher in a
| new age of remote work is... wishful thinking. Tech
| companies invest a ton onto their office experience.
| There is a reason for that.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yahoo didn't pull back workers because they were
| slacking, it was because Marissa Mayer didn't know how to
| manage, which is clear from how she managed Yahoo right
| into the ground.
|
| https://distantjob.com/blog/yeah-but-yahoo-learning-from-
| rem...
|
| > Which brings us to the ban on remote working. Mayer
| took over as CEO at Yahoo! in July 2012, so calling
| everyone into the office in February wasn't a knee-jerk
| reaction. The memo, authored by Jackie Reses, says, 'Some
| of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and
| cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu
| team meetings.' In other words, this is the old water
| cooler myth rearing it's ugly head again.
|
| > It wasn't just regular remote workers who got asked to
| stay in the office. The email also targeted those who
| stayed at home when needed, 'for the rest of us who
| occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please
| use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration.'
| For whatever reason, Mayer had decided that she wanted
| her staff in the offices at all times.
|
| With regards to reverting back to the mean, I wish you
| the best if you're trying to attract talent. They have
| options now.
| pram wrote:
| I don't disagree with your analysis, but iirc (its been
| awhile) this was pretext for (essentially) a stealth
| layoff
|
| It seems extra hostile and punitive because they didn't
| necessarily want people to actually "come back"
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > Mayer had decided that she wanted her staff in the
| offices at all times.
|
| And when she had a baby, she had Yahoo build a nursery
| for herself in the office, to give an extra Fuck You to
| all her employees. Mayer was a Machiavellian corporate
| climber from her first job out of college as Larry Page's
| Girlfriend at Google and getting installed as a senior
| exec before doing any substantial work of any kind.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Yeah and we still have video conferencing in remote world. I'm
| not sure why racism would cease to be an issue over zoom.
| truffdog wrote:
| Do people still turn their video on? I feel like it has been
| months for my team.
| sneak wrote:
| It bothers me a lot that the paper of record has declined so
| much in quality since I've been watching. As someone who loves
| New York and worked every day right across 40th st, it hurts my
| heart.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I think all forms of journalism essentially started to die as
| soon as pay per click marketing was created. Its all just a
| war for eyeballs and ad dollars now; content is irrelevant
| outside of those parameters.
| throwkeep wrote:
| To illustrate how easy it is to inject a racial angle into
| anything, here's Brandeis University on why "picnic" is
| oppressive language:
|
| https://www.brandeis.edu/parc/accountability/oppressivelangu...
|
| [edit] They just removed it. Here's what they had previously:
| https://archive.is/NR0Zj
| lallysingh wrote:
| Picnic's not on the list?
| bumbledraven wrote:
| It's in a snapshot from earlier today:
| https://archive.is/NR0Zj
|
| > The term picnic is often associated with lynchings of
| Black people in the United States, during which white
| spectators were said to have watched while eating,
| referring to them as picnics or other terms involving
| racial slurs against Black people.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| Snopes disagrees, maybe why they removed it:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/picnic-origin/
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The "rule of thumb" etymology is also bullshit but it's
| still there: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-
| xpm-1998-04-17-19981070...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Wow, they literally must have just changed this, I looked
| like 30 mins ago and it was there.
| astrange wrote:
| This is why you should always wait a week before reacting
| to news stories, they usually take care of themselves.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I can't believe this nonsense. This is Maoist at the core -
| it's requiring everything in our language and culture to be
| re-examined under a petty lens and for what? To appease
| people who could possibly complain about something? To me it
| sounds like cultural decay - when life is too good and
| consumer good are in abundance, petty people have to come up
| with new problems and dragons to slay to justify their
| $60,000 administrator salaries.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Lol, even the phrase "Trigger warning" is too triggering!
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Hallway conversations are exclusionary by their very nature.
| It's biased towards extroverts who have access to the physical
| levers of having their ideas heard (location, same office
| space). It encourages the loudest, most gregarious, most "in"
| people in the room to spread their ideas above others.
| database_lost wrote:
| I don't fully agree, as a more quiet person I don't feel
| excluded... Sometimes listening in to a conversation is
| enough, and in my experience people tend to group together
| such that everyone ends up chiming in their opinion...
| stcredzero wrote:
| Introverts are supposed to be better at quieter, more deeply
| introspective one on one conversations. That's a different
| class of serendipitous face to face interactions, but one
| which may be just as valuable, or even more so.
|
| Think Lex Friedman in a one-on-one vs. Joe Rogan with 2
| guests at the same time.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >access to the physical levers of having their ideas heard
| (location, same office space)
|
| Well, yeah. If you can't bothered to be in the same place as
| the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that
| having their time and attention isn't important to you.
|
| As Aaron Burr in "Hamilton" so put it, you have to be in the
| room where it happens.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the
| people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that
| having their time and attention isn't important to you.
|
| Untrue. My DMs are open.
| astrange wrote:
| Ironically this place doesn't have DMs.
| luffapi wrote:
| If someone's attention in the hallway is required for
| business success, it means the process and culture of the
| company are both broken. Ad hoc conversation are not how
| you run a scalable business.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| So what is the alternative? Reams of halfway updated
| internal wiki pages and heavyweight google docs?
|
| I mean the agile manifesto is all about human
| interaction. People over process. Face to face
| conversation over piles of stale documents.
|
| Are we done with agile? Is it time to embrace the
| waterfall?
|
| http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
| luffapi wrote:
| We are absolutely done with Agile. It's always been a
| failure.
|
| Alternatives to hallway conversations in increasing
| depth:
|
| * slack message
|
| * email
|
| * README.md
|
| * RFC
|
| * Business plan
|
| Plus there's always zoom or the phone if you really want
| to shoot the shit.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| You can't shoot the shit over zoom. Ever tried? It is
| super awkward.
|
| Slack is good for easy questions where you already know
| how to convert your thoughts into words. If you don't
| because your thoughts are currently encoded visually...
| slack (or any online medium) doesn't work. In the real
| world I would almost always abandon the slack
| conversation and go visit the person / people.
|
| Email is crap for communication, at least for my working
| style.
|
| The rest are okay when you've got a lot of clarity
| already but not so hot when you are very early in the
| ideation phases.
|
| All of your substitutes are significantly lower
| bandwidth, much more latent mediums.
|
| You can't replace face time with online. You just can't.
| luffapi wrote:
| I'd take zoom over a hallway conversation any day. I'm at
| home and comfortable with Zoom. I've had to dress up and
| commute to have that hallway conversation. In an office
| you'll also be pressured for your reserved room or you're
| literally in a hallway next to the bathrooms while you're
| talking. Not good environments for communication.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| All the arguments I hear for remote work revolve around
| the comfort of the individual developer. That's great but
| companies are more than just individual developers. They
| are teams working together to build things that
| individuals couldn't build alone.
|
| I've long held that the secret to FAANG company success
| wasn't their technical prowess or even their products. Is
| that they have superior software development processes.
| Their secret sauce is their process. Companies with
| shitty offices, crappy untrusting management, and
| heavyweight processes get beat by those with processes
| similar to FB or Google.
|
| You'll note that all the companies in FAANG invest a shit
| ton into their office experiences... well except Amazon.
|
| Give it a year and life will look much as it did back in
| 2019.
| luffapi wrote:
| Companies need individual developers because without them
| no one would write the code. We've seen a million
| articles about the developer shortage. It's not about
| what the company wants, it's about what the developer
| wants.
|
| For instance, I would never work in an office again and
| because there is a developer shortage, that requirement
| hasn't impacted my market rate, which is on par for the
| valley.
|
| Having worked at one of the FAANGs I would definitely not
| say they have a superior development process. Waaaaay too
| much middle management baggage and drag. They are
| successful due to first mover advantages, network
| effects, regulatory capture and in some cases a literal
| monopoly.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > They are successful due to first mover advantages
|
| Zero of the FAANG companies had a first mover advantage.
|
| * Facebook replaced MySpace within the course of like a
| year. Today TikTok and other things threaten them.
|
| * Apple... well... it was for a long time a huge
| underdog.
|
| * Amazon... born in the dot com era. At the time lots of
| people thought the company was gonna implode any day. It
| took like a decade before they even remotely generated
| something other than a loss.
|
| * Netflix... was DVD's, competed against brick & mortor
| and companies like Kozmo. Today it competes with media
| companies offering their own streaming service.
|
| * Google... plenty of search engines came before google.
|
| Not sure how any of these companies became successful
| because of regulatory capture, network effects or even
| literal monopolies. None of these companies could be
| successful in the long haul if their products sucked.
| Building non-sucky products involves a hell of a lot more
| than just developers sitting at home writing code 24/7.
| Success involves building successful processes that
| encourage innovation.
| luffapi wrote:
| Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage. As
| does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps...
|
| Network effects are all over the place, mainly FB and
| Google.
|
| > _Success involves building successful processes that
| encourage innovation._
|
| For the most part, large companies "innovate" via
| acquisition.
| astrange wrote:
| > Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage.
| As does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps...
|
| The Hiptop/Sidekick and Palm Pilots were already popular
| long before the iPhone came out. They just weren't nearly
| as good and the companies couldn't overcome the carriers'
| poor business plans.
| luffapi wrote:
| Apple were first movers with capacitive touch screens.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Sounds like you are not capable of distilling or
| synthesising your ideas.
|
| If you can't take a step back and make a paragraph, and
| instead attempt to just bombard others with your thought-
| stream and let them sort it out, then maybe YOU are the
| problem - face-to-face or not.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| given that most, if not all, large companies have
| dysfunctional culture, your conclusion does not hold
| water.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Well that's one of the consequences of not having a
| _water cooler_ ;-)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the
| people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that
| having their time and attention isn't important to you.
|
| As an introvert, I flip that around. If I have to engage in
| social games to improve things, I am instead just not going
| to bother and will confine my ideas to my conversations
| with co-workers laughing at inefficiencies and failures.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Telling people about your idea is not a social game.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Getting people to listen to your idea if they're not
| seeking it out is 100% a social game. Getting in the room
| is a social game. If you value the opinions of your
| introverts, ask them.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This has not been my experience. Introverts or Extroverts
| has nothing to do with whether someone will champion an
| idea. That's a doer / talker distinction.
|
| You have to be effective in managing people. Maybe some
| people like to socialize an idea in their in group before
| they find someone to champion it. Maybe others like to
| write up their thoughts and share the doc on chat. Maybe
| others like to whiteboard it out after talking to someone
| at the bar.
|
| But all of them actively push change.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Right, at least for some people. Still, a lot of
| environments don't really support all those options for
| pushing change. If you're running an organization, you're
| hamstringing yourself if the ways to push ideas that
| introverts find natural are dead ends in practice.
| SolonIslandus wrote:
| So in a world full of introverts no ideas would ever be
| shared?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| That's like dismissing programming as "computer game".
| It's not a "game" if it's how the real work gets done.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Programming is one component of how the "real work" gets
| done, yes. There is plenty of very real work that happens
| before and after the developer writes code.
|
| That being said, developers are in a very unique position
| because they are the ones who actually build the product.
| If you can't sell your devs on an idea, it ain't getting
| built.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >If you value the opinions of your introverts, ask them.
|
| This may be an uncharitable reading of what you said, but
| you're implying that introverts are special fragile
| people who can't be bothered to share their brilliant
| ideas.
|
| If someone comes up with an idea, and they think it's a
| good idea, it's _their responsibility_ to advocate for
| it. They 're already that idea's #1 fan. They're uniquely
| motivated to get it out in the world. How can they get
| others to take them seriously when they can't even take
| the initiative to share it themselves?
|
| Sure, maybe some people are true solitary geniuses. But
| that's a waste of genius if they can't effectively
| communicate their thoughts with other humans.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| There's a whole range of soliciting information that goes
| from "Beat the information out of them" to "Ask a person
| individually" to "Ask people as group" to "Allow
| information to be given" to "Discourage people from
| telling you things" to "Yell at people who talk to you
| without you asking them first".
|
| Depending on your approach, you'll get differing amounts
| of information from different people. A more charitable
| reading of the post you replied to might be: You
| shouldn't be content getting information only from those
| who like to talk and volunteer information.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Speaking as an introvert, that's certainly not my intent.
| But if the only way to share ideas is to do things that
| make me miserable, and the people who need to listen my
| ideas made it that way, they're clearly not interested.
| In most cases I have better things to do than fight
| uphill or shout into a void. It's probably a lot of
| stress for no benefit.
|
| Ed: incidentally, suggestion boxes (mentioned nearby in
| the thread) are also probably not helpful. Absent strong
| evidence to the contrary, I assume those are ignored and
| don't bother.
| astrange wrote:
| This reminds me that most of the things people call
| "introversion" on the internet are actually signs of high
| neuroticism.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Some people, it seems, mistake "introversion" for "lack
| of social skills". The former is a personality trait (I'm
| more of an introvert myself). The latter can be trained.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The actual saying what your idea is? No.
|
| The process of getting to saying what your idea is?
| Frequently, especially if it is very informal or reliant
| on social cred to get into the room.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Which makes you an armchair analyst.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I didn't see the loud mouths being any less annoying or
| obnoxious over the last 2 years.
| listenallyall wrote:
| No, large meetings are where the loudest voices dominate.
| Hallway conversations are where you can approach someone
| 1-on-1 without being interrupted or spoken over, and often
| express a contrarian view without fear of being shouted down.
| afandian wrote:
| I'd say the opposite. It allows introverts to negotiate
| alternative venues to share ideas.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| ...then what do you want?
|
| If introverts aren't voicing their ideas, what are we
| supposed to do, read minds?
| regularfry wrote:
| Pivot to a written-first culture. It's the natural endpoint
| of remote orgs.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| See I feel that it robs my of all my energy that I get
| for ideas from working with people. Not just that, but
| after grad school I actually have anxiety writing.
|
| I feel all these "solutions" just tell the other type of
| 'verts' to suck it up and adapt to the other style.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| doesn't that hurt folks who aren't great at writing?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Writing is a skill that can be learned. You don't need to
| write deathless prose, just be clear.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| So is speaking.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| In my experience a written-first culture is horribly
| inefficient for exactly the kind of impromptu
| interactions that happen in colocated spaces.
| luffapi wrote:
| Loudly conversing in the hallway is a terrible medium for
| exchanging information. Written documents are not only
| clearer, they scale in distribution and can be referenced
| later.
|
| Hallway conversations are temporal noise, at best.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's annoying that these "hallway conversations" became
| the thing to highlight as the main advantage of in-office
| work. It's not my experience that the random encounters
| next to the watercooler or the bathroom are often that
| useful.
|
| But, say you have some half-baked idea and want to talk
| it out with a coworker next to you. You both roll over to
| the whiteboard in your pod and start scribbling, both of
| you exchanging high-bandwidth information via utterances,
| gestures, and facial expressions with millisecond
| roundtrips. Third teammate overhears and rolls over,
| contributing further. This scenario IME used to happen a
| lot, created a lot of value, and is hard to replicate
| with a scheduled meeting or documents because the
| communication roundtrips and bandwidths are atrocious.
| luffapi wrote:
| I like whiteboarding too. I've worked fully remote a lot
| and have found the other benefits far out weigh the cost
| of losing it as a tool (temporarily while tech catches
| up?).
|
| Half the time I don't need to ask for help because in the
| comfort and focus of my home office I can figure out much
| more difficult problems then I could when a sales dude
| was closing a deal next to my desk, or having half the
| devs at my table coughing and sick.
| sempron64 wrote:
| I disagree that written documents are clearer than
| conversation. I've always experienced that the vast
| majority of engineers, including introverts, gain a
| clearer understanding of key concepts from an interactive
| conversation than from a document. In my experience
| almost all complex documents I've read and written
| required a follow-up meeting to explain and discuss.
|
| Documents are useful when the volume of details is too
| much to remember in a conversation, and to communicate
| with wider audiences, but for communicating key points in
| a small group, conversation is vastly more efficient.
| luffapi wrote:
| We're talking about hallway conversations as a source for
| innovation. Not all real-time communication in general.
| Yes, you can always hop on a zoom and chat through a
| problem.
| burnished wrote:
| Face to face conversation has a much higher signal
| strength than written documents, to be frank. For
| example, think about how many unhelpful screeds get
| posted on forums that in conversation would get cut short
| because of immediate feedback in the form of verbal or
| non-verbal conversation. Have you ever noticed that some
| one had more they wanted to say and encouraged them to
| speak their mind? I don't think that sort of back and
| forth happens as naturally in pure text environments.
| Plus if you are just not grokking something it is much
| easier to keep asking questions in person until the two
| of you figure out what the stumbling block was, you know?
| luffapi wrote:
| Face to face conversation doesn't scale. It's also still
| possible with zoom...
|
| A hallway conversation is a random happenstance between a
| couple of people. Any decisions made are going to have to
| be communicated more broadly as a next step anyway, which
| will require written communication.
| cguess wrote:
| It doesn't have to scale. Sometimes it just makes it
| easier for a few stakeholders to get through something
| more easily and quickly.
| [deleted]
| burnished wrote:
| Here is another way to think about it; if we were having
| this conversation in face to face, how long do you think
| it would take? I suspect after maybe fifteen minutes we
| would probably have felt out where the actual differences
| in our opinions lay and why and if for some reason we
| needed to codify this understanding I trust that either
| of us would be able to put it in written form and have it
| capture the nuance of that conversation. I think it would
| take a little longer in zoom and I would have a lower
| confidence that we had properly understood each others
| perspective. Face to face communication has a whole lot
| of information in the form of body language, intonation,
| expressions, etc that I don't think can be reasonably
| approximated in text format, even with reactions like in
| Discord (which are very helpful!) it still feels fraught.
| luffapi wrote:
| I feel like I totally understand your position, I just
| respectfully disagree. I'd say I've spent ~two minutes
| max in this thread, from the comfort of my house, doing
| about 6 other things to clear my mind between code
| bursts.
|
| It's pretty hard to read and comment on HN when you're in
| the office. Especially an open office where everyone can
| see your screen.
| cguess wrote:
| Completely agreed. I've been bootstrapping a new project
| with a colleague I've known for years. We worked together
| in the same office for a long time, know how each other
| work exceptionally well. We started this project up
| during the quarantine, while living a few time zones
| apart. It was going quite slowly, until we could finally
| meet up (vaccines!). We worked through issues we had been
| going back and forth over for weeks in less than two
| hours, and had time to head to a bar for an early happy
| hour.
|
| In person can truly make a difference. You're all subject
| to the same distractions, can keep each other on task,
| and pound through collective decisions in a way even a
| video chat can never facilitate well.
| ufmace wrote:
| I've got to disagree with that. If you have the vague
| beginnings of an idea, it's a heavy burden to type them
| up into a document that can be distributed widely. Many
| ideas just won't get a chance to develop into anything if
| that's the only path for it. It's much smoother to float
| a few thoughts that might or might not lead to something
| to one or two people you have some trust for and know are
| knowledgeable about that domain. That's a quick and low-
| effort way to determine if a thought has any merit and
| deserves being developed further, or is a non-starter. I
| think it's friendlier as well to people who are more
| reluctant to spread an idea that might not be very good
| to a large group.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Submission boxes, pitch dens, hackathons, or even just a
| place to dump written proposals etc. Some kind of structure
| so that contribution does not require winning a social
| battle first.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| What I believe parent is saying is that introverts would
| prefer a different venue for idea sharing than one where
| "whoever shouts loudest and fastest is heard." Which is
| very different from not speaking at all.
|
| For example, something where folks ask "please post your
| papers and ideas to this shared document repository where
| they can each then be read by the team at whatever pace is
| required."
|
| A collection of folks read the documents, write about which
| ideas they like, then make a decision based on the contents
| raised in said papers, all over text mediums.
|
| Something like that is an alternative to a world where
| whoever speaks loudly fastest, and to the right people, has
| their idea taken seriously.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Whence this assumption that when people are allowed meet
| in person, written communication is banned? You can do
| all these things and still allow people to have efficient
| live in person conversations.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| This has been a trend for a long time, five W's reporting is
| time consuming and expensive it seems, so it's been mostly
| replaced by opinion pieces and human interest stories.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Karl Popper would be disappointed with this journalistic
| approach.
| robscallsign wrote:
| > This article is heavy on quotes but very light on actual
| data. This is a trend that I see in media (mainstream and
| otherwise), where they take something that is by nature very
| difficult to study, find some researchers or limited studies
| that fit their narrative, and then report it as gospel.
|
| Sounds a lot like masks.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I know you are trolling, but it's basically the exact
| opposite of masks, which (now) have lots of data supporting
| their effectiveness, and which are much more easily studied
| (i.e. the outcome you are looking for, e.g. "got Covid or
| didn't", is much more concrete than looking for
| "innovation").
|
| If you care to open your eyes the data is easily locatable
| from reputable sources online. One overview article:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
| stcredzero wrote:
| _This article is heavy on quotes but very light on actual
| data._
|
| Here's the thing: Data on serendipitous meetings is going to
| exist primarily in the form of _anecdotes_! Fundamentally.
|
| _And I really take issue with the racial angle that feels like
| it is basically part of every single NYT article these days. A
| lot of the issues reported here feel valid, but just zooming
| back out (maybe pun intended?) for a second, this reporter
| seems to be arguing that actual face-to-face interactions are
| so fraught with racism that minorities need to be "protected"
| by remote work_
|
| Historically, here's how it has worked throughout history: To
| break into a field as a member of an under-represented identity
| group in that field, you had to be "So good, they can't ignore
| you." In fact, there are many areas of human endeavor where "So
| good, they can't ignore you," is just the regular price of
| entry. It is, in fact, the standard price of entry for those
| entities known as "startups."
|
| Is this, in an absolute sense, fair? No. There are always going
| to be proxies to actual merit used in evaluation. That's just
| the reality of how non-omniscient beings work. We can only
| strive to make things as fair and accurate as we can. That
| certainly _does not_ mean seeing that the lever is thrown one
| way, then wrenching the lever the other way. The lever needs to
| be changed from being a dumb lever and hooked up to meaningful
| data.
| neilwilson wrote:
| "Suppose that in addition to your present duties, you were made
| responsible for space and services for your people. You would
| have to decide on the kind of workplace for each person, and the
| amount of space and expense to be allocated. How would you go
| about it? You'd probably want to study the ways in which people
| use their space, the amount of table space required, and the
| number of hours in a day spent working alone, working with one
| other person, and so forth. You'd also investigate the impact of
| noise on people's effectiveness. After all, your folks are
| _intellect workers_ - they need to have their brains in gear to
| do their work, and noise does affect their ability to
| concentrate.
|
| For each of the observed kinds of disturbance, you'd look for an
| easy, mechanical way to protect your workers. Given a reasonably
| free hand, you would investigate the advantages of closed space
| vs opens space. This would allow you to make a sensible trade-off
| of cost against privacy and quiet. Finally, you would take int
| account people's social needs and provide some areas where a
| conversation could take place without disturbing others.
|
| It should come as no surprise to you that the people who do
| control space and services for your company (particularly if it
| is a large company) don't spend much time thinking about any of
| the concerns listed above."
|
| Peopleware[0], DeMarco and Lister, _First Published in 1987_
|
| [0] https://amzn.to/3d9uHPO
| macNchz wrote:
| I read Peopleware a long time ago (from an HN recommendation)
| and found it super valuable, but if I have any takeaway from
| this past year it is how right they were about office layout
| for knowledge workers.
|
| At this point I've worked as a programmer in many open office
| configurations, and this past year has been somewhat of a
| revelation in my ability to focus and think through things.
| With each passing month the status quo of pre-2020 has become
| more absurd to me: hiring a team of highly paid software
| engineers to do focused thinking and plopping them in the
| middle of big room with multiple conversations, phone calls,
| people moving around, only for all of them to wear headphones
| and communicate with each other via Slack.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| It's amazing how, 34 years later, that book is at least as
| relevant now as it was then.
|
| One would have expected some improvement in that area but
| sometimes it feels to me like the opposite is true.
| drewcoo wrote:
| What? Are you saying that devs in bullpens like livestock
| wasn't part of the Peopleware vision? Maybe I should give the
| book a closer reading next time . . .
| leetrout wrote:
| I can't tell if you are being serious or not.
|
| The book advocates for treating people as adults. Trusting
| them to do their work. Creating and environment and process
| for doing that work.
|
| And it definitely does not defend bullpen working
| environments.
| olau wrote:
| Indeed! The shared office building we're renting offices in
| was visited by the furniture police not too long ago.
|
| Fortunately, they didn't enter the offices, if they did, we'd
| have thrown them out, but they did put up gigantic signs in
| the hallways with slogans like "together we achieve more" and
| "coworking can be contagious". First we laughed in disgust,
| then we simply became banner blind. Then covid hit.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Innovation is a joke in most companies. The few that actually
| innovate are probably startups with <10 employees or big
| companies with small groups acting like startups.
|
| It's not chance meetings that brings innovation, it's purpose
| driven meetings (often had in stressful circumstances), which can
| happen very well on zoom.
|
| The real trade-off for companies is retention - productivity.
| People will have less distractions and be more productive when
| working remote from a quiet environment (unless you fill their
| schedule with unnecessary meetings because you don't trust them).
| The extra productivity comes at the expense of making friends and
| building relationships at work, which makes it easier for
| employees to just dump the company when you don't like it
| anymore.
| IMTDb wrote:
| Can we stop linking the remote vs onsite decision and the
| amount of meeting vs quiet time with "trust".
|
| All these issues are separate and - in my experience - very
| rarely tied together. You can be a remote first, no meeting
| company and have deep trust issues (eg: requiring very precise
| time sheets). Or have an absolute trust in your employees and
| have communications issues which leads to too many meetings
| being needed.
|
| Just saying that "you require onsite presence because you don't
| trust me", or "too many meetings are required because you don't
| trust your employees" is detrimental to the debate. You corner
| the whole discussion around trust, which is most cases is not
| the actual problem, and the core issues are then not addressed.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| I would absolutely not feel trusted if after working remotely
| for so long they say they "need" me to be in the office. I'd
| leave such a manager for another manager. Or that manager
| would be the reason I'm quitting and looking for a remote job
| tbh.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > I would absolutely not feel trusted if after working
| remotely for so long they say they "need" me to be in the
| office
|
| The problem is that the "I don't feel trusted" might be
| hiding the actual true underlying issue. What if your
| manager _does_ trust you, why would he need you in the
| office ? Is it because you don 't have proper communication
| channels ? Is it because he can't properly follow up what's
| going on ? Is it because he has to spend more time sharing
| the common vision with you and other employees ? Is it
| because he can't understand the issues you face anymore ?
|
| All these question are not related to him not trusting you
| in any way and they are very reasonable concerns.
| Identifying and addressing those will bring you one step
| closer to a fruitful collaboration.
|
| But if you stop the conversation at : "You want me to come
| back to the office, but I feel more productive at home so
| it means you don't trust me so I quit", is exactly the
| problem. It's super hard to start a reasonable conversation
| if the premise is "you don't trust me".
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| It is unreasonable to demand office presence in 2021
| after 1.5 years of remote work being tried and tested at
| scale. It serves no real purpose. All those meetings
| about the common vision, etc, can be done via video chat.
|
| Some managers just want to power trip by walking around
| the office to see who is in their chair. That's not how
| we do things anymore.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I concur with your observations. I know several people who
| changed jobs when their old employer went remote. Their new job
| may be equally as remote, but pay increases and increased
| learning opportunities speak far louder when you haven't seen
| your co-workers in-person for a year.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Innovation is the product manager coming to your desk and
| saying "Hey <competitor B> has feature X. How long would it
| take for us to build something like that?"
| [deleted]
| aseerdbnarng wrote:
| Something as slippery as 'innovation' can not be pinned down so
| easily as 'office/not-office'. If it were well understood how to
| create a generic 'innovation' every company would be doing it and
| it would be meaningless. This is a silly article
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It's a direct response to the reason many companies have given
| for forcing everyone back to the office.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Or does it just not matter if most employees innovate? I can
| see this being the case given the limited job scope of most
| people.
|
| I am pretty sure at this point employee retention is well
| understood. The conclusion of the market is that it doesn't
| matter.
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| Sure. This won't be "captured" in some survey or some nonsense
| because the benefits accrued might be detrimental to the company,
| but perhaps still good overall. Chance meeting gets people
| talking about salaries and negotiating up. Chance meeting gets
| two people talking about a cool idea, so they both quit and start
| a better company. Etc.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Do we have evidence that evidence can quickly overcome cultural
| practices? It seems to take generations for that to effect
| change.
| mcs5280 wrote:
| In person meetings boost opportunities for corporate butt
| sniffing by managers and aspiring ladder climbers.
| [deleted]
| blfr wrote:
| There is very little innovation going on in general. It's kinda
| like measuring if chance encounters in retirement homes lead to
| more kids. The main problem is not that people don't spend enough
| time around each other.
|
| For a meaningful comparison you would need environments in which
| significant innovations are being made. Then you can tell where
| it's going better.
| timdellinger wrote:
| There was a study of academic collaboration (measured by co-
| authored journal publications) showing that collaboration between
| academics increases as the distances between offices shrinks.
|
| Office is across campus? Office is in the building next door?
| Office is in the same building, different floor? Office is in the
| same hallway, but way at the end? Office is right beside? All of
| these correlate with number of journal articles co-authored!
| teekert wrote:
| As soon as a colleague of mine mentions something remotely
| interesting I try to plan a 25 min meeting for some coffeetalk. I
| love it I'm learning a lot. These meetings seem to offer more
| depth than the normal coffee meetings of the old days.
| jfengel wrote:
| I wouldn't expect "innovation" in any big sense.
|
| What I'd rather expect is less flashy but at least as useful.
| "Hey, it sounds like Mary in customer support is taking off next
| week. That might be a bad time to deploy the new mods." "Wait,
| you're working on that code? Maybe it'll also fix the thing I'm
| working on. I'll go work on something else until you finish it."
|
| These are tiny things. The benefits are probably too small to
| measure, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. It would be nice
| if they resulted in Big Improvements For Free, but that seems
| unlikely. That sounds more like a way of trying to make up a
| visible model of something that they feel but can't demonstrate.
|
| I have no idea if such things are worth it or not. I suspect it
| has a ton of variables (personalities, project type, luck) and
| you couldn't do a good controlled experiment even if you had a
| mechanism for measuring it. So different companies are going to
| constitute a natural experiment, and maybe in a decade or two
| we'll have some intuition for what worked.
| Swizec wrote:
| On the other hand MIT was specifically designed to increase
| chance meetings by forcing people to work near each other.
| Because it worked so well at Bell Labs.
|
| Paraphrased from Hackers, I think.
|
| Here's a source I could find from a study in 2017
| https://news.mit.edu/2017/proximity-boosts-collaboration-mit...
| [deleted]
| CPLX wrote:
| Indeed. I think better word is "efficiency".
|
| It seems pretty clear that at least _some_ things become more
| efficient _some_ of the time when everyone is in the same
| place.
|
| The question of if that's a total net gain to the enterprise or
| not is probably pretty dependent on the actual task at hand
| (fewer efficiency gains for software companies, more for
| symphonies, etc) but that seems a better description of what's
| going on than a generic sense of "innovation".
| regularfry wrote:
| "Innovation" does tend to be the reason higher-ups want face-
| to-face to happen, though. The reason, I _believe_ , is the
| Building 20 story - an environment where people could mix their
| time between isolation and spontaneous meetings, and where they
| were uniquely empowered to change the physical infrastructure
| at will, seemed to lead to a remarkable number of radical
| innovations. Part of that story is about how innovation
| happens: it seemed to show that you couldn't get it from people
| beavering away in isolation, nor could you get it from group
| brainstorms all the time, you needed a mix so people could
| switch between deep focus on hard problems, with the occasional
| serendipitous ping that unlocks something.
|
| I was hoping this article would delve into why (if) this story
| is not true, but it's too light.
| touisteur wrote:
| This is a very strange conclusion. I love my remote office for
| 'deep work' but most of the connections (breadth?) I make on some
| topics are with chance discussions with peers, colleagues,
| managers, directors. The recent slice of forced remote has let me
| go deeper on some topics but also miss ways in which my work may
| have been easier or more impactful. I'm thinking of 'hey I think
| we might need something similar to what you're doing', 'hey I
| think we did that in the past and it went so wrong, look up such
| and such', or even 'this subject is politically doomed, tread
| carefully'. Those kinds of conversations are almost impossible to
| 'chance upon' over chatrooms...
|
| Maybe our culture is bad, too oral, and maybe some people in
| other corps manage it fine and I'm missing something...
| tezzer wrote:
| For what it's worth, I agree with you. We've developed entirely
| new capabilities that grew out of tangential conversation after
| in-person meetings. A few of our technical folks prefer remote
| work, largely because it saves them from stupid commutes. I've
| noticed the folks most against it are the ones who have
| historically built new things (myself included), and if I stick
| around I'm going to miss collaborating with them in person.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I've heard so many times that ideas are not all that scarce in
| business -- that ideas are everywhere, and that _execution_ is
| the true differentiator that can make an entrepreneur successful.
|
| There is no shortage of talented, capable people in
| organizations, who could dream up and lead the next profitable
| line of the business. The challenge is empowering and encouraging
| those people in organizations with top-down structures and
| constraining, predefined success metrics for employees' managers.
| It follows that making more ideas (by chance meetings or what
| have you) is not going to help if the bottleneck is the
| organization's enthusiasm to support the ideas that happen.
|
| Perhaps randomly bumping into an executive is the traditional
| avenue for an individual contributor to get their ideas to the
| decision maker with the ability to help them? I'd argue that a
| direct instant message to that executive is much more efficient.
| bluGill wrote:
| > I'd argue that a direct instant message to that executive is
| much more efficient.
|
| Only in a small company. In a large company everyone sending
| just one idea a year means the CEO never has time to do
| anything other than read those messages. In large companies
| filters are required to ensure that work the CEO can get work
| done.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| My instinct was the same as yours, but I wonder whether this
| is really true. Obviously you couldn't read a treatise per
| employee, but even for thousands of employees a single
| sentence per employee wouldn't take too long. And I doubt
| that even a majority of employees would actually send one.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I've been in two companies that had open submissions to the
| executives for ideas. In an about 400 person org, about 25
| people submitted ideas. In the other one, it was about 40
| in several thousand.
|
| The one thing I can't factor out is apathy, as every time
| next to nothing was done with the suggestions and perhaps
| lack of prior success dissuaded people from trying again.
| bluGill wrote:
| With 100,000 employees sending one message a year, that is
| 50 messages per hour (depending on work day and vacation).
| While individual messages don't take long to read, it is
| enough. Don't forget that if the idea is good it will take
| a lot of effort to implement it.
|
| Note the the other reply gave interesting data that I
| didn't factor into this. You can expanding it to assume
| that all ideas need to be given a good reply or the people
| will give up on the idea.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I find that meetings in the office definitely makes meetings more
| useful. Why? Because of the side conversations that happen after
| the meeting. With Zoom there isn't much of a natural breaking off
| and really figuring things out after the meeting is over.
| plainnoodles wrote:
| My experience is the total opposite: more often than not, when
| IRL meetings break, everyone scoots off as fast as possible,
| grateful to be free, and just wants to get back to their
| office.
|
| Whereas on zoom, it's rare I go a meeting without side-channel
| conversations popping up just as a meeting ends or even while
| it's going on. e.g. someone mentions a new requirement in
| passing, and within a few seconds there's a group dm from the
| other 2 devs on the project going "wtf did either of you know
| about <requirement>".
| macksd wrote:
| It's not quite the same, but I can think of a lot of meetings
| where I've been pinged (or I've done the pinging) to follow-up
| in another Zoom with someone immediately after a larger meeting
| and discuss HOW to actually do the WHAT that was decided in the
| previous meeting. Maybe it just needs to be more intentional.
| tester756 wrote:
| literally same
|
| meeting right after meeting, but about real stuff.
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