[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the of...
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Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
Many of us were remote, and now many of us are being asked to come
back? Knowing office workers all work with remote people in other
offices, and there's not much in-office dynamic like maybe there
was 20 years ago, what are your primary motivations dragging us
back into the office? Nearly every meeting I've had in an office
since 2014 has been a video conference with remote people.
Author : devoutsalsa
Score : 237 points
Date : 2023-02-05 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I worked for 5 years for a group that was located on a different
| continent; I was the only one not in that office. My performance
| was stellar based on official evaluations, but career was
| stagnant, I was almost a myth than a real person with a real
| career. Salary raises were limited by the level in the company,
| so that had a ceiling too.
|
| Then I was the manager of others for even more years and we were
| part of a geographically distributed team. I asked the people to
| come to the office a couple of days per week, mostly to discuss
| face to face the stuff not so productive on audio (we almost
| never do videoconferences) and to have lunch and keep the feeling
| of being part of a team. This was only because of my previous
| experience.
|
| The result was during the summer most of the team was in the
| office most of the time (the request was only for 2 days), while
| during the winter the people with complicated comute were coming
| only a few days per month. Some of us were walking, cycling or
| motorcycling to the office, so weather was an important factor
| and traffic is usually very bad on bad weather, working from home
| was the right choice.
|
| A full work from office makes no sense, in my opinion, for most
| IT people except local helpdesk that interacts with people, from
| replacing a laptop to fixing an app for the business people, as
| IT people usually self-service their problems. At the same time I
| believe that a 100% work from home is not good for many people,
| especially new hires and people that thrive in a community.
|
| There is also the aspect of performance: if a bad performer is
| just a name, a person you never met and don't care, it is very
| difficult to empathize and the tolerance for their mistakes or
| slowness is very, very low.
| kochbeck wrote:
| I see a lot of "good" answers where good translates to reasonable
| business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad
| reasons.
|
| The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office
| because managers never learned how to manage people, so they
| practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven
| behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it's a hard
| curse to break.
|
| Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial
| reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual
| harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has
| made female and minority employees more valuable and better
| performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of
| the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The
| favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped
| on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives
| look, well... incompetent.
|
| Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have
| more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do
| at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their
| primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable
| for them.
|
| The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives
| are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we)
| come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an
| office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of
| pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world
| manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other
| people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are
| less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like
| sales numbers. If people don't return to the office, it will not
| continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this
| ego outlet will disappear.
|
| Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons,
| honestly, ring truer to me than "hallway collisions." In the real
| world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and
| executives simply don't benefit from hallway and breakroom magic
| or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy
| offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of
| skill, and forced social conduct, though.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| I wonder if there is a bias towards WFH on HN because the type of
| person most likely to like WFH is also the kind to post a lot on
| internet message threads. I think most people feel most
| productive spending at least some time in the office with other
| people, face to face. Further, I assume many people are like me
| and feel like some pressure to actually go to the office is good,
| or I'd too often make the short term easier decision to WFH.
| alentred wrote:
| Answering the direct question in a simplistic way: because this
| is the preferred style of collaboration for these employers you
| are talking about. Let me elaborate.
|
| It is not good or bad, effective or ineffective, nor it is the
| case for all employers.
|
| Here is my take: the preferred style of work (office, remote,
| hybrid, flexible) needs to be shared between the team members.
| Not unlike people's values. If the vast majority of people on the
| team share it - you are golden. If everyone has their own - you
| have got yourself a problem. By all means, please, ask it on the
| interview! (Goes both ways, for the employees and for the
| employers.)
|
| Now, I understand that right now there are probably more pro-
| office employers than people willing to accept it. Whether it is
| true or not (do we have some reliable statistics on this? are we
| a vocal minority instead?), I think only time will create an
| equilibrium (new generation of middle managers, etc.)
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo
| entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people
| again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.
|
| Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous
| work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much
| value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as
| remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems.
| People often end up working on wrong things.
|
| Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless
| it is somehow extremely stellar project.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > People often end up working on wrong things.
|
| The must have pretty bad managers then. Why should there be a
| trust issue? My manager assigns me a task, I do it on time and
| they are happy or I fail to do it on time and they are unhappy.
| How does where I do that task make a difference?
|
| I think the return to office thing is just a cover for
| incompetent management.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| Yeah, let's say that it is incompetent management. As an
| business owner, you can fix the situation either by forcing
| people into offices, or firing the bad managers and
| recruiting a competent management instead. To me the latter
| solution sounds crazy expensive and difficult compared to the
| first.
| manishsharan wrote:
| Whiteboards !
|
| None of the online whiteboards equivalent tools work as well a
| old fashioned white board and markers.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| We expensed graphical tablets, it gets you closer but still not
| quote there yet.
| Cub3 wrote:
| I've worked remote for several years as both a senior engineer
| and team leader, these are the problems with remote work I
| haven't yet found good solutions for:
|
| 1. I don't know how my employees are doing; many times in my
| career I've had to tell programmers to "go for a walk" or "time
| to go home" when they get stuck on a frustrating task or fall in
| to a flow state far past leaving time. Solutions I've found to
| this put onus on the employee or create more restrictions that
| hinder in other areas
|
| 2. Brainstorming whiteboard sessions are harder; the issue with
| remote meetings is that you need each person to finish speaking
| before the next person can start, which IMO slows down
| collaboration. Also I still haven't found a great tool to replace
| the whiteboard, Miro / Figma (Figjam) come close but also are
| slower at spinning up a flow diagram or sequence diagram or
| describing a stack.
|
| 3. Juniors / Grads need handholding; I've written frameworks to
| train newer developers in a remote setting but the remote divide
| creates an invisible barrier between the seniors and juniors for
| base support. I used to purposefully sit them next to eachother
| to enable the quick "do I use this or that?" questions or,
| better, have the senior look over and spontaneously create a
| learning opportunity related to whatever the junior is doing.
|
| I guess the themes here are speed and spontaneity
|
| (I haven't had my coffee yet so I hope above made sense)
| josefrichter wrote:
| Not an employer. But I believe most employees simply put in less
| hours when working from home, and most employers aren't very good
| at rewarding people for their results, not their hours.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| > But I believe most employees simply put in less hours when
| working from home
|
| What do you have to back up your belief? I work from 8-6 on
| most days +/- 30 minutes. Lunch is a walk downstairs, grab
| something and eat it at my desk. That's pretty typical of the
| group of engineers I've been working with remotely on/off for
| the past 15 years. I don't think we're exceptional in this
| regard.
| DougN7 wrote:
| With three out of three different employees so far, all slowly
| did less and less work the longer they worked from home. I'm
| 90% sure one of them had an additional job, and another one
| admitted it when he quit. I don't like to micromanage so give
| developers a lot of freedom. Few people have as much long-term
| integrity as we like to pretend we all have.
| pc86 wrote:
| If they aren't getting stuff done, that's its own
| conversation. Whether they have a second (or third, or
| fourth) job is irrelevant.
| ilyt wrote:
| Less distractions tho.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| > I believe most employees simply put in less hours when
| working from home
|
| From my experience and observations I've gathered from my
| teams, my conclusion is the opposite of this. I have to
| regularly tell folks to watch out for burnout and it's ok to
| wait until Monday.
| klyrs wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience. With a home office, it's hard
| to tear myself away from work. Commuting is a waste of my time,
| and a "clean break" ends up costing my employer several hours a
| day. I'm salaried, so that isn't a monetary cost, but I've seen
| a real benefit to productivity.
|
| Of course, employers want both butt-in-chair metrics and 24/7
| availability without increasing pay. Don't give them that.
| irrational wrote:
| Opposite for me. At home I start working when I wake up and
| often don't stop until the evening. When I go into the office I
| have to get ready and commute, and then at the office there are
| so many distractions - our campus has fantastic fitness
| facilities and I'll often spend a few hours each day over
| there. So, at home I probably work for 10 hours. When on campus
| I probably get 4 hours of work in, if that. Plus, I am so much
| more productive at home. I have a quiet private office with a
| much faster internet connection and better equipment. On
| campus, people don't know how to shut up, so it is hard to get
| work done with people around me discussing things that have
| absolutely nothing about work - the other day, 2 people spent
| an hour discussing how much butter is in Danish cookies! Right
| next to me!
| moonshinefe wrote:
| Same here, started my first fully remote job semi-recently.
| I've got a nice quiet area to work and the worst interruption
| I get is maybe my dog drops in for some pets. The
| productivity and satisfaction remind me of when I was way
| younger and used to code for fun before it became a job, so I
| actually kind of enjoy it.
|
| Like maybe I go afk 30-45 mins here or there when I normally
| wouldn't in office. But for me, I put in more hours overall.
| A key to this was learning to not have my personal laptop
| open to the side, and avoiding distractions like social media
| and idle browsing.
|
| YMMV of course, I think it can really depend on the person
| and their life situation. But the same could be said of
| anyone remote or not when it comes to productivity. It's on
| the managers to measure if things are getting done or not,
| which is the most important thing.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| It is always the employees telling these stories, but how
| managers are supposed to know if they are really working?
| When they are at the office the see it with their own eyes.
|
| Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks
| because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from
| managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be
| on-site than fix his/her own problems.
| irrational wrote:
| 1. My manager lives and works in an entirely different
| state. 2. We do not have assigned seating on campus. We are
| just required to be on campus, but can find a place to work
| in any building. So, even if my manager was in the same
| state as me, I certainly would not be anywhere he could see
| me.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Person you replied to said they spent hours in the company
| gym during office hours. Either they are delivering what's
| expected of them anyway, or the manager has no idea what to
| expect regardless of in-office or remote working.
|
| They also mentioned avoiding other distractions: That's the
| main feature of remote for me, after many years of wearing
| headphones all day in various offices.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Managers know who is and isn't getting work done.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > how managers are supposed to know if they are really
| working?
|
| Because if they're not, they miss deadlines.
| throw248989 wrote:
| Why?
| dudul wrote:
| Over the past 2 years many studies have actually shown the
| opposite. People work during what was their commute time, they
| work when they are sick, during lunch break.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Not an employer but I noticed that after 2 years of working
| remotely I feel like I have enough. Not just enough of working
| remotely. Enough of working at all.
|
| Then again I don't think I ever stayed in any company for more
| then 2 years so that just might be me.
| totoglazer wrote:
| Pre March 2020 almost none of my meetings in the preceding 5
| years included a single remote person. I liked that better for
| working. I felt more connected to my colleagues and more in tune
| with what was happening around the firm.
|
| Of course I also enjoy some of the flexibility of WFH.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Not an employer but if I was, I would absolutely be full remote.
| Employees mostly want this and costs / headaches are far lower. I
| don't buy into the "water cooler" thesis. If you want people to
| collaborate more, ask them to work together. This is where I find
| the best connections are formed.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think that within a few years this question is going to be much
| more nuanced. There are numerous tools for remote presence, from
| chatting to real-time code windows, 2d RPG-style shared spaces,
| and 3d and VR shared spaces.
|
| My assumption is that within say five years the question is more
| often going to be something like, how often (if at all) are you
| required per day or per week to "teleport" into the shared AR/VR
| collaboration space.
|
| We should anticipate putting on a pair of normalish glasses or
| maybe goggles that can then integrate a very realistic virtual
| room into your home. There will be eye contact with what appear
| to be real people. These will make heavy use of AI for
| compression and realism. This is just extrapolating from existing
| research or enterprise devices and software that have most of
| these capabilities already.
|
| Many people will view this in the same way they do going to the
| office. They will either think it's essential or a total
| distraction.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| I really don't care - whatever works for you. But there are a few
| things I observed, due to which I believe remote work will not be
| default work mode in the long run.
|
| * There's significant rise in burnout rate and LOTS of people
| looking for professional help with psychological issues. Many
| times more than in previous years. Some returned to the office
| and got significantly better, because they simply lacked human
| interaction (both their and surrounding opinion).
|
| * There's group that prefers to work from the office for various
| reasons (people, work/life separation, small/noisy home).
|
| * Both groups make significant part of our teams. Due to that
| some additional people decide to join as they feel they are
| missing out on part of the discussion and team interaction. This
| tends to snowball.
|
| * Then there's elephant in the room: I know some people
| (personally, but outside of my org), who will hire at a few
| places (three or more) and bluntly lie about being full-time
| dedicated to each of them. They'll actively delay work giving
| false reasons, to maintain that illusion. Some employers will
| react by implementing group responsibility, when they find out.
|
| Disclaimer (I had that discussion before): if you have steel-
| strong psyche, prefer people from outside work, have great
| communication skills, can sleep 2h a day and work 16h or have
| negotiated terms of employment that allow to be hired at a few
| places - good for you. This comment is mere observation, not
| attack on your life choices.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I don't think work culture has broadly attuned itself to working
| from home and how companies operate hasn't shifted enough to
| leverage its advantages and mitigate the disadvantages.
|
| Companies that do figure this out will thrive of course, as it
| seems that this is something employees are willing to stand up to
| management over
| noam_compsci wrote:
| Not an employer but:
|
| - Older execs are too stuck in their ways
|
| - Busy execs __need__ a work family to rationalise their
| commitment
|
| - Hard to make a culture when remote
|
| - Hiring is one of the hardest task in most companies and it's
| made harder by remote. Not being able to nail onboarding and the
| face to face getting to know someone can be lethal
|
| - In the 1% of times, when shit really hits the fan, remote is
| best because you can have zero communication delays, command
| management etc. As an "exec" these are the moments that you
| optimise for
|
| - Bad eggs leave such a bad taste in the mouth.
|
| I'm not an employer and not even exec level. So I may be totally
| off base. Just my observations.
| prng2021 wrote:
| I have a very hard time believing people are so out of touch with
| reality that they don't understand why employers want people in
| the office.
|
| You're not in back to back meetings from the moment you start
| work until you finish. Not all meetings involve teams in other
| geographies and even ones that do might still be one where most
| people in the call are from one city.
|
| While in office, every single person talks to coworkers at many
| random times throughout the day. That builds comradery within and
| across teams. That, in turn, means each employee cares more about
| their job and the success of the people around them. That in
| turn, makes it harder for them to look for other jobs because
| your not just completing some tasks from day to day like a
| machine. It's not just boring chit chat either. You'll sometimes
| briefly turn your chair or walk a few steps to get someone's
| opinion/ideas about something you're stuck on with your work and
| vice versa.
|
| Aside from this, having people in the office reduces the number
| of people who slack off during the day. This point shouldn't be
| glossed over. Not only does it hurt productivity, depending on
| the type of job, that will put extra burden on others on the
| team. A slacker could at the very least take on some of the work
| of others and that reduces overall stress and improves overall
| morale.
|
| I love remote work and would hate having to go back to the office
| more than a couple times a week. That said, I can still be
| objective and understand the viewpoint of someone running a
| company and wanting in person collaboration.
| fandorin wrote:
| exactly my thoughts! (employer here)
| mmaunder wrote:
| None. 100% remote for 8 years with a team of 40 in the
| cybersecurity space. It's all about control.
|
| https://www.defiant.com/truly-remote-vs-total-control-wordfe...
| Moto7451 wrote:
| I can't speak directly for the people you're actually asking. I'm
| involved in these meetings at my workplace. I don't agree with
| the call to bring everyone back to the office even though I like
| working from an office. I've been fully remote since before the
| pandemic but I like seeing coworkers. I'd like to think I can
| "see it both ways." I voted against bringing people back but I
| lack the all important "C" or "V" in front of my title so my
| opinion carries little weight.
|
| From my company's discussions, my take is that it's hard for the
| C suite to feel connected to employees without face to face time.
| Why? Probably the very basic issue of 1 on 500 or 1 on 5000
| communication, which is hard in person and even more so online. I
| don't mean 1 on 500/5000 _presenting_ , I mean the exchange of
| ideas and gaining understanding of the people that work for you.
| If you're a front line manager or sufficiently senior on the IC
| track then you likely had to learn new techniques to communicate
| in 1 on 10 and 1 on 20 engagements. It's harder to scale that to
| 1 to 500 or so.
|
| If you hold the power of sword and purse, then it's "easier" to
| mandate that people work from a location you can easily travel
| to.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Remote is high risk, high reward. If you've built a great
| organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy
| people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon
| to productivity because it's an extension of the autonomy that
| helps the workers thrive...
|
| ...if you've built an average organisation filled with people who
| are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and
| struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work
| will shred what little value you've managed to extract from a
| dysfunctional organisation.
|
| Remote work isn't the problem, the problem is further upstream:
| if you work for a company that is restricting remote work,
| whether you love to work remote or in office, it's a sign to
| leave.
|
| I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-
| office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is
| far more valuable.
|
| So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is
| struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work,
| you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and
| engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement...
| or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just
| kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road
| is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.
| cloudwalking wrote:
| People need social connections with their peers to work together
| successfully. It's much easier to build these connections in the
| office than virtually. Seeing each other a couple times per
| quarter for an extended period could also work, but it's easier--
| if you already have an office space--to bring people together in
| the office once or twice a week.
| wankle wrote:
| "People need social connections with their peers to work
| together successfully."
|
| Our team doesn't, are we anomalies? People need to be mature,
| reasonable, responsible and accountable to work together well.
| olliej wrote:
| No you're not.
|
| There are many people who have never developed social
| connections outside of school or work and unilaterally
| decided that that is how people must socialize. After all if
| they can't socialize outside of such an environment surely no
| one else can. If they can't see a person as a person if
| they're not face to face surely no one else can.
|
| It's unfortunate that these folk provide backup to the
| executives who are forcing RTO simply to provide the
| appearance of value and/or control over the plebs.
| wankle wrote:
| Well, I was really more addressing social connections with
| my coworkers, we share jokes, care about each other too but
| most I'd say have families and several of us are
| geographically diverse, so we don't socialize with each
| other or very little. Outside work, I do have social
| connections, long term friendships. I wasn't addressing
| socializing or not across the board.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > People need social connections with their peers to work
| together successfully
|
| One size very much does not fit all, and that's the entire
| point that those who prefer remote work are trying to drive
| home.
| watwut wrote:
| That sounds like a reason why an employee would go to the
| office. But not really something employer would care about -
| they don't care about employees social lifes in other contexts.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because people will leave. I will no longer work any job
| which doesn't have an office. Remote work is depressing and
| isolating.
| dasil003 wrote:
| > "People need social connections with their peers _to work
| together successfully_ "
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, but we know that people were more productive in home.
| So, nah.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tens of billions of dollars in market cap of remote first
| orgs disagrees. You can work with colleagues without any
| superfluous social connection, it's just a job, not a tribe
| or family. One should be both polite and effective; this
| does not make you friends.
|
| The inability to support remote work signals the employer
| cannot manage based on performance, is power hungry, or is
| managing from emotion instead of data.
|
| (have worked remote for 10+ years)
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I disagree, that's exactly why an employer would want that.
| Team cohesion is important.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| Team cohesion is important as far as being able to work
| collaboratively to finish a project, but it's not clear
| that requires being in an office every day for 8+ hrs
| shyn3 wrote:
| You can't have team cohesion and outsource so better learn
| to scale early.
| Redsquare wrote:
| Love these soundbites with zero evidemce. Absolutely not true,
| plenty of us enjoying remote, we can socialise in a
| bar/restaurant. No need for an office.
| waltherg wrote:
| OP pointed out that meetings and projects have happened
| remotely anyways for a long time - an experience I share. The
| peers you describe aren't in the same place as yourself even if
| you're both in some office.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I had an in-office contract in 2019. No one in the open
| office plan wanted to be interrupted while sitting at their
| desk. Everyone had headphones on. I literally used Slack to
| talk to the people sitting to the left & right of my desk XD
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Why not just get rid of the office space and use the money
| saved to get people together twice per quarter for an extended
| period? I bet in almost every case it would be a significant
| cost savings for the employer.
|
| Unless, of course, there is some other reasoning than what you
| state in your comment, like for example, middle management
| feeling irrelevant or sunk cost fallacy on office space?
| astura wrote:
| Most people don't want to be on travel every six weeks. You'd
| have to pay me a LOT for me to agree to that.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Mozilla used to do something similar.
|
| For background, at least half, or more of the company is
| fully remote. It's so many, that the transition to remote
| work was met with a collective shrug. So MoCo used to have
| weeks (maybe twice a year?) where teams would fly in to the
| office to work. Later, in a cost savings move, it switched to
| fly every everyone in MoCo to some place for a week twice a
| year. It was called "All Hands".
|
| I enjoyed the free trips to Whistler, Berlin, and Austin, and
| Maui, but it never really felt like work was actually getting
| done. It was conference room chats ostensibly about planning,
| but everything always felt a bit phoned in.
|
| I never got it. Inevitably the real planning work would end
| up after we returned back to our regular locations, so it was
| more social than anything.
|
| My personal thought is that RTO among the FAANGs is 100% sunk
| cost fallacy. They wasted billions on bespoke glass donuts,
| circus tents, and airplane hangers. There's pride on the
| minds of these oligarchs.
| detaro wrote:
| Yes, all-hands like that 100% are primarily about social
| and unplanned factors - getting people to see and talk to
| people they'd otherwise not meet and talk to.
| yablak wrote:
| It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a time.
| Especially those with children.
| olliej wrote:
| Happily commuting for hours and being away from home most
| of the week is actually super easy for people with
| children.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > It's very hard to get people to travel for days at a
| time.
|
| I believe parent is suggesting quarterly gatherings of the
| _existing_ office team, the _ones who share an office now_.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Couldn't the employer just hire people close together if
| they feel like that is an issue and still not have an
| office space?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| When I owned a business, that's what I did. Everyone
| worked remotely, except for me and a couple of people. I
| had a small coworking space simply because working out of
| my shoebox sized apartment was not fun. I hired everyone
| from the local area & occasionally had a meeting in the
| coworking space.
| dsr_ wrote:
| This is true.
|
| Companies can make this more appealing by holding the
| meetings in nice parts of the world -- note, nice doesn't
| have to be outrageously expensive -- putting people up in
| nice hotels with suitable space for spouses and kids, and
| by making the week before vacation for half the group and
| the week after for the other half, with the option to stay
| in the same hotel at the company's expense.
|
| This won't work for everyone, or every company, but it's a
| much nicer carrot than usual.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Couldn't one say the same about getting people to come to
| an office 250 days per year?
| jedberg wrote:
| No. It's a lot easier to hire someone to watch the kids
| on a regular basis, and also they go to school during the
| day. I can hire people to pick them up and watch them
| after school, and then help them after work with homework
| and chores and such.
|
| But if work wants me to travel for a week, it either
| means my spouse has to pick up all the stuff I do at
| home, or I have to find someone I trust to stay at my
| home for a week on an ad-hoc basis.
|
| It's much harder to find ad-hoc babysitting than
| regularly scheduled babysitting.
| irrational wrote:
| That happens through zoom. Half my team (including my manager)
| is remote. All of our meetings are over zoom, even when half
| the team is on campus at the same time. I go to campus, I find
| someplace to sit (we don't have assigned places to work), I hop
| on zoom calls as needed, I work, I go home. I never talk to
| anyone on campus - so my social connections are entirely the
| same whether I'm working from home or working on campus.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It's much easier to build these connections in the office
| than virtually.
|
| This isn't self-evident to me at all.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| It isn't self evident that humans communicate better in
| person than from behind cameras and screens?
|
| Do you know how much time people spend on other tabs while in
| zoom meetings?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of
| dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my
| experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including
| working together successfully despite being remote.
|
| I think we overrate the need to build in-person social
| rapports. Just be a professional. I think there's a concept
| where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify
| that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I'm not sure it's
| necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and
| I'm quite fine with that.
| cj wrote:
| Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a
| fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).
|
| I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good
| working relationships within a small team that's remote.
|
| One notable challenge, though, is developing working
| relationships between different teams and cross-departments.
| In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of
| the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running
| into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard
| of to (literally) never interact with other departments at
| all.
|
| So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a
| new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate
| because the engineers simply don't know the people they're
| working with in (for example) Marketing until the project
| starts.
|
| Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work.
| At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you
| won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But
| for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to
| know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but
| it has to be encouraged at the management level since
| intermingling between departments for fun isn't something
| that most people will do on their own unless directed to.
|
| Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like
| engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete)
| especially when you're working with a small group of people
| every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer
| if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and
| quickly) build working relationships with people on other
| teams to complete cross-departmental projects where
| collaboration is necessary.
|
| This is also where good product managers can really come in
| handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the
| cross-team relationships, manage expectations,
| gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead
| from engineers).
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| >In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of
| the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running
| into people in the hall or at lunch.
|
| Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in
| the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty
| years and only met the sales people in the period before it
| was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales
| was something that happened only rarely and always
| deliberately.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| > Just be a professional
|
| In my experience, there are many people that find this an
| incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.
| skibidibipiti wrote:
| [dead]
| ttul wrote:
| To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over
| nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in
| these projects feel a strong social connection.
| necovek wrote:
| And a bunch of conferences like FOSDEM, GUADEC, LinuxConf,
| PyCon...
|
| All the while not forgetting that people contributing to
| free software have altogether different motivations: they
| are (almost) _all_ in it because they want to contribute
| their own time to something they believe in.
|
| Quite different from what majority of people in any company
| are there for.
| olliej wrote:
| People need social interaction, sure, people also need to have
| social interactions outside of the office.
|
| What we are seeing is a large swathe of people who use the
| office as their social life, and they're taking the position
| that their inability to socialize out of work is important
| enough to inflict the negative consequences of returning to the
| office on people who don't treat the office as a fun zone for
| personal sustenance.
| davedx wrote:
| This is just conjecture, post some evidence for your claims
| alar44 wrote:
| You can do this through any video conferencing platform. Or do
| we need to smell our coworkers for teamwork to work?
| scotty79 wrote:
| More important role of those connections is that they promote
| inertness in the employees so they will remain employees even
| when they are disadvantaged because social component will hold
| them back from moving on.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| 20 years ago I was on a lot of conference calls early or late in
| the workday, offshoring my job to a time zone 11.5 or 10.5 hours
| off, or with sysadmins 1 hour off.
|
| The only thing that's changed in 20 years is Zoom or WebEx vs a
| conference bridge. There wasn't an in office dynamic then or now.
| mech422 wrote:
| Funny how having everyone in the same office wasn't a concern
| when outsourcing was the new hotness.
| cess11 wrote:
| Big organisations are lead by people that hang out with other
| people in big corporations. Some of these other corporations are
| friends with people in big organisations that own office
| properties or do office cleaning or whatever. These corporate
| leaders have common interests in office workers being at the
| office and justifying paying friends of friends and keeping them
| happy.
|
| If you're a bigwig and cut down on office spending other bigwigs
| will be less likely to help you out when you need a new position,
| among other things.
|
| To explain the 'hallway talk is great' myth: it's from the
| masters of process, owners of product, and other similar people,
| that work relatively closely to the people actually building and
| maintaining the systems that make dah mahney. These people learn
| a lot and get a lot of things explained that they otherwise
| wouldn't and that makes them feel less nervous about not having
| any actual control at all over the output and functioning of the
| 'team'. They could of course ask over asyncronous chats or email
| but they don't know what to ask and they're scared they'll
| irritate someone, so they prefer sucking it out of smalltalk by
| the coffee machine.
|
| And then there's the 'but how will I ever manage to take a walk
| or bike if my boss doesn't tell me to'. If this is you, get help.
| You have some executive dysfunction that will eventually be
| unhealthy somehow, probably when you're unemployed or have a lot
| of spare time for some other reason. Fix it before you realise
| you've spent amazing free time that you yourself got to own on
| doing none of the things you know makes you feel good and strong.
| How to do it varies, it could be therapy, it could be to move to
| a less polluted place, could be something else.
|
| Remote is here to stay. Fire your boss if they insist on you
| spending more than two days a month at some office for no good
| reason.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| At my company we have the worst of both works with "hybrid
| office". Employees need to come to the office 3 days a week, each
| team picks one day for the entire team to be in-office, the
| employees can choose the other days.
|
| The team day is mostly consumed with in-person meetings with
| others on your team, so no individual work gets done that day.
| The other in-office days are either spent heads down with
| headphones trying to focus or trying to book one of the limited
| conference rooms to have a zoom meeting with coworkers that are
| working from home or in a remote office. It's hard to book
| meetings before 10am or after 4pm because someone's usually
| commuting during that time.
|
| Companies should either pick full remote or full back in the
| office, Hybrid doesn't seem to work well.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting
| together in front of a whiteboard and drawing. For those kinds of
| problems it's useful to have people in the same room until we
| have AR solutions that can fill that need. Also for some people,
| not leaving their home caused significant issues in their
| performance. People aren't solitary creatures, so for some - the
| office fills that role. For others, home office works perfectly
| well. There isn't a yes/no answer here. I should perhaps add,
| that coming to the office was always voluntary in my company, way
| before Covid.
| iknownothow wrote:
| Sorry but in my opinion you can't beat free styling with
| Excalidraw and a bunch of nerds leaning back in their own
| basements and home offices thinking deeply and being critical
| of ideas.
|
| The overhead of having such meetings is next to nothing in
| remote compared to the office. No one has to get up to go to a
| meeting or book a meeting room.
|
| Did you just have a eureka moment 5 minutes after a meeting
| ended? No problem! Ping the group chat and get on a call in
| less than 15 seconds while the idea is still hot in memory.
|
| Oh you want to pick up where you last left off? No problem,
| upload last meetings Excalidraw file and start editing.
| dudul wrote:
| Ha the good old tale of people gathering around the whiteboard
| to solve hard problem.
|
| IME, it's usually 30/60 minutes during which the Architect
| listens to himself, draws some nice boxes and arrows, overlooks
| all the edge cases and nuances and then everyone goes back to
| their open space desk. And the next day you realize that the
| solution doesn't work and you start a Jira comment thread.
| j-bos wrote:
| Are you in my office?
| amf12 wrote:
| > Some problems are solved faster by multiple people getting
| together in front of a whiteboard and drawing.
|
| I hear this often, and it makes sense, but I am not sure how
| frequently do people solve problems with whiteboarding? Is it
| such a frequent problem that we need to be in the office every
| day?
| bawolff wrote:
| I'm not sure i have ever solved a problem at a white board in
| my entire career.
| ttul wrote:
| Employer here. We had a fancy brick and timber office. It was
| beautiful and centrally located. I let the lease expire in 2021
| after everyone went remote for the pandemic. There has been no
| sign of any decay in productivity.
|
| It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of human
| connection that feels good. But is that needed for effective
| work? I'm not so sure.
|
| Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more
| effective when done in person, so we have periodic "off-site"
| retreats for a day or two, or we meet at a conference. But most
| of work is just grinding. That works perfectly well from a home
| office.
| sekai wrote:
| > It is true that hanging out in person develops a sense of
| human connection that feels good. But is that needed for
| effective work? I'm not so sure.
|
| Especially questionable in an open-plan office, everyone is
| trying just to concentrate and are wearing headphones.
| ttul wrote:
| We were guilty of this. Open plan all the way. It was - to
| reflect back - horrible.
| Gigachad wrote:
| That was the best of both worlds. Headphones on, you're
| focusing, standing around the coffee machine, you're open to
| chat. There is really no signal for remote that someone is
| open for a random chat.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| >Brainstorming and creative collaboration activities seem more
| effective when done in person
|
| Let me tell you, I hate these. And I will take vacation days to
| avoid going to them. And I also think they're not very
| productive no matter how many 'How To Run A Sprint' classes the
| organizers take.
| joxel wrote:
| Those type of discussions are great. Sounds like you just
| work at a horrible place where the only brainstorming going
| on is about super boring/worthless material.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I
| have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those.
|
| Some key components for me are:
|
| - don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make
| it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully
| some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people,
| that actually get work done. The less managers the better. -
| Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to
| complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and
| perhaps come up with potential solutions.
| oriolid wrote:
| This is the key point. In the arranged meetings and
| workshops that everyone likes so much there's constant
| pressure to be positive and come up with quick solution
| before deadline. Open ended complaining is far more
| productive.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I think you're thinking "brainstorming and creative
| collaboration activities" implies something corporate
| organized. But it can also refer to actual brainstorming and
| creative collaboration that happens spontaneously and
| organically when smart people happen to talk to each other.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I consider myself 100% a remote guy, but c'mon. Isn't it
| reasonable for people in an org to be in the same physical
| space a few times a year.
| dymk wrote:
| No, why do you think it's reasonable that be a requirement
| to be productive?
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Because while I think the benefits of remote work clearly
| outweigh the cons, I also concede that face-to-face human
| interaction provides a host of benefits that cannot be
| replicated virtually, and meeting my clients and partners
| in person from time to time is nice (if I worked as an
| employee, I'd think the same of my teammates and bosses)
| nprateem wrote:
| Because it helps people bond and so work better as a
| team. Plus probably not all your colleagues are complete
| introverts and may actually enjoy the company of others.
| antisthenes wrote:
| In my experience the only thing helping people work
| better as a team is just working better as a team.
|
| Be patient, kind, and spend an extra minute writing a
| more detailed email that is helpful to your colleagues.
| If you're a manager, give them the right tools and
| empower them.
|
| But this is completely orthogonal to whether the work is
| in an office or remote.
| treebeard901 wrote:
| Employers are locked into all these commercial real estate
| transactions and since it's a big part of the budget, they have
| to utilize it. The alternative is a realization that without the
| performative part of office politics most of the stage is
| unnecessary since in most companies the core business ultimately
| is done by a small group of people. Often similar with tech
| teams... Management and middle management without the meetings
| and performances to prove their need and value require everyone
| in the office to be in attendance as an audience. Otherwise it's
| just even more obvious how much is needed for the core business
| to be profitable and succeed.
|
| So far Twitter has been a good example. Now for workers, it's
| important to go back for other reasons. Remote workers reduce
| your power negotiating as an employee and it's a much larger pool
| to even get hired. Being able to be in person becomes an
| emoloyment advantage at that point.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Communication bandwidth.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I'm not an employer. I've worked in academic research as a
| software engineer and research scientist for 20+ years. I don't
| think great research can be done without some kind of regular in-
| person collaboration. Serendipitous, chance interactions are part
| of this. But for me, there's no substitute for whiteboarding in
| the same room. Now of course we also need lots of time to do
| focused work by ourselves.
| shyn3 wrote:
| Banks are offering almost 40% more than they offered me last year
| for 2 days hybrid. It's amazing.
| synu wrote:
| Scrum Masters (and equivalents) have gotten lonely and don't feel
| quite as useful without in person interaction.
| sf_manager1 wrote:
| [dead]
| jaequery wrote:
| I remember an interview of Blockbuster long time ago who claimed
| that their business will never go out of business because people
| come to their store for the people connection, chatting with
| employees, walking around the isles searching for videos, and
| ultimately the experience of even going to the store.
|
| I was actually in agreement with them at the time. But fast
| forward 10-20 years and with Netflix and YouTube, looks like they
| were wrong about the whole thing.
|
| I think the same is playing out here with the in office vs remote
| work.
| system2 wrote:
| Maybe does not apply to high-tech companies but I personally
| witnessed fintech company employees slowdown almost to halt. They
| stopped working and did not finish many of the tasks unless
| managed in person. Majority of employees find ways to watch
| netflix/hulu/youtube even on company laptops (or play games).
| They miss the first minutes of meetings, you can hear them eating
| stuff and plate sounds in the background while talking to them.
| Unless the employees are career driven, they stop working and
| find ways to do bare minimum to get their paychecks. That's why.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| Not an employer, but work at a pretty big company where the CEO
| made a pretty big tell: he mentioned that remote work seemed to
| cause a loss in overall productivity. But then almost all
| engineers chafed, and he had to clarify: we was talking
| specifically about the sales organization.
|
| My sense is that leadership making these decisions simply isn't
| really tuned into how engineering operates. And that's mostly it;
| they're focused on the business, and probably are dialed into the
| sales pipeline. And that probably leads to tons of questions and
| one-off-style clarification sessions where video chats and Slack
| just aren't great, to be frank.
|
| At the same time, I do think there are significant tradeoffs
| between a remote team and a "shared meatspace" team. With remote
| teams, cross-team relationship building is really challenging,
| and I've noticed that there's a natural tendency to focus purely
| on your team. With all teams in a same physical location, it's
| easier to actually just pop by and clarify complex details. But,
| I did work at a place that got hundreds of engineers together
| about 3x a year, and that seemed to be enough to build
| significant bridges across the org.
|
| Ultimately though, in my experience, these kinds of decisions are
| just because upper management is more aligned with sales
| organizations than engineering.
| rumdonut wrote:
| Salesforce? I read Benioff's comments differently. He gave an
| example of lower productivity in sales, but that doesn't mean
| it didn't apply to engineering. It was just an eye-catching
| example that 50% of sales wasn't accomplishing anything or
| whatever it was.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| My guess:
|
| - the communication aspect (I've noticed projects with people who
| are physically in the office progress much smoother than when I
| have to schedule a meeting or reach out via chat; the friction to
| ask someone is lower when you run across them and can see that
| they're not busy vs. pinging them and then not getting a response
| because they actually were in a meeting)
|
| - some people treating WFH as "part time, work a few hours
| between child-minding, chores and other non-work tasks" or a fear
| of that happening
| jonstewart wrote:
| I'm a middle manager in my 40s. I've been going into the office
| since the fall, but was fully WFH during covid before that and
| made the decision to go back in purely due to personal
| convenience. My company continues to offer employees flexibility
| and has not mandated RTO.
|
| That said, we have a lot of team members in the firm in their
| early 20s, their first jobs. I've noticed a preference for those
| team members to RTO (at least a few days a week), and that a good
| deal of learning and camaraderie result. It is certainly far
| easier for me to mentor such folks in the office (especially
| since most aren't on my team) than when we're siloed at home.
|
| More senior folks prefer remote -- it's generally easier to
| balance family demands. But ones who've joined the team having
| been fully remote from the start have even expressed difficulty
| coming up to speed, despite everyone on the team being
| transparent and working to solve the issue. It takes new habits
| and they're hard to learn.
| arikr wrote:
| 1) Managing remote employees is harder. Managing in person is
| easier.
|
| Both are doable, but managing someone remotely requires either
| the manager and/or the employee to be really good at remote
| comms.
|
| 2) in person spontaneous collaboration
|
| 3) my experience is most people get less done remotely. Some do
| more, but most do less
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > 3)
|
| My experience is quite the opposite.
| donohoe wrote:
| I'm not answering this directly as an "employer" but just a few
| imperfect observations...
|
| Many people do not need social connections and interactions to be
| productive and happy. I find that most of the people who want WFH
| or be entirely remote fall into this group.
|
| Many people so need social connections and interactions to be
| productive. They find value in dealing with people 1:1. Its how
| they socialize in-part, how they make friends, and provides
| variety in their day. They may like to WFH on occasion, but the
| office interaction is integral.
|
| So... it is (IMHO) mostly the first group that we hear from in
| these discussions. I would argue that OP is in the group. That
| second group is often ignored when these questions are framed in
| such an abolitionists manner ('this works better for me so it
| must work better for everyone').
|
| Its not just 'employers' making arbitrary decisions. It is not a
| simple question to answer and a whole host of other factors come
| into play (company culture, company size, history of remote work,
| location of teams/people, timezones, and so on).
|
| (Minor note: I find myself in the first group but I appreciate
| that there are many sides to this)
| ecshafer wrote:
| This topic comes up a lot, and the biggest pro return to office
| argument is essentially social. People want more human
| interactions that online do not give them.
|
| This I think is more indicative of society, and I think is
| something that is a gap in society / business opportunity.
| WeWork, which was poorly run, I think really has a foot into
| this, but not to the full extent. In urban design there is this
| idea of a third place, somewhere that is not work or home that
| people interact. These places have massively declined in the
| west, especially in the united states. People used to have many
| many third places. People had work, and home, but then they would
| also have church that they attended weekly or more, they would
| have union halls, taverns, social organizations (masons, elks,
| knights of columbus, vfw, etc). A lot of bars and restaurants are
| a lot louder and more consumer focused than they used to be I
| think as well which has hurt.
|
| Public Libraries are another place that could step up, try and
| get more people to work from there and socialize, but most
| libraries have pretty bad hours and are undefunded or have strict
| silence requirements. But I can see a need for some kind
| location, that is open a lot, 7am-10pm or something, that you pay
| a membership fee for. That you can go anytime, and drink cheap
| coffee or beer and work / socialize in them.
| lowken wrote:
| If you live in any medium to large city there are countless young
| professional organizations available. Join one or two and get
| involved. Be willing to volunteer for committees and participate
| in events and you will quickly have a full social calendar.
| Junior Achievement is one great organization. Jaycees is another
| organization.
|
| Young Republicans or young Democrats are a couple of great
| organization. Want to meet young people who are going places in
| their life? You will meet them in these organizations.
|
| Do you like exercise and fitness. Look into Team in Training.
| This is a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
| Sign up for one of their races Go through the training and
| fundraising process. You will me lots of other like minded
| people. After your race consider becoming a Team in Training
| coach.
|
| The possibilities are endless. If you are lonely it's by choice.
| hawthornio wrote:
| Real estate.
| bwhiting2356 wrote:
| What do you mean exactly? Is there a conspiracy from people who
| own commercial real estate to force people who lease that space
| to renew their leases? Are employers stuck in a sunk cost
| fallacy where they just can't conceive of letting something
| they paid for go to waste until their lease is up?
| thisarticle wrote:
| Commercial real estate is worth trillions of dollars and you
| better believe office REITs are terrified right now if the
| trend continues.
| merb wrote:
| I dislike remote work, because I live in a small apartment which
| means I don't have a special room for work and that leads to the
| fact that my work and my free time sometimes aren't clearly
| separated anymore. I also think that there are people who are
| good at remote work and people who aren't, the people who aren't
| mostly abuse wfh, while the other group strifes in it.
| sunsunsunsun wrote:
| Heres the catch-22 for me. I dislike remote work where I
| currently live because I am in a small 1 bed apartment with a
| child so it's literally impossible to get work done. But why am
| I in this tiny apartment? Because my company insists we be in
| the office at least 3 days per week and therefore I cannot
| afford a bigger place in the most expensive city in my country.
| I want remote so I can improve my living circumstances.
| anon74885 wrote:
| (CTO here, 100mEUR public company in the EU, 200-person
| development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely)
|
| 1) I don't care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some
| teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I
| suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not "cranking out
| lines of code faster" - it's making sure we are doing the right
| projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well
| with all the cross-team dependencies. I'm quite consciously
| making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently
| interrupted and get less work done ... in return for which they
| will be much better informed about what the company is doing and
| we can focus our efforts more effectively.
|
| 2) because this development organization works and I want to keep
| it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking
| over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have
| potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I
| am running a fully remote organization then I can't justify a
| physical office space in the EU and there's a very clear route to
| cost-reduction which is "push all the work out to low CoL
| countries" And honestly it won't matter whether that is actually
| feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there's a
| risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache
| because I know it won't work well. On the other hand, if as a dev
| organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier
| for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn't work.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that
| happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| That's the sort of thing that isn't immediately obvious, but
| becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of the
| pandemic people were able to coast on their existing connections,
| but it becomes harder years on, especially if half your team has
| _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
|
| In the before times, good remote companies would be intentional
| about having regular company meetings in a single location. That
| is a good alternative. But if you already have an office and
| already expect everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone
| to London or SF?
|
| Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer
| employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship,
| company culture, etc.
|
| P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software
| engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a commute
| a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy separation
| between your work and your life.
|
| Edit: full disclosure, I'm not an employer but I sympathize and
| spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum
| master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020. Now
| I'm not an SM and largely work independently, but I love being
| able to walk to the office every day (30 minute commute). I used
| to do hybrid but now I'm really enjoying the separation and am
| loathe to work from home, except on weekends.
|
| I'm also an Urbanism nerd and don't want to see cities revert to
| the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably happening,
| destroying decades of progress on livability. Unfortunately
| there's a collective action problem; people will miss having nice
| cities to visit, but don't make the connection that there is a
| "use it or lose it" aspect to great shared spaces.
| sbmthakur wrote:
| What was the 70s-era trend?
| brightball wrote:
| I remember when I first started my career, my boss told me
| "Don't miss meetings, don't miss deadlines. Otherwise, I don't
| care when you're here."
|
| I thought it sounded great. Spent most of my time out of the
| office for the first 3 weeks. Quickly felt the downsides and
| got back in the office for the remainder of my next 2 jobs.
| Networking alone was more valuable for my career personally
| than anything that we actually accomplished in the office by
| being there together.
|
| I don't know that the company benefited, but I felt like I did.
|
| At the larger company though (business telecom), it was a lot
| easier for them to secure the network by controlling all of the
| devices and endpoints in the office, including camera access
| and building access. Dealing with all those employees on remote
| devices over a VPN would have been a huge security headache
| IMO.
| thisarticle wrote:
| Sorry but this sounds really bad (and frankly, a bit entitled).
| Not everyone can afford to live 15 minutes walk to work w/ Bay
| Area, Seattle, etc housing prices. Not everyone wants to spend
| 30 minutes or more each way in a car just to get to an office
| that has a demonstrably worse setup than what they have at
| home. I have a healthy separation between work and home, it's
| called closing the laptop lid and walking away.
| _gmax0 wrote:
| I'd be curious to see a study done comparing the extent of
| happen-chance that occurs in-person vs digitally.
|
| Digital hallways exist in the form of private messages.
| pflanze wrote:
| Do you have tips on how to approach coworkers about "odd"
| topics via private messages? The "hallway" principle as I
| understand it is that it is low-key, low-risk, you can
| immediately read the others' reactions, and you (usually)
| won't be blamed for odd thoughts, nor does the other side
| need to feel pressured to handle your question well.
| ovao wrote:
| For the purpose of enabling more "spontaneous connection" in a
| remote environment, could managers not simply foster an
| environment in which bandying around ideas in Slack or Teams is
| just encouraged?
|
| I can see how employees existing solely in the Slackosphere
| _can be_ crippling to the sort of shop talk that can spur new
| ideas, but I see no reason why it _has to be_ that way.
| ilaksh wrote:
| If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can also do
| so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
|
| There are also several good applications for internet
| collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video
| space.
|
| Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.
|
| Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen
| over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to
| use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.
|
| So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell
| them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be
| done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares,
| remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an
| at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot
| or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then
| you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire
| them.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Discord, rich shared 3d spaces, GitHub Issues, wikis... Lol.
| Some people (most, I'd say) prefer going to lunch or to
| Starbucks with other people, leaving all the technology
| behind briefly, and simply talking. I think it's also more
| effective in getting a point across than any virtual medium.
| ilaksh wrote:
| More effective how? You may have a higher bandwidth
| interface but the difference between a video chat audio
| call and in-person is not as big as people think it is.
| Also eye contact is coming soon to VR devices.
|
| It's nice to be able to meet in person sometimes and going
| out is more fun. But it absolutely is not important for
| effective communication. Unless they literally have poor
| writing skills and/or poor reading comprehension.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you can
| also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool).
|
| I don't believe that, those are very different modes of
| communications.
|
| > There are also several good applications for internet
| collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video
| space.
|
| I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still
| very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to
| achieve a realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still
| tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody
| was able to figure this out yet, it feels like there was
| hardly any progress in the last 15 years.
|
| Personally, participating in a remote meeting is very
| noticeably more demanding for me than an in-person meeting.
|
| > Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all
| happen over the internet.
|
| Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice.
| My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but
| the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person
| events.
| kelnos wrote:
| > > _If you can connect or collaborate in a hallway, you
| can also do so in a Discord channel (or whatever tool)._
|
| > _I don 't believe that, those are very different modes of
| communications._
|
| So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't
| mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
|
| No, you're not going to have a random hallway meeting and
| conversation on on a chat platform. But the barrier to just
| saying hello to someone or asking them a question drops to
| near-zero when you have those chat platforms. Yes, it does
| mean you need to be more deliberate about making
| interactions happen, but there's nothing inherently wrong
| with that.
|
| The "remote renaissance" is still very new. (And it started
| during a time that was not ideal for methodically exploring
| and learning a new paradigm.) It'll take many more years
| before people adjust and really find out how communication
| works best.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > So what? Just because something is different, it
| doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
|
| You've missed the point. It's wasn't that there are no
| benefits from it. It's that there are specific benefits
| from conversations that won't happen on a wiki.
|
| This is a great example of how people can miss the point
| if you don't go round the houses with conversation and
| say something in multiple ways, so they can't
| misunderstand.
| jpeterson wrote:
| "There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that
| happens in hallways and kitchenettes."
|
| I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20 years
| in the tech industry, I've never once seen a meaningful
| collaboration spring up in a kitchenette or hallway. It's
| invariably "how was your weekend?" fare. Don't get me wrong,
| there's value in connecting that way, but it's never the sort
| of thing that directly leads to any of the productivity gain
| that the anti-remote crowd would like you to believe.
| sekai wrote:
| > I've seen this idea repeated many times, but in over 20
| years in the tech industry
|
| Exactly, and how many of those conversations are wasted on
| nothing? Sure, there's a social element to it, so how about
| we highlight that aspect and not some "lightbulb" moment that
| derives from small talk.
| mort96 wrote:
| Conversations which let you get to know your colleagues
| better are "wasted on nothing" to you? Is there no point to
| knowing your colleagues?
| whynaut wrote:
| there's no point adding 2+ hours of commuting to my day
| for what could be a video call.
|
| I don't really understand why many commenters here are
| expressing a sentiment that you can't get to know someone
| digitally. Some of the best people in my life were met
| online, both personally and professionally.
| mort96 wrote:
| You don't get coincidental conversations between people
| of different department with no set agenda through a zoom
| meeting.
|
| I'm not saying it's worth 2+ hours of commuting. And
| honestly, I think it's bullshit that employers expect
| commuting time to be unpaid; if having people in the
| office is something they consider valuable, they should
| be paying for that commute time. But I reject the idea
| that those conversations have no value.
| atsuzaki wrote:
| I scored most (if not all) of my career-defining
| opportunities from hallway convos after a meeting, or
| chatting while waiting for coffee to brew, so YMMV.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This seems wild to me. It seems like the company and
| managers are doing something wrong if all your advancement
| is coming from random unofficial chats.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Wow where do you work that management has their shit
| together that well?
| moremetadata wrote:
| Norwich Union (Aviva) the insurance company have a system
| called The Wall iirc (been over decade).
|
| Its a free for all for asking questions, sending
| messages, making unofficial FYI notes, its an attempt to
| document those conversations that would have otherwise
| taken place between individuals. Everyone from the top
| down has read/write access. Main objective to document
| those conversations, so nothing gets missed, like people
| being otherwise engaged in meetings/phone calls. Self
| Censorship takes place because everyone can view it,
| reduces staff harassment problems.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Management doesn't have it together, but they do make
| suggestions about taking on certain projects etc that are
| good for your career and at least talk about plans to
| getting to the next level (sometimes).
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's exactly how managers advance. Through good
| personal relationships across the organization, rapport,
| "alignment".
| giantg2 wrote:
| Maybe for managers. But really it should be about
| delivering completed projects, especially for technical
| folks.
| joxel wrote:
| If you're not just a code monkey than those chats are
| great for coming up with new ideas and fleshing them out
| over time. But hey you can also just be a code monkey
| that completes projects assigned to them. To each their
| own I guess.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yes, and people can be assholes if they want.
|
| Maybe what you describe works at some places or for
| specific people. Many companies will ignore your ideas.
| Your title is code monkey and that's all you do - shut up
| and listen to us important people. Some managers are very
| threatened by their subordinates, or are unimaginative.
| The business side generally wants what they want. God
| forbid you suggest some new approach.
| joxel wrote:
| Makes sense. I'd just be trying to get out of a job like
| that, and don't see how that's desirable at all. You seem
| to think its the better way though.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I never said it was the better way. It's simply reality,
| at least for most jobs (larger non-tech companies).
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I think you're missing the point, this is not about the
| split between management and engineering. Code monkey is
| here somebody who accepts assignment and produces code,
| without having a lot of understanding for the larger
| whole.
|
| And that's mostly what you get with this attitude that
| doesn't value any meetings / communication which doesn't
| relate directly to one's work.
|
| But the organizations don't want to have code monkeys
| (typically), because to produce value, people can't just
| churn out code to complete assignments, they need to also
| understand the context, be able to identify made up
| problems, be able to design the most minimal solution
| covering the business needs etc. That requires
| understanding, certain alignment, communication.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They might say that they don't want code monkeys, but
| their actions say otherwise. That's my experience
| anyways.
| whynaut wrote:
| My career has advanced just fine over Slack and Zoom.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Technical folks simply cannot do their jobs without solid
| working relationships, and those are not as well formed
| digitally.
|
| Remote work will continue to reduce over the next couple
| of years. If you don't have a real reason for being at
| home during the work day, expect to be back in the office
| soon.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Technical folks simply cannot do their jobs without
| solid working relationships, and those are not as well
| formed digitally."
|
| Any real data on this? All the data our company has shows
| increased performance during WFH, such as an increase in
| deliveries and decrease in cycle time. So even if it's
| not as well formed, it seems it's formed sufficiently.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| I think you focusing on delivery and cycle time is kind
| of emblematic of my point; none of that matters if you
| ship the wrong thing, and don't correct over time, but to
| you that's where the conversation ends.
|
| That's not where it actually ends, however. How do you
| know what to work on? How do you know if you built a
| profitable thing? Being remote lets you ignore those
| things in ways that are harder to do in person.
|
| Hybrid is probably here to stay, but "remote first" was a
| pandemic only thing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "I think you focusing on delivery and cycle time is kind
| of emblematic of my point; none of that matters if you
| ship the wrong thing, and don't correct over time, but to
| you that's where the conversation ends."
|
| Lol don't tell me what _I_ think. Those are the metrics
| that our management uses. That 's _their_ focus, and are
| pervasive in the industry. Sure, you can talk about
| shipping the wrong thing. What 's the metric called for
| that, or would it fall under rework? Our rework has not
| gone up. There's no noticeable increase in failed
| projects either.
|
| "Being remote lets you ignore those things in ways that
| are harder to do in person."
|
| No, it really doesn't. These same ritual and due
| diligence conversations take place remotely. Or maybe
| your org doesn't have good procedures?
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| If you don't know why or how your management figures out
| what to build or if what you're building is what they
| need, and don't see how that's related to remote work,
| there's not much I can do to help you.
| Adraghast wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, but I was doing good work remotely
| ten years before covid and will continue to do so ten
| years after.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| I mean sure, but there's no real way of knowing what
| you've left on the table by working remotely.
|
| And I say this as someone who was also working remotely
| before the pandemic. I'm always wary of people who refuse
| to acknowledge the downsides of ideas they support...
| Implicated wrote:
| Question for you to help satisfy my curiosity about this a
| bit... do you also enjoy socializing in bars or the like?
| atsuzaki wrote:
| Not really. I'm very introverted and not good with
| strangers, actually in the process of getting an autism
| diagnosis right now.
|
| But I really enjoy socializing with folks with similar
| interests (e.g., tech), and I work with a lot of
| neurodivergent colleagues which puts less of a strain on
| my social battery as I don't have to be "normal"---we're
| all weird and it's fine.
|
| Still, my social battery drains quickly nonetheless, I
| tend to have to leave after hanging out for an hour or
| two.
| User23 wrote:
| That's called office politics.
| ljf wrote:
| How much of your working life was in person vs remote?
|
| I agree most of my 'big breaks' were face to face, that was
| due to the point I was in my career at that time. I've
| still had some great progression during remote working
| times - sometimes you just need to make these things happen
| - contacting someone just for a chat if that is what you
| need, turning up to online meetings early to spend a little
| time chatting before the proper meeting, or asking specific
| people if they have time to stay on.
|
| I really think half the problem is that we aren't yet used
| to the new rules of engagement, and are still figuring out
| what feels right. But opportunity is still there.
| kelnos wrote:
| So we should require that everyone be in an office, so that
| people like you can get their career-defining
| opportunities? Maybe many of us would be fine making that
| trade-off: fewer opportunities for career-defining
| opportunities in exchange for the elimination of a commute,
| more-comfortable working arrangements, and a much more
| flexible work schedule.
|
| Not everything in life is about career advancement.
| ornornor wrote:
| > Not everything in life is about career advancement.
|
| Well said :)
| bilvar wrote:
| Yes, and when people going to the office get more
| opportunities, more advancement and higher compensation,
| he/she will be complaining for making "less money for the
| same work". Or they will start complaining about how
| unfair is that those opportunities only arise in the
| office and demand that there will be "procedures" for
| them to be available remotely.
| captainbland wrote:
| It turns out using that time and energy I was spending on
| my commute on my work was actually good for my career.
| ornornor wrote:
| Not speaking for GP, but as far as I'm concerned I'm
| happy to stay far far far away from office politics games
| and getting paid less than those who do while having half
| or a quarter of their workloads.
| bilvar wrote:
| See reply to GP. I commend you too.
| kelnos wrote:
| Long ago I accepted that if I want better work-life
| balance and more flexible arrangements, there would be
| consequences. In my post above I explicitly called it out
| as a trade-off: I am totally fine with lower pay and
| fewer promotions if it means I get to live more of my
| life outside work.
|
| If you're not ok with that, that's your choice to make:
| find jobs that give you those opportunities, and tilt
| your work-life balance toward work. Hell, you should be
| happy that I have more flexibility in my working
| arrangements and can make this trade-off: less
| competition for you to get what you want.
| bilvar wrote:
| I commend you for having this approach. I'm biased from
| my experience from colleagues that got annoyed when they
| realized they couldn't have their cake and eat it too.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Why go off one example and pretend it's the whole topic?
| They were just saying it's easily possible to have
| meaningful conversations, as a counter to the previous
| comment.
| kelnos wrote:
| Not sure what you mean; please re-read the comment I'm
| replying to. They made a single point on a single topic,
| and I addressed it.
| atsuzaki wrote:
| ...No?
|
| I think people who wants to work from home should be able
| to. I'm doing hybrid personally as well now, it's great
| for keeping my chronic pain under control. And I enjoy
| coming in couple days a week to a quieter office (as lots
| are doing hybrid/mixed wfh as well).
|
| Internet has conditioned us to think that people can only
| have extreme beliefs, and any disagreement means their
| opinion must be the polar extreme opposite of mine. I can
| simultaneously appreciate opportunities I've got from
| socializing with people in a fully-WFO setting while also
| appreciating benefits of WFH -\\_(tsu)_/-
| kelnos wrote:
| Then say that! Your post was a single sentence in support
| of office work.
|
| This isn't about assuming extreme positions, this is
| about reading what someone has written and responding to
| it at face value.
| necovek wrote:
| So everyone should work from home?
|
| Yes, that's not what you said, just like that's not what
| the comment you replied to said.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem is that for all these alleged career-defining
| opportunities to happen, you need a bunch of people in an
| office. That means that people need to be required to go
| to an office.
|
| I explicitly did not say "everyone should work from
| home", using words like "many of us", so right, "that's
| not what [I] said", and you're just making up an argument
| where none exists.
| leros wrote:
| I would probably say that 95% of my creative problem solving
| type work happened in unstructured conversations like hallway
| conversations. A lot of value was definitely lost there.
| joxel wrote:
| You must work in a boring ass place. We are always talking
| about ideas to each other. Though I do research so maybe
| that's why.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Same. I don't really collaborate in the hallways, I don't
| think IT people tend to.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Probably, because if you do, you get asked to fix something
| and you're already overloaded with work to do and people
| can't be bothered to google.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Moreover, personally I'd prefer it stays this way. When I
| take a break and go to the kitchen to get a coffee, it is
| also a part of mental hygiene - I need to clear my mind as it
| needs some rest, too. So the last thing I want is someone
| bothering me about a merge request or some planned feature. A
| weekend trip, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Hear hear. I worked at a place that pair programmed all the
| time (I liked it that way--it's why I joined the company)
| but it meant that I always had to eat lunch at my desk. To
| me it's crazy to be talking all morning then talk all
| through lunch then talk all afternoon! But to each their
| own.
| kelnos wrote:
| Wait what? Why does pair programming mean that you have
| to eat lunch at your desk?
|
| You are just as capable of taking a bag lunch to a
| cafeteria, or going out to eat...
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Because I want an hour a silence during the day. Eating
| in the kitchen means eating with people and having to
| talk more, or at least listen more.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Completely disagree. I probably have 3 or 4 of these
| spontaneous conversations that wouldn't otherwise happen a
| day when I'm in the office. It might start with 'what are you
| working on' and branch off from there, it's not just small
| talk.
| nicpottier wrote:
| What? This is a crazy anecdote. I believe you but understand
| that's not the norm. I have had many and know if others
| having many as well.
|
| Companies that are all remote will survive but they won't
| thrive and in a competitive market will lose to those that
| are in person.
|
| I say that after running a company that was one or the other
| at various times. The periods when we were all in person
| (constantly, not as a special event) is when real innovative
| progress was made.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| I have had a lot of interesting conversations with colleagues
| from other teams while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it's just
| meaningless small talk about the weekend but sometimes we
| talk about work and help each other find solutions to
| problems, or realize we should collaborate. And even if it's
| just small talk, making those kinds of connections can make
| it a lot easier to get in touch with them in the future.
| mort96 wrote:
| I have a ton of informal conversations with people I don't
| have formal meetings with, just because we happen to go to
| the coffee machine at the same time or happen to go eat lunch
| at the same time. Some of those conversations are non-job-
| related (which is valuable, since strong social connections
| with colleagues are valuable), but a lot end up being on job
| stuff. I end up just informally talking with sales people,
| customer service people, managers, etc, and hearing about
| stuff from their perspective or the stuff that's on their
| minds is incredibly useful.
| paxys wrote:
| This whole "spontaneous collaboration in a shared space" thing
| was a myth started by Google to sell the idea of open office
| layouts, and something the rest of the industry latched on to
| after that. This is not how software development works.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes._
|
| I love reading things like this, because it tickles my
| hypocritical funny bone.
|
| Where is the evidence for this? Where is the hard data showing
| that these "hallway conversations" ultimately generate more
| sustainable long-term revenue for the company? Because at the
| end of the day, that's the only reason a company should ever
| mandate anything that employees don't want: because it either
| generates more revenue, or saves them money. If you can't prove
| that requiring employees to be in-office accomplishes this,
| then there's no reason to do so.
|
| Regarding hypocrisy: I recall as an individual contributor all
| the times I've been required to justify -- with hard data --
| things I wanted management to support because I believed it
| would increase developer happiness and comfort, and thus
| increase productivity (and reduce costs). It was always hard
| (or impossible) to do this, especially before the fact, so
| management would often turn me down. And yet, we have this
| completely unsupportable statement -- "everyone in-office
| creates better connections that leads to higher productivity"
| -- that management is all-in on enforcing.
|
| I think the real reason for "return to office" initiatives is
| mundane and obvious: ego, power trips, and an unreasonable lack
| of trust.
|
| > _But if you already have an office and already expect
| everyone to be relatively close, why fly everyone to London or
| SF?_
|
| If you already have an office and expect everyone to be
| relatively close, you don't have to fly everyone anywhere. You
| just have "come to the office" days. Depending on the level of
| remoteness of your workers, that can be as often as once a
| week, or once a quarter.
|
| > _if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software
| engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a
| commute a quite pleasant part of your day_
|
| False. You're not taking into account the myriad ways people
| choose and need to live. I wouldn't do the SF<->south bay
| commute ever again (used to do that 10+ years ago daily). Are
| you telling me I'm required to move to take a job that's a
| 60-minute drive away? That's ridiculous.
|
| > _I'm also an Urbanism nerd and don't want to see cities
| revert to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably
| happening, destroying decades of progress on livability._
|
| Ah, I see. So basically you see "people are leaving cities in
| droves" and think the solution is "make people come to the
| office". Another unsupportable statement, and also unreasonable
| to ask of people. I live in a city, have no intention of
| leaving, and value the fact that I work from home, even though
| any job I'd take would also be in the city. I hate sprawl and
| would never go back to living in a suburb.
|
| Maybe some people don't _want_ to live in cities, though. Your
| "solution" to this problem is to require people do that
| (through completely unrelated employment considerations), just
| to keep cities healthy? How selfish!
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| > you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and
| create a healthy separation between your work and your life
|
| May be true in some small, limited segments of the States. The
| vast majority commute by car. Traffic accidents are the leading
| cause of death. Very pleasant!
| allenrb wrote:
| I'm with you 100% but we're fighting an uphill battle. For the
| couple of years pre-Covid, I alternated between a 15-mile bike
| ride (each way) and a walk->train->walk commute. It was
| wonderful, and great for my mental and physical health. I felt
| like a part of the city.
|
| At the start of the pandemic we went full-remote and it worked,
| because we all knew each other well. Yet even then, I felt the
| loss of informal (sometimes work-related, sometimes not)
| communication with coworkers.
|
| Time passed and now I'm in a fully-remote job. It's alright, my
| coworkers are nice, and things get done. But it's not the same.
| I don't feel like a part of anything. I'm constantly subject to
| the distractions of being at home -- there's lots of
| interesting stuff to do here, and my ADHD makes it tough to
| ignore.
|
| More than likely, I'll retire early rather than finish out a
| career that's some mix of WFH or going to a nearly-empty
| office.
| asveikau wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I can't believe the amount of people here denying this exists
| or that they've ever seen it. I wonder if they are the type to
| neglect social dynamics over cold, detached, ultimately flawed
| and incomplete metrics? They can't even conjecture about unseen
| forces and subtle influences, a sort of butterfly effect where
| an off topic conversation about the weekend leads to different
| technical decisions? Because all that stuff does happen. It can
| be very hard to quantify or understand.
|
| That's one reason I hate cultures they put too much weight on
| performance reviews. They think they can measure individual
| contribution and productivity. They don't get the less obvious
| things that arise from group settings and informal
| collaboration.
| itronitron wrote:
| I understand your point, and I have experienced that on
| occasion, maybe once or twice a year. However that also
| requires that people have slack time available to kick things
| around in conversation.
|
| I've had equal or better success following paths on my own
| that while being highly tangential/unrelated to my work
| ultimately provided valuable and relevant insights.
|
| I guess my point is that valuable spontaneous connections
| require time but they don't require in-person interpersonal
| interactions.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| > That's the sort of thing that isn't immediately obvious, but
| becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of
| the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing
| connections, but it becomes harder years on, especially if half
| your team has _never_ met in person or come to company HQ.
|
| As an employer it's your job (via delegation) to facilitate how
| people (can) collaborate with each other. Relying on people
| doing that for you during their breaks is just lazy and poor
| leadership.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I've never ever ever have had all my team in one place. I've
| worked in two different countries and six different cities. Not
| one team has had everyone in the same area. Water cooler
| conversations always ended up isolating and creating in-out
| group dynamics. We always had to fight to force communication
| through async global channels as much as we can to make sure
| people don't feel left out or lack important context. It is a
| challenge.
|
| Pandemic changes in work has thrust into the open the
| challenges with remote. But you ignore it at your own peril or
| curl up to the familiar return-to-work ass-on-the-seat model
| and be left behind.
|
| Btw, if you need good ideas, you schedule and organise a
| brainstorming session or create an idea board org wide. You
| encourage challenging assumptions and involve your team in
| decision making. All of this need to happen irrespective of
| whether your team is local or scattered. Might as well use
| modern technology when you can and support remote and local
| discussions.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| I think this boils down towards being extrovert and introvert.
| you seem to cheering lots of "people interaction" and thrive on
| it while "the remote crowd" can get by just doing work without
| the need or pressure for in-person interaction.
|
| From the about 1 year i spend in the office about 10 years ago
| it was mostly annoying to have to "connect" (and the worst
| thing was force "team building", after 8h spend together in the
| office). Sometimes we had fun and laugh aut at the end of the
| day work is just work. everything beyond that is some weird,
| twisted invention by the HR and corporate mumbo-jumbo
| (especially part about "corporate culture") - remember, you
| don't own anything to the company, you are not a slave and
| corporation doesn't own you anything (which was shown by the
| recent lay-offs)..
| thewebcount wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I've literally never seen this. I've seen people sit around and
| gossip about coworkers or talk about the latest TV shows or
| movies or sports, though. (And nothing wrong with that. We
| can't think about work for 8 hours straight.)
|
| > That's the sort of thing that isn't immediately obvious, but
| becomes more noticeable as time goes on. The first months of
| the pandemic people were able to coast on their existing
| connections, but it becomes harder years on
|
| That's the exact opposite of my experience. The first few
| months were awkward because it was slightly new and assumptions
| were made that we'd be back in the office in a few weeks. But
| as time went on, everyone became much more productive. But
| that's just my office, not everyone else's.
|
| > Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for
| younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking,
| mentorship, company culture, etc.
|
| That's total speculation. When I was first hired out of
| college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but rarely
| interacted with outside of work. The majority of my friends
| were people I met in real life around town.
|
| > if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software
| engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a
| commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy
| separation between your work and your life.
|
| Or you can just turn off your work computer and do something
| else to create that space, like hang with your family or
| friends.
| prpl wrote:
| I don't think the "bad for younger/junior people" thing is
| speculation. My team had an intern who was toiling away at
| something for two+ weeks that I resolved for him in 10
| minutes the one day I went to the office for that month. It
| was slightly mentioned in stand ups and even meetings, but
| remote work doesn't mean less meetings and frankly people
| (myself included) have even more divided attention during
| remote meetings because it's easier to multitask and tune out
| things that aren't immediately relevant to your work. That
| happened a bit before, but it happens much more often in the
| remote era.
|
| I think remote is better for personal focus, but at a small
| cost to team focus.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Sounds like a management failure, why wasn't anyone
| checking in with the intern and diving deep to see what the
| problem was? Did the intern have an assigned mentor? Where
| were they?
| sseagull wrote:
| >> Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for
| younger/newer employees who completely miss out on
| networking, mentorship, company culture, etc.
|
| > That's total speculation. When I was first hired out of
| college, I had 1 colleague I was kind of close with, but
| rarely interacted with outside of work. The majority of my
| friends were people I met in real life around town.
|
| These are not the same thing, although you aren't the only
| one in this (frankly depressing) thread making this mistake.
| You don't have to be completely best buds with your mentor,
| including outside of work.
|
| Spontaneous discussions and networking don't work as well
| online because it requires more intent to talk to the other
| person. That spontaneous networking is more important for
| junior rather than senior people.
|
| Being "in the kitchen" is a sign someone is probably not
| really working on something at that moment, and therefore may
| be open to conversation about something other than work. That
| signal is almost always missing online, and therefore doesn't
| happen.
| QIYGT wrote:
| > I'm also an Urbanism nerd and don't want to see cities revert
| to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably
| happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
|
| There's more demand than ever before to live in NYC, as
| evidenced by record high rent prices. Cities don't need to be
| about offices.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I heard the opposite, but I haven't seen any proof in any
| direction. What I read is that office space in NYC is still
| expensive, but occupation rate is lower than ever.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think the person you're replying to is talking
| about office rents. Residential rents are still high, so
| clearly people still want to live in NYC, regardless of
| whether or not they're working in an office or work from
| home.
|
| The number of people who want to live in cities seems to be
| pretty similar now to what it was before the pandemic. I
| don't think urbanism is dying, or, if it is, it's not
| because of remote work.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I would like to revisit this in 3-5 years, without an
| office there is less motivation to live in a very
| expensive city like NYC. As leases expire and companies
| close even more offices, we'll see where all this goes.
| xwdv wrote:
| Not good enough.
|
| In fact, a counter example: people regularly spawn random
| threads of conversation like the one you mention in Slack
| channels. A lot of times nothing comes of it, but some of these
| threads tag senior executives and managers within the company
| who have followed insights from threads into new cost
| improvement or even revenue generating ideas.
|
| These conversations are unlikely to happen in passing hallway
| conversations and even if they did would likely not develop
| further than a couple remarks without forcing people to
| creating meetings to discuss topics that may or may not be
| important, which quickly gets overwhelming and makes people
| lose interest in further discussion. Having people sit around
| all day at an office in case such a conversation spontaneously
| happens is very inefficient when it can be done online in
| asynchronous fashion.
|
| The central tenet of your argument is thus unraveled and the
| conclusion you must come to is that we don't need offices.
| Accept it. Office workers aren't here to serve as NPCs to fill
| your pretty little cities.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software
| engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a
| commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy
| separation between your work and your life.
|
| I'm supposed to move whenever I change jobs?
| User23 wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes
|
| That's an interesting way to say "office politics."
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I used to work at a job where I was required to go into the
| office (Florida). My teammates were 1. offshore (India) 2. in
| Nebraska 3. in Atlanta.
|
| My manager was in Atlanta.
|
| I had 0 teammates in the office in Florida.
|
| What's the justification there?
|
| I also had to do a lot of 2am-3am on call.
|
| Our laptops were also tracked with Sapience Buddy.
|
| I no longer work there.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > everyone being remote is really bad for younger/newer
| employees who completely miss out on networking, mentorship,
| company culture, etc.
|
| I've personally found mentorship is much _easier_ remote since
| you can more easily dedicate your entire focus on a person
| rather than just catching up real quick before meetings.
|
| I had a team member who was really struggling with isolation.
| Mentioned it to me briefly in chat and I had him give me a
| call. That turned into regular bi-weekly meetings where we chat
| about work issues and whatever topics are interesting to us.
| It's helped us both tremendously.
|
| The only reason for anyone to suffer remotely is deliberate
| ignorance by senior member of the team.
|
| And because of the more private nature of remote communication,
| I've found colleagues are _much_ more willing to open up about
| concerns and frustrations they have about the office.
|
| Sure remote means that if you're a senior member of the team
| and want to abandon your responsibilities it's easier to hide,
| but some of my best working relationships have been founded
| remotely.
| throw1230 wrote:
| All these commenters are unfairly picking on you. There IS
| value in personal connections and it is different when you have
| been in the same physical space with the other person instead
| of an avatar that can send texts and emails.
|
| Spontaneous conversations happen every once in a while to
| creates an opportunity for collaboration, or maybe someone is
| working on a problem that another colleague worked on, so you
| can connect them etc. IMO, Happy hours in front of the screen
| are boring and feels like more work.
|
| I don't want to go back to the office on a regular schedule,
| but I actually miss having stronger connections to my
| coworkers. I think the regular company meetings in a single
| location is an excellent alternative
| leftbit wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| Those spontaneous connections yielding noticeable results are
| probably an urban legend. 25 years in the business and I've
| never seen this happen. You're talking with people in your
| team/project anyway in regular meetings, so there is no reason
| to drag that into the hallway. Talking biz to people from other
| projects/teams is mostly impossible - would take hours to
| explain a specific problem to get a meaningful contribution.
| Never goes beyond basic griping and commiseration.
|
| If you think those meetings are essential for company success
| you REALLY should examine your process.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and
| create a healthy separation between your work and your life.
|
| Unhealthy separation: spending 45-90 minutes (one way) in
| traffic, polluting the planet.
|
| Healthy separation: the 6 vertical meters between me working in
| the attic and my kids playing downstairs in the living room
| Natsu wrote:
| I think there's some value in actually meeting one's teammates,
| but I've found that the collaboration I have works just fine if
| they know they can IM me to talk when they're having issues. I
| have lots of people from many different departments who just
| know what kind of things to IM me for. I don't always have
| answers for them, but I can usually point them to someone who
| does.
|
| When I hung around in person, we'd chat with them about totally
| random stuff. You can learn from that, but it's not nearly as
| business-centric as intentionally talking to people about work
| stuff.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes
|
| If your business success is predicated on random encounters,
| then your business success is just pure luck compensating for a
| lack of planning and communication.
|
| If you actually plan and communicate well across teams & orgs
| then your business will work equally well in person or remote
| (or a hybrid).
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > you can make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and
| create a healthy separation between your work and your life
|
| Everyone is picking on the rest of your arguments, and I can
| sympathize with some of them, but not this one. Never had, nor
| can I envision, a commute with a healthy separation of work and
| life or that wasn't orders of magnitude worse than, you know,
| reclaiming that time for whatever I want.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > nor can I envision
|
| Actually I implemented this. When I worked in the office, I
| used to bike to and from work every day. Every week I tried
| to choose a (slightly) different route. An it was really,
| really good for my mental health.
|
| For the first 10 minutes or so of the ride I still had some
| thoughts from work, then gradually they started to disappear,
| I got intrigued by new shops being opened, some random folks
| doing crazy stuff on the street etc. In the end, I could feel
| endorphins coming and finally felt pleasantly tired when
| arriving home.
|
| Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride
| whenever I want instead to the office.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Now, when I work remotely, I do the same, I just ride
| whenever I want instead to the office._
|
| Thank you! I've seen far too many posts where someone is
| saying "I biked/walked to work and it was great; everyone
| else should be forced to go to an office so I can keep my
| nice commute".
|
| How are so many people blind to the idea that, if they are
| working from home, they can still take a bike ride or go
| for a walk before and after work? Hell, they might even now
| have the flexibility to take that ride/walk during lunch,
| or at other times when they need it.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Me as well. I intentionally chose to live within a 30 min
| bike ride and biked as much as I can. That's how I got fit.
| That said, companies don't pick their office location based
| on how close it is to where most people live. In all major
| cities and especially in the Bay Area, commute is a
| nightmare you just have to deal with rather than do
| something with it.
| nicpottier wrote:
| Live in a city, get a bike, take a job you can bike to.
| tzs wrote:
| I had such a commute once. I lived in Seattle but worked on
| the other side of Puget Sound commuting by ferry.
|
| Most people who commute across Puget Sound go the other way.
| They live on the west side and commute east to Seattle. That
| direction is a nightmare, with heavy traffic and long waits
| both in traffic and at the ferry terminals.
|
| Going my way traffic was not too bad even if I went in during
| rush hour. I usually went in a couple hours or so later
| though and then it wasn't even noticeable. Similar coming
| home.
|
| On the ferry I could nap in my car, or read in my car, or go
| take a nice stroll around the deck enjoying watching the
| water, or have a meal or a snack at the ferry's cafeteria, or
| relax in the fairly comfortable passenger seating area. There
| were newspaper vending machines with the Seattle Times,
| Seattle PI, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal which
| provided another way to spend my time on the boat.
| Implicated wrote:
| I gasped when I read this sentence. I wish I had a blood
| pressure monitor to get an idea of the effect. What an
| incredible perspective. Amazing how we can massage things in
| our minds into a shape we can accept.
| anonred wrote:
| Biking 10-15 minutes to work on a protected bike path is an
| order of magnitude better experience mentally and physically,
| speaking from personal experience.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I can do that on my own without the need to be compelled by
| anyone, and in fact I walk to the office every morning (I
| work remotely, but go to a co-working space), with the
| difference that I have the freedom to do otherwise at any
| given moment.
| alexfoo wrote:
| For the sake of balance I'd just like to say that I agree
| with the GP on this.
|
| I miss my ~30 minute commute (by bike) from my old job. It
| provided good delineation between home and work, and 1h of
| good cardio a day meant I didn't need to do any of that at
| the gym. I didn't have a need for that time to myself to
| choose what to do because I liked that choice being taken
| away for these relatively short periods and me being "forced"
| into doing a nice chunk of exercise. It also allowed me to
| ramp up to work thoughts on the way in, and to slowly dump my
| work thoughts as I went home.
|
| Maybe this is also just me who, now working fully remotely,
| struggles to regularly schedule in a similar amount of
| exercise despite having more time available with no commute.
| Since it's no longer strictly required I'm less likely to do
| it.
|
| But discussing this with other colleagues and we worked out
| that, as a generalisation, which side of the fence you are on
| these types of things comes down to whether or not you have
| children.
|
| If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a 30
| minute commute because it's an genuine excuse to have this
| time to yourself. If you don't have kids you've no idea why
| you would crave this time.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem here is that you've decided that because you
| liked your commute, and that it had benefits for you,
| everyone else should be forced to do the same, and
| inevitably it will often be in much less comfortable and
| useful ways than you've been able to do it.
|
| Allowing remote work _increases_ possibilities, and you 've
| presented a false dichotomy. There's nothing that says an
| employer can't still maintain a (smaller) office for people
| who want to come in (either every day, or a smaller part of
| the week). Employers could also provide a stipend so people
| like yourself could rent a desk in a co-working space
| (assuming they still exist post-pandemic). And at the most
| basic, assuming you really did have to work from home,
| there's nothing stopping you from taking a break and going
| on a 30-minute bike ride. You could even "simulate" your
| commute by taking that ride once in the morning and once at
| the end of the day.
|
| Requiring people to come to the office reduces
| possibilities, and requires that everyone conform to the
| same mold. I totally get that you liked going to an office.
| But it's selfish to require everyone else do that just
| because you want to. And you don't need to require that in
| order to get what you want, too.
|
| > _If you have kids then you often crave an activity like a
| 30 minute commute because it 's an genuine excuse to have
| this time to yourself._
|
| This is completely unrelated. Please don't suggest that
| everyone else should have to go to an office every day
| because you somehow can't negotiate a 30-minute break from
| your kids with your partner. That's your problem to fix,
| not mine.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Wow, you've completely misread/misunderstood my post.
| Little point in saying any more.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
|
| I work remotely, but I walk to an office. I also like to
| have a separation of work and home.
|
| Also I'm very physically active, I do crossfit 4x a week
| right next to my house.
|
| I find it easier to commit by not being tied to any other
| location other than my home.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I definitely go through phases where I need a lot more
| structure in order to make things happen. Having an
| office just the right distance away to go to was a good
| target. I could either run or cycle to/from it. A public
| transport option was easily available (this is London, so
| public transport is nigh on amazing) but I was able to
| resist that lazy option.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that the freedom of working
| from home is just too much freedom _for me_. I 'm way
| more productive and my employer gets way more of my time
| (not that they demand any extra time from me) but I'm
| lacking the initial impetus to get out of the house to do
| my own stuff.
|
| Even something as simple as walking my kid to school
| (they're old enough now to make their own way) meant that
| I was out of the house and, on days without any early
| morning meetings, I'd walk on to the local pool to do a
| ~1h swim, or I'd run a long route home. Now it's just too
| easy to be holed up indoors and think "ah, I'll go for a
| swim/run/ride a bit later" and never do.
|
| I know the motivation/planning/execution will come back
| eventually. I've successfully trained for various
| endurance events in the past but I guess my brain hasn't
| caught up with all of the changes that the pandemic has
| had influence on, including my working setup.
| paulcole wrote:
| Get yourself a short bike commute. I did pre-pandemic and it
| was amazing. I've never had a commute longer than 30 minutes
| by bike in my professional life. I always much preferred
| living in the smallest cheapest apartment I could find near a
| place with a lot of jobs.
|
| Pandemic royally fucked over that lifestyle.
| kelnos wrote:
| Or you can, y'know, just go for a bike ride before and
| after work. Just the starting and ending points will be
| your home, rather than an office.
| paulcole wrote:
| My apartment is too small for me to want to be there for
| both work and after work hours.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I already walk to work, because working remotely doesn't
| mean necessarily working from home, and I could do that
| even if I worked at home.
| paulcole wrote:
| Yeah, I switched to a coworking space about a year ago. I
| still hate remote work but having a nice building to go
| and work it makes it tolerable.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "for younger/newer employees who completely miss out on
| networking, mentorship, company culture, etc"
|
| To be fair, most of this doesn't happen in the office either. I
| don't see any real mentorship going on in my 10 years at the
| company. Comany culture is a joke in my experience. Management
| doesn't really care about the culture as long as it facilitates
| getting work done and keeping people in line. Networking might
| be easier in person, at least for some people. I personally
| think networking is toxic since it effectively means that
| outgroups remain outsiders and potentially promotes cronyism.
| pm90 wrote:
| > I'm also an Urbanism nerd and don't want to see cities revert
| to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably
| happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
| Unfortunately there's a collective action problem; people will
| miss having nice cities to visit, but don't make the connection
| that there is a "use it or lose it" aspect to great shared
| spaces.
|
| I can see why you would think that but might I offer another
| perspective: we are better off without cities being built as
| commuter hubs for suburbanities.
|
| Cities in the US are often located in very valuable real
| estate, most of which is used suboptimally for office spaces,
| which are occupied only during certain time on weekdays. I
| would like this to change. American cities should build a TON
| more apartment towers and dense housing in city centers that no
| longer need so many office buildings. Let the young, the weird
| and the creatives live in the cities and make them great.
|
| In fact, I am seriously happy about the reduction in traffic
| to/from suburbs. Every weekday, most American cities turn into
| traffic severs, mostly commuters getting in/out of the city.
| This is just madness! And no doubt makes our cities more
| polluted (air and noise) and less desirable to live/work in.
| ilyt wrote:
| >There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection that
| happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| It has been certainly be nice distraction, and I definitely
| knew more people by name but I haven't noticed anything
| actually profitable for company happening there.
|
| The things that did happen is that I could just catch the few
| people needed to push things forward, drag one to the other and
| clear the roadblocks but grabbing a quick call on the
| communication system of choice isn't that worse.
|
| The brainstorming on problems was better when in person tho,
| but that might be the mix of tooling and platform company I
| work for chose (MS Teams, need I say more?)
|
| > Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for
| younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking,
| mentorship, company culture, etc.
|
| Yeah, the one remote work experience that has been my benchmark
| (in startup) had us meet every 2 weeks and just had half-party,
| half socialising, half-brainstorming thing. I feel like there
| is heavy underuse of tooling, back then our standard was voice
| only but screen sharing via ancient methods (screen session)
| that worked well, editors like IDEA also have very neat "editor
| sharing" feature that I rarely seen talked about
| alentred wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I agree, but not with the hallways and kitchenettes part.
| Sorry, never have I ever seen anything productive done in a
| hallway.
|
| But I wholeheartedly agree with the "spontaneous communication"
| part, but *in the office, at the desk*. There are many things
| that are much easier when you can just come to a desk of your
| colleague (someone on the team, or your manager, or your direct
| report) and discuss instantly, then maybe grab another person
| into this discussion, make a decision, etc. Yes, I see that
| happening all the time in the office. Just not in a kitchenette
| indeed.
|
| Now, I agree that maybe not every team needs it. Consider the
| two extremes. One is when your daily work is mostly "executing
| tasks". In this case, whatever is more *comfortable* is the
| best: for some it would be working from home, for some it may
| be working from the office. Or, on the other end, if the team
| is in the early stages of making some important decisions. In
| this case, I truly believe this team needs to be able to
| communicate spontaneously. If this team is Okay with Discord -
| fine. Or if this team prefers being in the same physical place
| - fine as well.
|
| Bottom line: being in *the office* is *one of the ways* to
| create an environment for spontaneous communications, which
| works wonders for making a series of small decisions fast.
|
| P.S. I currently work in a flexible hybrid environment: we just
| agree with colleagues when we go to the office, if we want to.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I call bullshit.
|
| This is the claptrap that upper management always uses to to
| justify RTO or keeping separate bus lines or whatever, but it
| doesn't match reality.
|
| In 25 years of professional experience, I have _never_ seen
| collaboration done by random encounter. At _most_ you'll ask a
| question you were already going to ask. And guess what? In
| 2023, that happens over Slack.
| phil21 wrote:
| > In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen
| collaboration done by random encounter.
|
| This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.
|
| I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote
| teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have
| advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I
| guess I'm a remote work Hipster.
|
| That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via
| a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone
| would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have
| been realized if so.
|
| Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random
| lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that
| saved them millions a year) tend to add up.
|
| I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm
| absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of
| experience in an office setting and never have had a
| serendipitous unscripted moment.
| ilyt wrote:
| > Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random
| lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue
| that saved them millions a year) tend to add u
|
| Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before
| covid
| JohnFen wrote:
| This. I think of this every time I hear the "spontaneous
| connection" argument. Decades ago, this was true, but it
| hasn't been true anywhere I've worked for at least 15 years.
|
| Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100%
| of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the
| person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It
| minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.
| hfbff wrote:
| I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom
| matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I
| wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of
| people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of
| course, the people I meet in real life could be the more
| biased sample)
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I noticed that very technically focused people tend to
| underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike
| daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value
| informal exchange. All these things take their time out of
| what they want to do - deep work on solving technical
| problems.
|
| There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical
| problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always
| so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong
| problems, solving more general/complex problems than
| needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc.
| To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you
| work on and getting feedback from other people, including
| questions you yourself did not think of.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > I noticed that very technically focused people tend to
| underestimate the importance of communication. They
| dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't
| really value informal exchange. All these things take
| their time out of what they want to do - deep work on
| solving technical problems
|
| I'd say you' be taken the wrong lesson from your
| observations.
|
| Big formal coordination rituals typically are simply
| round robin of 1:1 communication. Occasionally 1:3, but
| never ever 1:n when the speaker isn't management.
|
| The reason is simple. Tasks are often independent. In
| that case, there's no one to coordinate with, beyond
| updating the person running the status board. Even when
| there is a take that needs coordination, that
| coordination _is already happening_ , just not at that
| place.
|
| Or in other words, people that get the most out of these
| rituals simultaneously overestimate the average degree of
| connections in the social network, and underestimate the
| amount of communication that happens outside of their
| immediate view. Call it a bias in a local a hub in a
| network.
| projectazorian wrote:
| I used to prioritize communication and collaboration
| because I'm better at it than most engineers I work with.
| A problem emerged where I noticed that come review and
| promotion time, I was always coming up short due to
| concerns about lacking technical seriousness. My
| interview performance was also suffering due to not
| spending enough time in the codebase.
|
| I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get
| much better results. It's not an issue because I am happy
| to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My
| job title is "software engineer" and my job role is to
| ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer,
| engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role
| change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a
| minority of my time.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I'd challenge your friends to give some examples of these
| collaborations by random encounter. I suspect there's a lot
| less to them than they think.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved
| companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the
| office that would have been a Slack DM remote.
|
| At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate
| business units were all competing for the same tender, they
| were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3
| separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender
| #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one
| single person was in more than one of those channels.
|
| Now all this goes away if your company only uses public
| channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the
| company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25
| years of professional experience.
|
| And all of this is without counting the fact that most
| enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information
| from everyone.
|
| Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some
| people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental
| shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is
| very, very hard.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| This goes away, if they have better management and
| coordination. They'd be in the same mess even if they were
| physically conference rooms. Unless you somehow think that
| people spontaneously drop by meetings they're not invited
| to
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I should add - now that I've googled you - you and I work
| in very different areas of 'IT'. The problems I imagine
| you deal with need a lot of quiet dedicated focus time;
| while my problems need me to be able to wrangle a dozen
| cats into something like a coherent strategy that
| sometimes involves whiteboards, sometimes coffee and
| sometimes vodka. That's a people problem that requires
| people solutions, not technology products marketed as
| people solutions.
|
| But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but
| I sat next to an ML guy for six months once
| troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to
| imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| You'd be amazed what people say in open plan offices
| thinking they can't be heard.
|
| But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the
| number of those years working for a company that had
| perfectly working leadership, management, communication
| and coordination is very very low.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of
| the companies remote work is very, very hard.
|
| While I agree, I could rephrase your argument as "remote
| work is very easy provided that you adjust your structures
| accordingly."
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I see you've worked with me before :)
|
| "Zwayhowder, the way you've phrased this sounds very
| angry, could we just tone it down a little" is comment in
| slides/reports that I receive often :D
|
| I'm just passionate, I swear.
| klooney wrote:
| > if you do a good job arranging your life (as most software
| engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can make a
| commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a healthy
| separation between your work and your life.
|
| I feel like this isn't really true in the SF Bay Area, it's too
| expensive even for most software engineers. We're not all
| making L7 @ Meta money.
| itronitron wrote:
| I know, that comment about a pleasant commute is absolutely
| laughable for anyone that commutes in or around a major US
| city.
| extraAccount wrote:
| > Finally, everyone being remote is really bad for
| younger/newer employees who completely miss out on networking,
| mentorship, company culture, etc.
|
| Thank you for mentioning the importance of this. I graduated
| and entered the job market during the start of the pandemic.
| Getting a job was super difficult because every company
| suddenly implemented a hiring freeze. I managed to find a job
| at the company I interned at because they lost many developers
| due to the company being in the travel space (they didn't want
| to find themselves jobless in a pandemic, travel related
| payments were tanking). They were so desperate for bodies I got
| waived through because I was an intern one whole year before.
|
| I quickly found myself in an empty office trying to onboard
| myself through the process, with a handful of tired devs trying
| to do the work that before had a team of 30. I spent my first
| few months in panic because nobody could find the time or
| patience to work with me, and the business logic was quite
| dense. It was still my first job and I hadn't worked up the
| courage to ask for help, and it was x10 harder when we worked
| from home. I could ask my fellow desk-mate because I could
| judge how busy they were, but it was torture asking people over
| teams and interrupting their flow.
|
| Now almost 3 years into my job, I can definetly see how my
| anxiety kept me from progressing and I grew a lot. But WFH as a
| new person into the workforce, it was difficult until I found
| my footing and a routine. And a nice mentor. I am not ashamed
| to admit that it took me quite a while. Now I have more
| experience and I can work a bit more independently, so I
| appriciate our 2 wfh days. But most of our collaboration work
| is done best in the office.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I've absolutely managed to have non-structured zoom meetings
| which have been productive. Often its just a spillover of
| standup where me and a coworker take over the end of the
| meeting and basically let everyone else drop off (or not) and
| we start bitching about something horrible to fix. Sometimes it
| resulted in something meaningful, sometimes it was just a
| bitching session. I did this mostly with other coworkers
| because I'm an introvert. If you're aggressive about hopping on
| zooms with other people then they can happen with external
| people. I've gotten dragged into zooms with customers, via the
| customer services team airdropping me into some horrible
| customer issue, which later solidified the direction the
| architecture should go based on the obvious struggles the
| customer was having. My coworker at prior job was better about
| inserting himself into those kinds of virtual discussions.
|
| And there's a major advantage to being able to operate that way
| since you don't have to be geolocated with your customer or
| your customer services folks and you don't need plane tickets
| and you can get it done with an hour or three virtually rather
| than having to take days out of your schedule to do an onsite.
| gemstones wrote:
| > There's a lot of collaboration and spontaneous connection
| that happens in hallways and kitchenettes.
|
| I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-
| driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do
| you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one of
| these environments?
|
| > Edit: full disclosure, I'm not an employer but I sympathize
| and spent a lot of time thinking about these things as a scrum
| master, trying to mitigate some of these problems in 2020.
|
| What about being a scrum master would give insight into what
| hallway conversations are valuable from an engineering
| perspective, in an engineering org? Or did you find that
| process improvements came out of these conversations?
|
| > I'm also an Urbanism nerd and don't want to see cities revert
| to the 70s-era trend, which is clearly and noticeably
| happening, destroying decades of progress on livability.
| Unfortunately there's a collective action problem; people will
| miss having nice cities to visit, but don't make the connection
| that there is a "use it or lose it" aspect to great shared
| spaces.
|
| Why didn't cities have this problem before the rise of big
| employers that utilize dense downtown construction?
| Additionally, if neighborhood livability improves at the
| expense of downtown livability, why should I be overly
| concerned with how downtown livability is?
| skhameneh wrote:
| Depends on the environment. If your team is open to casual
| conversations and comfortable going off topics, then this
| likely isn't an issue. But, if your team is very metrics
| focused, you may not see levels of casual conversation that
| build rapport and build on ideas that come up on
| conversation. Sometimes a casual conversation is all it needs
| to hook a random thought into successful action.
|
| I like having casual talks about nothing in particular
| without having to worry about meeting budgets or taking away
| from "limited time" of others. Such time is important for
| growth in many aspects.
| garciasn wrote:
| I'm a Sr. Director. There is nothing but non sense in any
| claims that say random shout outs as people are breezing
| between one unnecessary meeting and another are useful. It
| just doesn't happen.
|
| The only useful conversations are thoughtful, planned, and
| collaborative. Almost never what happens in a hallway nor
| in most meetings, frankly.
|
| Let's dispel with any of this outdated thinking. Remote
| work is here to say and it should be embraced. Any company
| that can do it should be and any that isn't should go the
| way of the dodo.
| sseagull wrote:
| Where are you a senior director? I just want to know
| where to never apply for a job.
|
| That kind of belief about communication is horrifying to
| me, and I am about as introverted as you can possibly be.
|
| And to maybe analyze this more, my guess is the
| spontaneous interactions that solve problems/grease
| wheels might be invisible to you. And they are probably
| invisible to you because you don't take the time to get
| to build a relationship with your fellow workers.
| capableweb wrote:
| Probably depends on what kind of problems you're working
| on. If your problem to solve is "Raise this KPI X percent
| until Y", then probably yeah, wouldn't matter too much.
|
| But if you're doing fundamental research or trying to
| find grander ideas, then I believe it has some merit.
|
| One example is Bell Labs, which architectured their
| offices in order to facilitate random meetings between
| people:
|
| > However, almost as many fruitful interactions described
| in the book can be traced to architectural features.
| Long, wide hallways that had to be traversed to navigate
| the building were included intentionally, so that chance
| encounters with colleagues and acquaintances were
| virtually unavoidable. As Gertner himself put it in a
| 2012 opinion piece for The New York Times, "a physicist
| on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet
| rolling past iron filings."
|
| Seems other companies successfully copied this as well:
|
| > In 2012, Norwegian telecoms company Telenor decided to
| investigate the effects of inter-office communication.
| They convinced their employees to where sociometric
| badges for the duration of the experiment and identified
| three metrics: exploration, or interaction with people in
| other work groups; engagement, or interaction within a
| workgroup; and energy, the number of interactions
| overall. They found that a 10 percent increase in
| exploration by salespeople led to a 10 percent increase
| in sales. This led to a restructuring of the office
| coffee stations and cafeteria that increased sales by
| about $200 million.
|
| I don't think it is as "outdated" as you think it is. At
| least consider that there is no "right" or "wrong" way,
| companies definitely should play around and see what
| works for them, rather than following something dogmatic.
| koliber wrote:
| Remote work is here to stay. I don't agree that there is
| nothing that comes out of casual interactions at a
| physical workspace. This is where relationship building
| happens. I firmly believe that it is possible to build
| strong relationships in a remote or hybrid workplace. It
| just needs to be done intentionally. And naturally, it
| takes a different form than casual hallways conversation.
| slifin wrote:
| Yeah this can be done remotely
|
| Engineer only stand ups are a good one
| ilyt wrote:
| I feel like most of the problems are tooling and culture-
| induced. Company have to change to work remotely, else it
| _will_ be inefficient to do so
| joxel wrote:
| You are completely detached from reality. Almost all of
| my conversations happen by running into someone in the
| hallway, or seeing them in their office with their door
| open and asking if they have a couple minutes.
|
| I'm honestly curious about where you work that that
| doesn't happen.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Sorry but _what_??? "The only useful conversations are
| thoughtful, planned, and collaborative"???
|
| That's so wildly untrue and obviously so, I'm blown away
| that you could declare something so obviously false so
| confidently.
|
| Where do you work? I'd love to short that company's
| stock.
| MrScruff wrote:
| I feel like with a lot of the hardcore anti return to the
| office people the arguments are disingenuous. People have
| built their lives (and in some cases moved entirely)
| based on being able to work remotely 99% of the time, and
| they refuse to accept there are any disadvantages. I saw
| Sam Altman say the other day that he didn't think any of
| the important companies in the next period of time will
| be fully remote, and I would agree.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| I've found that folks who are attached to parts of the
| business that are focused on growing the business want to
| be in person more than parts of the business that "punch
| in/punch out" and don't take full ownership of their role
| in the bigger picture.
|
| I'm betting you can imagine who is helpful and who is
| less so, and further I bet it's pretty obvious in most
| cases, which makes the folks who are on the bad end of it
| defensive.
| [deleted]
| downrightmike wrote:
| You need to get a life and actual friends. Coworkers are
| NOT friends.
| alluro2 wrote:
| I spend 8-10 hours with them every work day. More than
| with anyone else - my partner, kids or "actual friends".
| I've known them for years - I know how their kids are
| doing, how they feel on a wide variety of topics, we
| joke, discuss, brainstorm, even fight. We've solved so
| many challenges together, I've helped them move, and they
| helped me fix my garage. We have breakfast and lunch
| together. We go to each other's birthday parties. We've
| celebrated childbirths and consoled after deaths of loved
| ones. Our goals in work, and often in life, are shared.
|
| Why on Earth would I not want any of that, and spend all
| that time out of my life with people who are not also my
| friends? What a sad way to look at life.
| ineptech wrote:
| > I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-
| driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do
| you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one
| of these environments?
|
| I can think of lots, and am surprised anyone would say
| otherwise - I guess you must be using a really high bar for
| "meaningful". An example might be, "You know, I didn't want
| to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake
| proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years
| ago?"
|
| Looking back though, I think the important thing is not
| physical proximity, it's conversation without an agenda. If
| you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind
| purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk:
| grousing about frustrations, daydreaming about improvements,
| comparing notes, etc. I think these things are important (not
| to everyone, I get that some people despise small talk, but
| to some people). If you only communicate in formal meetings,
| you can end up with 6 people independently realizing Greg's
| data lake proposal is doomed to fail, but not speaking up
| because they each feel like everyone else is on board.
|
| And it hadn't occurred to me before this moment, but the way
| to get this back without returning to an office seems
| obvious: pairing and mobbing. That's the only time since I
| started WFHing that I've had or seen others having these kind
| of un-directed conversations with coworkers: during downtime
| in a mob. I need to think about this a bit more...
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say
| anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake
| proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two
| years ago?"_
|
| A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether
| you're in the meeting or at home.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| I am a lot more open in honest in person than I am on
| Slack, because I know everything I say on Slack is logged
| and can bite me in the ass years down the line.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| We have a very strict Slack retention policy, both DM's
| and messages in user created private channels self
| destruct in 7 days with no possibility of retrieval.
| Public channels and designated private channels can have
| a longer lifetime. And they really are gone, a VP tried
| to retrieve some 2 week old messages and was unable to.
|
| So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private
| channel during the week that the messages are alive --
| probably less than the chance of the person you're
| talking about standing around the corner.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| How would you know? The very nature of that communication
| is that it's private.
|
| Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn't
| mean it doesn't happen.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _How would you know? The very nature of that
| communication is that it's private._
|
| How would I know that these conversations happen over
| Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's
| or small private channels. And this was commonplace well
| before the pandemic and WFH started.
|
| _Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn't
| mean it doesn't happen._
|
| It's hard to have a private in-person conversation
| outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup
| -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people
| that you don't want to hear them.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| It's really not hard to have private convos in an open
| office setup, I did it for years and years. Nobody cares
| about you or what you're saying.
|
| I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to
| have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.
| ornornor wrote:
| > If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a
| defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk
|
| Whats stopping people from scheduling "shoot the shit" of
| coffee calls though? That's what I've seen many do since
| the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you
| describe: people vent, talk about what happened during
| meetings, etc.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| It feels very artificial and takes a lot more planning. I
| still do this sometimes but it's not the same.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Why does it require a lot of planning? I do this, usually
| it's "bored, coffee break?" "Yep" or I ask a question on
| slack and the other party says "call?"
| doutunlined wrote:
| Because IRL you're effectively always in call. Not sure
| whats hard to understand about the difference.
| nostrebored wrote:
| I hate online coffee chats and love workplace
| conversation. Coffee chats have an overloaded amount of
| assumptions -- conversation should start off personal,
| last for x minutes, make you feel closer to a teammate.
|
| This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that
| can be about anything. It can differ based on the person
| and your relationship.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Yeah I'm not keen on the organized chats. We did those
| pre pandemic and I got nothing from them. Casual
| conversation has to be adhoc, whether it's in person or
| by call.
| krabizzwainch wrote:
| Our director started scheduling a big group video meeting
| with all the people that started since 2020 just as a
| chat room. But he did absolutely 0 planning or
| conversation guiding or anything outside of "so who wants
| to talk about something?" and we would just sit there in
| silence.
|
| It completely feels like the scene from Arrested
| Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".
| Smaug123 wrote:
| My team kept a Webex room open at the start of every
| morning for just turning up and chatting in; it would
| generally stay open in the background until everyone had
| left for meetings. It certainly worked well for us.
| Sometimes people just worked silently through it, but
| usually there was lots of chat.
| ineptech wrote:
| We don't have something like this (except for the
| bullshitting that usually occurs in the last few minutes
| of standup) but I'm thinking we should try it.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Relationships are really important for getting stuff done at
| work. An irrelevant water cooler conversation that clicks can
| make someone your future ally. Having a better idea of
| someone's interests and priorities can make it easier to
| persuade them when the time comes.
|
| Simply smiling at someone nicely over the coffeepot a few
| times can make them disposed to help you later. A three
| minute chat about nothing, and now you have a contact in
| IT/purchasing/payroll...
| sayrer wrote:
| I have seen "meaningful, revenue-driving conversation
| happen", and I do find Zoom calls kind of irritating. I think
| the real issue is that this tech has exposed the fact that
| urban planning in the US is awful unless you're in New York
| City or something similar.
|
| People just don't want to sit in traffic on the freeway for
| two hours a day for a serendipitous conversation that
| probably won't happen most of the time. If you think about it
| that way, it makes perfect sense.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-
| driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work. Do
| you have specific examples of valuable collaboration in one
| of these environments?
|
| Maybe it depends on the company (specifically size and
| bureaucracy) but many of the most successful ideas we've
| implemented in companies comes from employees having beers
| together after work discussing some crazy idea, or while
| lunching in the cafeteria and babbling about "how things
| should be".
|
| I remember a specific incident when a colleague was lamenting
| about some hard-to-solve big to me while we had lunch, and
| another person who wasn't really in the conversation
| overheard, and finally had tips to solve the problem which
| ultimately lead to my colleague to being able to solve it.
|
| As a more famous example, Bell Labs had tons of hallways and
| other "infrastructure" that facilitated impromptu meetings
| like this, and cites the design for some of the ideas that
| sparked from it. If I remember correctly, some new entire
| buildings were built with this in mind.
| sseagull wrote:
| > I echo others here - I've not seen a meaningful, revenue-
| driving conversation happen in these in a decade of work.
|
| If you restrict yourself to that metric, maybe. But theres
| more to life (and business) than that.
|
| Does everyone on HN seriously care that little about fellow
| workers? Not necessarily asking to become close friends, but
| I feel a workplace that is business-only to be sterile and
| depressing.
|
| It's interesting to talk to people, even co-workers, about
| non-work stuff. People are cool in so many different ways,
| and it makes life better to know them a little bit.
| kelnos wrote:
| I've made many lifelong friends from the workplace, but
| most of those were not made through the course of day-to-
| day work, but through hanging out after work. Sure, being
| at an office during the day facilitates that (easy to
| gather a group of people at the end of the workday to go
| out for a drink), but that's by no means the only way of
| doing it.
|
| Personally I find the negatives to required office work far
| worse than the positive of social opportunities in the
| office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion
| on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office
| friends after years of being required to be in an office),
| but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote
| work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers
| after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that
| there's much more friction and inertia that would make
| those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a
| worthwhile trade-off.
|
| I think businesses that are embracing remote work should
| still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come
| in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure,
| this doesn't work when people are geographically
| distributed all over the place. But that can also be a
| choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an
| employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers
| with office cultures.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| I'm one of those people who likes to enjoy work--ie, I
| don't think of work as "just work"--and I want to get to
| know the people I work with and maybe even make a real
| friend or two. And yet, I don't ever want to go back to an
| office. Zoom/Tuple calls are more than sufficient for me
| for shooting the shit for a bit while on the clock.
| Otherwise, I prefer to get together outside of office hours
| if I really want to spend social time with coworkers. I
| mostly despise forced social interaction on the clock. I do
| miss whiteboards, but that's about it.
|
| I totally respect people who prefer the office life, I was
| just trying to offer a perspective as someone who is, like,
| half-aligned with you :)
| ddingus wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| "Revenue driving" is one metric. Another one is, "cost
| reduction", and still another on is overall zeal for the
| work.
|
| A good conversation can hit any and all these metrics. And
| it all adds right up too.
|
| I care about coworkers. When people are able to make it OK,
| it shows! Tons of small things happen, people helping one
| another out, feeding off one anothers overall energy, and
| more really matter!
|
| There needs to be laughter, fun, and the good vibes that
| come from a group of people who understand one another well
| enough to appreciate the time they spend together.
|
| A group like that will have plenty of the business
| conversations too. First and foremost, they will be
| comfortable enough around one another to have those chats
| with few worries.
|
| Another thing to keep an eye out on is fear, blame and
| shame.
|
| Much better to boil it down to choices and outcomes.
|
| Did we make a bad call? Ok, great. The outcome sacked, so
| how do we avoid that in the future? Easy conversation that
| should not worry anyone.
|
| Making failure into learning opportunities is another big
| one. People need to be able to try it whatever it is. And
| when they can share the experiences and draw own their more
| seasoned peers, they improve rapidly and feel good about
| the whole process.
|
| I could go on here, but there are just a ton of human
| dynamics well worth the bit of time and attention needed to
| insure everyone is able to participate without having fear,
| blame and shame front and center.
| jahewson wrote:
| > P.S. if you do a good job arranging your life (as most
| software engineers absolutely have the means to do) you can
| make a commute a quite pleasant part of your day and create a
| healthy separation between your work and your life.
|
| Clearly you don't live in the Bay Area. My commute was 2hrs
| each way. That's 4hrs a day, just gone.
| snozolli wrote:
| Every element you mention as being part of an in-office
| experience has been completely absent from my career.
|
| Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never
| received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always
| simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company
| culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR
| blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by
| interruptions and meddling from management.
|
| Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo,
| but I have a hard time believing these points.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.
|
| Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections
| by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point
| down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember,
| hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're
| available.
| Clubber wrote:
| >You make valuable connections by being generous and
| helpful to others.
|
| In my experience all my valuable connections have come from
| me working really hard on the same team as them and being
| goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time
| dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful
| connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager
| thing.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Working really hard and meeting goals == helpful and
| generous. I'm sure at some point you had a roadblock on a
| piece of code and a co-worker helped you overcome it, or
| vice versa. Or you covered for someone that one day when
| his kid was sick so the team didn't fall behind it's
| timeline.
|
| Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via
| hallway convos is also a good way to build connections
| and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my
| earlier comment.
| [deleted]
| snozolli wrote:
| You're making some really huge assumptions.
| brightball wrote:
| The exact story of my career and many people I worked
| with. There's one guy I know who's had companies fighting
| over him because he was so great to work with.
| lolinder wrote:
| What about remote work prevents "being generous and helpful
| to others"? Or, put differently, what about being in an
| office makes it _easier_ to be generous and helpful?
|
| And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you
| come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and
| people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech
| (myself included) are _literally_ digital natives who
| learned to socialize on the internet _before_ adapting to
| doing it in person.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Where did I say you can't be generous or helpful
| remotely? My comment applies to any type of work (until
| non-human AI replaces all of us).
| lolinder wrote:
| Ah. I think you and I must have interpreted OP's
| statement very differently. I interpreted it to mean that
| being physically present in an office never directly
| contributed to making a connection, not that they
| _literally_ never had anyone help them out later on.
| antisthenes wrote:
| That's on you only if the people you made friends with
| later advanced to positions of power that can make hiring
| decisions. I don't think I have to tell you how incredibly
| lucky that is.
|
| Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in
| the machine that has no say over hiring.
| scruple wrote:
| I've used my network for the last decade+ of work. I
| cofounded a startup because I developed a relationship with
| my cofounder in the break room at a former employer. We
| were in different orgs, we'd have never had the chance to
| develop our relationship in a Zoom-first world. And I say
| this as someone who's been part time remote since 2014,
| full time since 2016, and started freelancing remotely back
| in 2010. I love remote work but, IMO, there's a huge
| discrepancy between what can happen in-person vs. Zoom.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >You make valuable connections by being generous and
| helpful to others.
|
| Lol. Never knew that, time for me to to go into therapy.
| thisarticle wrote:
| > Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.
| Never received any mentorship or even any guidance
|
| That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers
| offered/provided any mentorship?
| molodec wrote:
| I've never had any mentorship too from engineers in the
| company where I started my career. I learned a lot from
| books.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not every person works in a company organized this way,
| even IT people. In all my working years and all companies,
| I always had managers that were technically inferior to me
| (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some
| had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for
| management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.
| snozolli wrote:
| What senior or principal engineers?
|
| I graduated college with significant, real-world
| programming skills. I immediately went to work writing
| software. The only thing my first manager contributed was
| showing me where to find documentation, and even then,
| books that I found on my own were far more valuable
| overall.
|
| It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's
| what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training,
| just self-learning and resourcefulness.
|
| I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could
| need, besides general career or investment advice.
| phphphphp wrote:
| I don't mean this as a slight against you because there's
| a place in the world for every type of developer, but
| your description of work and collaboration is very
| cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the
| world and thus you've never met anyone worth
| collaborating with, or, more likely, you've not attracted
| those people in your workplaces.
|
| I've worked at great companies and awful companies, and
| no matter what, I have always met talented people in
| these companies who I've been able to build meaningful
| professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic
| hell-holes, there's people worth learning collaborating
| with -- across all disciplines.
|
| The most valuable work you can do when in software
| engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve
| their goals: code is just a means to an end,
| collaboration is how we discover what to build.
| [deleted]
| snozolli wrote:
| _your description of work and collaboration is very
| cynical._
|
| One man's cynic is another man's realist.
|
| In my opinion, OP's description of office life is
| idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of _Dead
| Poets Society_ or _Mr. Holland 's Opus_.
|
| _I've been able to build meaningful professional
| relationships with._
|
| I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful
| professional relationships, but despite having made many
| work friends, as stated previously none of them have led
| to career development (OP's mention of networking).
|
| _Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there's people worth
| learning collaborating with_
|
| I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.
| koliber wrote:
| One thing I got out of mentorship is that it's one thing
| being correct, and and entirely other thing having people
| actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough
| that you have one and not the other. Until you have both,
| you won't have impact and will grovel about others.
| silveroriole wrote:
| I've not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my
| career. I would say I've made connections, but my
| experience was very much just "you're in charge of this
| team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being
| a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management
| course! I don't get it!". And the same for being a manager.
| People are very complimentary about me when I'm just doing
| programming because I don't need any help, but as soon as I
| get into a situation I'm not very good at, it's criticism
| all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many
| managers don't seem happy being managers, and that only a
| minority get significant career development value from
| managers/leads.
| koliber wrote:
| Have you ever received constructive feedback that did not
| feel like criticism?
| silveroriole wrote:
| Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager
| feedback, though, is of the form "you need to/should do
| X." If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don't
| really know, especially when it comes to soft skills
| issues or personality clashes. They see their role as
| providing the feedback, and it's your job to figure out
| how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you're
| left with the critical part and no clear path forwards.
| Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value,
| but I wouldn't call it mentorship, guidance, or even
| constructive.
| thrashh wrote:
| I haven't worked at a FAANG but I still hang with people from
| old jobs. Idk it's pretty normal to be able to make friends
| at most jobs
|
| I think you just had bad luck
| snozolli wrote:
| _Idk it's pretty normal to be able to make friends at most
| jobs_
|
| I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I
| never made a connection that proved valuable in the context
| of networking, i.e. career growth.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If so, it's far from just him. I've never personally
| observed any of that, either. You have "work friends", but
| those relationships are work relationships and don't
| translate to outside of work.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Man I feel ya. I hear all these idealic work life experiences
| and I'm like...man my first job I did 18 hour days and got
| essentially bullied by the 2nd in command. Next job, spent
| the entire time w seniors throwing spanners, yelling abuse,
| threatening to lock me in toolboxes and leave them in the sun
| (mine workers hate uni students it seems). 3rd job, forced to
| work w asbestos w zero health gear. Called worksafe basically
| got laughed at. Walked out of that one.
|
| My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was
| basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices.
| Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there.
| Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie
| business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.
|
| Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others
| it would seem.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| > Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or
| BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.
|
| It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated
| FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and
| fancy offices (but not for long).
| zmxz wrote:
| I'm not from the US (EU) and we're doing hybrid model (wfh if you
| want to, work from office if you want to, combine both as you see
| fit, no requirement to notify anyone on your preferred model).
|
| I like to work from my office. What I hate about remote work is
| often waiting for responses from multiple people. Something that
| used to take ~60 seconds to deal with now takes up to an hour
| while waiting for everyone to answer. I dislike video calls and I
| prefer to use written text as a way of relaying information
| crucial to engineering / configuration / infra.
|
| I never cared about office and having to work from the office,
| but it's noticeable that a lot of people don't have sufficient
| self-control or work ethics to be as productive from home as they
| are from the office.
|
| TL;DR:
|
| 1. people work less efficient from home 2. it takes a lot longer
| to receive information
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Let's talk about resources and overhead. If you WFH, then you're
| paying rent, utilities, you have a kitchen, you may well be BYOD,
| your ISP is a consumer-grade connection, you've got renter's or
| homeowner's insurance covering your stuff.
|
| That's all miles different from working in an office. They've got
| cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an enterprise-
| class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and the on-prem
| servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's a break room
| and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't need to clean
| their own toilets.
|
| I mean, if you think about it, it may be crazy for companies to
| insist on RTO because of costs of all that overhead they're
| saving, except for the simple fact that you get what you pay for.
| There are reasons people work together in offices and not from
| their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are
| efficiencies that happen.
|
| I've been waiting for the penny to drop for some time now. Since
| COVID-19 locked everyone at home with a consumer-grade ISP, I've
| had plenty of time to read my TOS and service agreements. And
| you'd be hard-pressed to find such an ISP that actually permits
| "commercial activity" or WFH to occur on their connections, which
| are intended for gaming and entertainment. In case you haven't
| noticed, consumer ISPs don't really care when your connection
| goes down. The SLA is 0 CBR, best-effort delivery. So, enjoy your
| WFH infrastructure, but you get what you pay for.
|
| My Site B is the public library, where I've been assured that I
| can conduct my WFH activities on their network, even in a private
| study room. That's the best I've got for now. If you're RTO--
| count your blessings. I have no office to return to!
| thisarticle wrote:
| > There are reasons people work together in offices and not
| from their homes, there are economies of scale, and there are
| efficiencies that happen.
|
| Such as?
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Well you see, at home everyone has their own fridge, but in
| the office there's a single fridge for 50 people. And it's
| got free drinks in it to make up for the extra (say) hour a
| day spent travelling to get there.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > That's all miles different from working in an office. They've
| got cleaning staff and a maintenance team. They've got an
| enterprise-class high-speed redundant Internet connection (and
| the on-prem servers are on your multi-GB core network.) There's
| a break room and free sodas in the fridge. The engineers don't
| need to clean their own toilets.
|
| By saving on office costs you can just offer those benefits to
| your remote employees. You can hire someone to clean a
| residential bathroom too!
| blep_ wrote:
| (or just give them the money you saved and let them decide
| how to allocate it)
| andsoitis wrote:
| > not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20 years ago
|
| what's an example?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| My reasons:
|
| - I like easy access to my crew
|
| - I feel like people goof off when WFH. I know I do.
|
| - For most people (not all) office work is better from a mental
| health perspective than WFH.
|
| - For most jobs (not all), the work is more easily performed at a
| high level in an office environment with easy access to
| colleagues and resources.
| axpy906 wrote:
| People are missing the point. Remote work is about judging you by
| your results. In person is about your manager watching you.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I think that in our field people work better together - more
| collaboration, knowledge transfer, teamwork and ultimately better
| solutions delivered.
|
| I also believe that people are more motivated and engaged, and
| work harder and with more focus in a shared workspace outside of
| the home.
|
| I was on the fence going into the remote work experiment, but
| everything I've seen since supports my feelings above. I've seen
| less of the good stuff and a lot more slacking off.
|
| I think the level of flexibility we had before was about right
| for knowledge work. I could always get a day or two from home
| when I wanted some solo focus. I could always shift working hours
| to fit around life, or take a few hours out of the office for a
| personal errand. That was enough flexibility for me even though
| office was the focal point. I don't think being asked to go back
| to the office with that kind of dynamic is overbearing or in any
| way unreasonable.
| olliej wrote:
| That does not require being in person, pretty much the entire
| OSS community demonstrates that.
|
| Honestly I'm beginning to find "we need to be in person to
| collaborate" to be a red flag for unable to communicate and
| "will interrupt people working all day"
| tonfreed wrote:
| Not an employer, but my read is this:
|
| When I'm in the office, I have little, off the cuff conversations
| I can't have online, where I can express and develop a thought
| that would otherwise be gone as quickly as it came to me.
|
| IRL, I have thousands of opportunities during the day to get 10
| seconds of feedback, online I'm not likely to get a response
| because of the context switching overhead.
|
| I don't want to be 100% in the office, but the one day a week we
| have at the moment is definitely positive for the whole team.
|
| Tl;dr: the creativity that can be achieved by having people to
| bounce ideas off is multiplied when they're in the same room.
| etempleton wrote:
| Working closely with a number of pro-office senior leaders it
| basically comes down to a few thing:
|
| 1. It is very hard to steer a giant organization and get everyone
| on the same page under ideal circumstances. Work from home makes
| that even harder because people aren't as tuned into what is
| happening beyond their job. If the business needs to pivot it
| takes longer.
|
| 2. Most senior leaders spend 6-10 hours a day in meetings. It
| really sucks when they have one or two people on Zoom and
| everyone else is around a conference room. Wait, your mic is
| muted, Ted. Oh, no it is the conference room speaker is off or
| something, I don't know...20 minutes later someone fixes it, but
| it wasted 20 minutes that all those people don't have in their
| day.
|
| 3. Usually senior leader, C-suite folks, got to where they are
| at, in part, because of how good they are in the in-person
| meeting / 1:1 in-person. It is their super power. You take that
| away and they feel less effective.
| GeorgeMD wrote:
| Not an employer, just a mid dev. People waste their time so much
| remote. In 2021 it felt like almost noboby was getting any work
| done. You need good managers to handle that, and they are rare.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| The management class is dominated by extroverts, who cannot
| imagine not needing in-person interaction to thrive because it is
| what they need.
| wankerrific wrote:
| How about just reconfiguring bullpen office back to semi private
| cubicles or tiny phone room offices? Make the office a place to
| come to for a better work environment.
|
| Let's be honest- these bullpen setups suck and very few people
| want to "return" to that.
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| > there's not much in-office dynamic like maybe there was 20
| years ago
|
| Yeah, because folks like you insist that office culture has
| nothing to do with productivity. I wonder if you've ever worked
| somewhere productive.
|
| > dragging us back into the office
|
| Dragging? Are we slaves now?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Obviously we're not slaves. But if your employer says everyone
| is required to return to the office on some date, it's not like
| you have a lot of options for saying no other than not showing
| up to see what happens or finding alternative employment.
| bwhiting2356 wrote:
| Remote communication is not as good as in person. One zoom
| meeting is not the end of the world. But after 1000 zoom
| meetings, the problems start to compound and matter a lot for any
| team that requires a lot of communication.
|
| If you're maintaining legacy software, the requirements are
| relatively clear, everyone is experienced and knows what to do,
| and you're not in a hurry to ship, bearing the extra
| communication overhead of remote work is probably not a big deal,
| and you get the benefit of hiring people where the cost of living
| and wages are lower.
|
| On the other hand, if you have a fast-moving project where you
| still don't know how to solve the problem, you need cross-
| functional collaboration, speed is important, you don't have time
| to spell out all the requirements in writing, you're trying to
| get junior people up to speed, etc, remote work makes that very
| challenging. It doesn't make it impossible for a project to
| succeed but it makes it less likely.
|
| Ultimately, the measure of productivity should not in the number
| of lines of code written or tickets completed, but in delivering
| value to the customer. Many of the projects I've worked on in the
| past couple years have ended up failing and were a huge waste of
| time and money, and I think a lot of it comes down to
| communication problems.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| There aren't that many actual employers responding, but I read
| several of these comments, and kinda starting to see a pattern:
| cliches, anecdotes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that the world
| has changed, or that teams, jobs, and people, can be different
| then your own experiences
|
| Y'all are not looking good, bosses.
| doggerland wrote:
| I had the same experience of finding loads of cliches, but
| mostly on the other side: from the pro-WFH people it's all some
| variation of "you're just bad at managing", "I don't care about
| your office lease", "I don't go to work to make friends" and
| "you can do that just as well online".
|
| To be fair, I think both sides make decent points.
| cientifico wrote:
| 1. We generate trust faster and stronger when we are physically
| present.
|
| 2. Teams with high trust tend to be happier and deliver better
| and more.
|
| 3. Some people need to be in the office. Hybrid approaches (some
| people at the office, some not) suck. So full-office, or say
| goodbye to the people that need the office.
| pxue wrote:
| Because going remote first is hard.
|
| Because "you", as an established worker in your industry don't
| need hand holding guidance.
|
| Remote first will never replace the way impromptu mentor sessions
| happen in person or after hours. I am extremely glad I had the
| opportunity for this, and I want to replicate it for the juniors
| just entering work.
| kept3k wrote:
| I'm unsure why an engineer would want to be back in the office.
| There are a lot of distractions and unnecessary stress.
|
| From my point of view, engineers who depend on others to get
| their work done like to be in the office. Because it makes it
| look like they are collaborating and getting work done.
|
| From a manager point of view, this looks like collaboration as
| well. And would benefit the project. This is why they want people
| in the office.
|
| I disagree with it. There are engineers who like to manipulate
| other people and it is far less likely to happen in a remote
| environment.
|
| Just my observation, not 100% facts in all cases.
| voisin wrote:
| A lot of the comments here are binary. Why not advocate for
| hybrid, 3 days in, 2 days out, or vice versa, giving junior
| people opportunities for exposure and mentorship and giving
| everyone time to build culture together, but allowing people time
| away for deeper work? And then why not invest in your office
| space so people aren't treated like animals at a trough and be in
| actually good locations with walkable amenities?
| welshwelsh wrote:
| Nobody is actually in the office 5 days a week anymore, right?
| I thought RTO meant 1-3 days a week in the office.
|
| Anyway, I don't think we need the term "hybrid." If employees
| are required to live within commuting distance of an office,
| then that is an "in-office" job. Being able to work remote at
| least some of the time is a given for any position.
| dudul wrote:
| Well, see 4 years ago we invested in this new office building
| with lots of open office space and small conference rooms with
| shiny whiteboards. Now it's all empty and we need to make sure we
| can tell corporate it was a good decision. Therefore, we need as
| many butts in seats as possible asap.
| adenozine wrote:
| In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation,
| disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty
| deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you'll ever
| read.
|
| They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to
| make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to
| feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100%
| unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)
|
| If your team isn't getting stuff done remote, investigate a
| protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the
| developers, and maybe skim some commits.
|
| If you are being threatened with back to office and you don't
| want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I'd
| estimate there's about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher
| paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first.
| The world is changing, don't let them play tricks on you.
|
| I've fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I'll be damned if
| I'm ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-
| vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it's on fire, you better
| call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.
|
| I know it's tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that
| loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little
| further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I
| strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work
| arrangements.
|
| If we're all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well
| be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!
| alper wrote:
| It's not about the productivity, it's about the culture and the
| shared experiences. It would be tough to argue that those two
| things don't matter for the success of a company.
| theusus wrote:
| Not an employer myself. But still taking a jab.
|
| "We have set unrealistic expectations and those aren't met. So we
| conclude that employees are slacking. Thus we want you back"
|
| Or
|
| "We pick lower-tier employees who won't work until they are
| forced to."
| olliej wrote:
| For many (most?) it's fairly clearly about demonstrating power
| over the plebs. For some there's making it look like their
| investment in shitty open plan offices wasn't a waste of money.
|
| Of course they dress it up as collaboration, much like they do
| open plan offices, and much like open plan offices it's BS in
| this case as well.
|
| Obviously there are some people who desperately want to return to
| the office as they use the office for socializing, except that of
| course they're taking the position that their socializing /lack
| of non-work life is more important than everyone else's life.
|
| Also chatty coworkers isn't productive, especially in open plan
| offices. Oh and of course now you get to have coworkers coming to
| the office size and giving you plague as they did prepandemix,
| only with an exciting new plague option as well.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| > Employers, why do you want us back in the office?
|
| Because we're all paranoid that the other companies will somehow
| gain some sort of economic/productivity advantage from bringing
| their guys back into the office and leverage this to push us out
| of the market.
|
| Even though we keep seeing research that this absolutely isn't
| the case, the only way to be sure is to preemptively bring our
| guys back into the office too. Ya know.. just in case.
| taberiand wrote:
| I assume it's mostly ego driven, imagining the side comments
| from their peers at the industry conference "Joe couldn't even
| get his people back into the office"
| 65 wrote:
| I'm in my 20s. I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone.
| Remote work destroyed my mental health.
|
| All I wanted was to be able to go into an office and talk to a
| real life person. I would go weeks at a time not talking to a
| single person in real life.
|
| I don't think people understand the plight of the young office
| worker until they've experienced the torture of solitary
| confinement. Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a
| girlfriend, friends, or a life in this city.
|
| I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was
| working all day. The maker space closed early. I'm creative, I
| like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I
| wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people watch.
| I wanted to feel like I was living life. But no, I had a remote
| job.
|
| I got a new job that's supposed to be 3 days a week in office.
| Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're not
| going to go into the office. And here I am, again, in the torture
| of solitary confinement.
|
| I've been thinking about getting a new career, going into the
| trades. Anything that would allow me to have consistent
| interaction with other people.
|
| I've become anti-technology, anti-society. I'm an optimistic
| person, yet I slip into depression because the only thing I want
| - to be able to go into an office - will not happen for me.
| quailfarmer wrote:
| Wow, this hits close to home.
|
| I just moved a thousand miles from school to a new state. I
| live near work, which is about 30 miles from the nearest city
| (no public transit to speak of). If there's any spots for young
| people to socialize nearby, I haven't been able to find them.
|
| My long-term girlfriend has a career near where we went to
| school, so many weekends I'm traveling there, or she is here.
| Both of which are great, but neither of which are conducive to
| making friends in this new place.
|
| I'm really excited about the job, and I'm a late sleeper. I
| tend to work 11am to around 9pm.
|
| I've had some roommates, but they've been pretty uninterested.
|
| Luckily, work is fully in-person, and it's a very young office.
| The first few months were rough, but I've finally made friends
| with people, I had a barbecue, we went skiing, went to see a
| co-workers band perform.
|
| My personal situation could be a lot worse, but it could have
| also been a lot better. Compared to the last year of my Masters
| program, the adjustment period was very painful, and I think
| not having human interaction would have made it worse.
|
| -- Though, (and I'm just realizing it now), if the job were
| remote, I could have just stayed in the part of the country
| where I had many friends. Sadly, I work with hardware, so
| that's probably not going to happen.
| nostromo wrote:
| Working in person isn't the issue here -- not having friends is
| the issue.
|
| People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing. But it
| should never be your primary place of making friends. (Friends
| and family won't lay you off like a job might. Having a network
| outside of work is critical if that ever happens.)
|
| Asking your coworkers to come into the office just so you can
| get some needed face time with other people doesn't seem fair
| to them. They have social lives outside of work and aren't
| being paid to be someone's social outlet.
| pxue wrote:
| C'mon that's just bullshit.
|
| Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.
|
| It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed
| repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for
| friendship) is already solved by going to work together.
|
| Making friends as an adult is hard. Work is the easiest
| shortcut in establishing meaningful relationships with
| strangers.
|
| Edit: addressing some of the comments below.
|
| Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will
| maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance
| (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
|
| I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
|
| Friend just means someone you have established a platonic
| relationship with right here right now. You may drift apart
| in the future, but what's important is that the connection
| and relationship is genuine and real.
| sircastor wrote:
| We tend to make friends early in life at school or church,
| but those friendships are because there's a very wide pool
| of individuals in a single location. Literally everyone in
| a geographic area who is your age. That inherently tends to
| include people of similar economic status and cultural
| background. You have this huge group of people and can pick
| your preferred subset from them.
|
| Walking into a job, literally the only thing you have in
| common with these people is an employer. While time spent
| together is an important component of building
| relationships, it lacks the other substantially important
| pieces of relationships: Common interests, similar
| backgrounds, similar worldviews, etc. (Though it doesn't
| mean they're inherently absent)
| Joeri wrote:
| Similar backgrounds and worldviews are not necessary for
| a solid friendship, as long as you have shared interests
| and mutual respect.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > It's by far the easiest way to make friends
|
| But I generally have nothing in common with the people I
| work with.
|
| I'm friends with people who share my world outlook, my
| moral and philosophical and aesthetic views, and there's no
| correlation between that and working with people.
|
| > Friend just means someone you have established a platonic
| relationship with right here right now.
|
| NO, that's not friend, FFS! That's an acquaintance or a
| coworker.
|
| Don't get me wrong - I'm a very sociable guy, I love
| hanging out with people, but I only have a few actual
| _friends_.
|
| > Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who
| will maintain a connection with you no matter the
| circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
|
| > I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
|
| I'm sorry, but if you leave a job and lose all your
| connection with someone, _you were never friends._
|
| I moved to a new continent in 2016 and I'm still in touch
| with my small group of actual friends, and I even made two
| more here.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.
|
| Until they, or you:
|
| - quit and move to another company in 2-3 years
|
| - move to another department in the company
|
| - get fired
|
| Then what?
| mgraf1 wrote:
| Then you keep in touch with them.
|
| The best friend I've made as an adult was met through
| work. Then he took another job, and I moved across the
| country when I went remote. We still keep in touch and
| occasionally travel to visit each other.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Most work "friendships" are transactional. Always
| exceptions of course, like in your case, but it's
| important to be clear eyed going in.
|
| A lot of people in my life have had their feelings hurt
| when their "work friend" stopped talking to them after
| leaving the company, because they failed to understand
| this important truth.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| > Making friends as an adult is hard.
|
| Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running /
| reading / trivia / sports groups.
|
| Take a class.
|
| Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm,
| shelter, political office..
|
| Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends.
| The friends are a byproduct.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yes a byproduct of consistently spending time with the
| same people.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'd argue the socialisation is just as important as the
| formal education.
| mustini wrote:
| This is very easy advice to give and oft repeated, but
| I'm deeply skeptical that this is something that works
| for most people (unless we substitute friends with
| acquaintances).
| autoexec wrote:
| > unless we substitute friends with acquaintances
|
| Isn't that the case for 'work friends' too? The people we
| never see or hear from again the moment they get a good
| offer at some other company or we ourselves move on to
| other roles? There will be exceptions of course, people
| you meet at work who you actually form real meaningful
| connections with, but there will also be exceptions for
| the people you meet while volunteering, or while playing
| a sport. Either way, most of the people in our lives are
| strangers or acquaintances.
| scrollaway wrote:
| It's often repeated because a lot of people make friends
| this way.
|
| My board game buddies are my closest real life friends,
| and I met them exactly like this.
|
| However people do need to accept that not everyone makes
| friends the same way.
| mustini wrote:
| Maybe the more interesting question is what does it take
| for this to work?
|
| I'm just going anecdotal here from college friends that
| have dispersed across the US.
|
| Warm intros, so to speak, help. If you join a running
| group attended by a friend of a friend it seems to stick
| better than joining when you know absolutely no one.
|
| Public transit helps. It's hard to be consistent when
| going to the activity requires slogging through traffic.
|
| And lastly, an activity that encourages repeated regular
| attendance. Hiking is an activity that is super flaky
| attendance compared to say training for a triathlon with
| a specific event day.
| scrollaway wrote:
| In my experience the reason board games work great is
| because you are forced to interact, understand the
| people, you play better when you figure out how they
| think etc. It forces you to create a rapport. You
| inevitably find out when you have chemistry with someone
| and want to play more with them.
|
| Most people meeting over other activities I believe have
| similar stories. Dancing for example, or other group
| sports.
| mettamage wrote:
| Digital nomad here. I like being one. For me making
| friends, the best places are: Tinder (it took a lot of
| effort) and just giving compliments to people on the street
| (it took some effort to learn).
|
| Regarding complimenting people on the street and
| potentially turning it into a conversation, it takes some
| practice. 10 years ago when I did some solo traveling
| (before uni even) for the first time, I had the choice to
| stay inside and feel even more agony or to go out and
| experience social anxiety and pain. I've experienced a lot
| of social anxiety and pain (initially). It feels better
| than feeling lonely.
|
| There are courses on how to make friends (and influence
| people :P, see "How to make friends and influence people",
| it's a book, I haven't read it though). If you really want
| to, you can consciously make an effort on bettering social
| skills and meet anyone everywhere and maintaining it.
|
| A good channel (a bit too broad though) is Charisma on
| Command [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand
| calsy wrote:
| What bizarro world is this?
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Ummm, no! Maybe some people get their social life from work
| but many don't.
|
| I have 1 friend I've made during my entire career that
| stayed with me after the job ended. The others I've lived
| with, or went to school with, or met following other
| interests.
|
| If you just mean socialising with colleagues, sure, I do
| that. But they aren't my good friends.
| Gigachad wrote:
| We are dismantling every place people form new
| friendships and then wonder why young people are becoming
| more lonely.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I agree, and it's a problem. But out of every place being
| dismantled, I'm ok with dismantling the workplace.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| No, we're really not. People still live together, people
| still go to school together, people still have interests
| out of work, people still go to bars and clubs.
|
| The office may have been a good place to make friends for
| some young people, but certainly not all.
|
| I was quite lonely in my early twenties. I had moved away
| from home and university and all the people I knew. It's
| quite normal. And nobody worked remotely.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've got friends but you can't fill 100% of your social
| interactions with meeting friends. Unless you have a very
| large number of them, you won't be able to see them daily,
| and even if you do, you end up consuming all of your free
| time with socialising and having no personal time left.
|
| Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social
| interaction or personal time after work, either option
| leaving me unsatisfied. I can't wait to get back to the
| office, those were the best years of my life.
|
| Remote work is making me depressed and isolated.
| nostromo wrote:
| Sure, friends are part of it -- family is the other part of
| it.
|
| If you don't have either -- filling that void by spending
| all day in an office sounds even more depressing. I'd focus
| more on making friends and finding a committed
| relationship.
|
| There are lots of solutions here outside of working in-
| person: Find roommates. Start playing sports. Date more.
| Find an in-person hobby. Volunteer.
| Gigachad wrote:
| What I know is that those first few years of my career in
| office were the best years of my life. I've been
| scrambling around trying everything to fill the gap left
| by remote work, I go to meetups, I have family and
| friends, none of it is as significant as working together
| with people for the majority of your day.
|
| I'm going back to the office and I won't take another job
| that has most people remote.
| porker wrote:
| > What I know is that those first few years of my career
| in office
|
| In _that particular_ office.
|
| Ive had spells of time like that. Mine were at
| universities working together in labs.
|
| Ive worked software jobs in companies and startups where
| the developers sat in the same room all day and didn't
| speak. Completely unsociable. I found that much more soul
| destroying than remote working.
| goostavos wrote:
| >I can't wait to get back to the office, those were the
| best years of my life.
|
| Huh. It's wild how different two people's experiences of
| the same thing can be. I hated the office. I hated
| commuting. I hated meeting in stuffy rooms. While I like
| (most) of my coworkers, and enjoy the occasional drinks
| with them, I could also never see like 99% of them ever
| again and never even think about it. I vastly, vastly
| prefer WFH and would trade those "relationships" away in a
| heart beat in order to have it.
|
| It's hard for me to wrap my head around the "best years" of
| someone's life being those where they're surrounded by
| people who think of them so little that the flexibility of
| doing laundry during the day beats ever seeing them again.
|
| This thread has a healthy mix of both camps, which is
| pretty surprising to me.
| Gigachad wrote:
| > surrounded by people who think of them so little that
| the flexibility of doing laundry during the day beats
| ever seeing them again.
|
| My coworkers have all gone back to the office part time,
| they go out and do stuff in the city almost every week
| after work, they go to huge javascript meetups, go to the
| pubs and clubs, and I'm here sitting alone doing very
| little because my city doesn't have a large tech scene.
| Remote work has given me the ability to work senior level
| jobs which just don't exist here, but it's not enough.
|
| I've decided, I'm packing my stuff and moving state this
| year primarily so I can work in the office with everyone.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Remote work left me choosing between fulfilling social
| interaction or personal time after work, either option
| leaving me unsatisfied.
|
| Congratulations, you're an extrovert. To me, that sounds
| like the PERFECT arrangement. 0 pressure to interact with
| people, but in case everyone is feeling like it, we meet up
| with friends over the weekend.
|
| I like having personal time to work on personal projects
| 3-4 days a week. I'm also fine with only 2-4 hours of face
| to face interaction per week.
| herghost wrote:
| Sorry, but I have to disagree.
|
| I'm happily married, children, dog, several distinct groups
| of friends, great job at a great company, lovely house in a
| nice village, etc, etc, etc.
|
| I worked from home for about 4 years as a freelancer and
| found it incredibly isolating (but lucrative, so endured it)
| but finally had enough and get a permanent job back in an
| office. This was 5 weeks before what would be the first of
| several COVID lockdowns and roughly 3 years later there's
| still no realistic "office culture" where I work.
|
| Last year was incredibly tough for me. Incredibly dark.
| Despite everything that I ostensibly had going for me I was
| suddenly crushingly lonely, anxious, probably depressed. 8-10
| hours per day of constantly interacting on Zoom calls doesn't
| just cut it. It's not the same.
|
| I don't think the answer is to necessarily "return to the
| office" as a 100% arrangement. I don't think that's possible
| in reality. But something has to change; undeniable dilemma.
| Gigachad wrote:
| You have to go back to the office. All my friends and
| coworkers who have tried it haven't gone back to remote
| work. People weren't meant to sit alone all day.
| RichEO wrote:
| I don't know where you live, but have you considered
| finding a "third place" to work from or frequent at lunch
| or after work?
|
| I've found that working from a local cafe, in my little
| suburban "village" centre has been really fantastic for
| this. I work, I bump into people I know, I meet new people
| and get to know my neighbours. It's great.
| Moru wrote:
| Was listening to radio the other day. Was some writer
| that used to sit at her local cafe to work but during
| covid she stopped because it got too crowded and now she
| can't go back again.
| gedy wrote:
| Given their ubiquity, local libraries might be good to
| advertise meeting facilities for remote workers during
| the day. Before anyone complains about the noise and
| distractions from other workers - it's probably better
| than an open office layout.
| krabizzwainch wrote:
| I started a new job during the pandemic (well, 2...). What
| sucks for me is that my boss has been like "Yeah, you can
| go back to the office." But both him and my direct coworker
| have said that they will never go back to the office.
| Pretty sure I will never physically meet them before I
| inevitably try to find some other job.
|
| And what is more isolating than being home alone? Well,
| working completely alone in an office building meant to
| hold like 300 employees that was last updated in the 80s.
|
| My basic idea about all of this is to restructure where
| people work. Take all the employees that want to come into
| the office on a regular basis and put them in the same
| building on the same floor.
| christkv wrote:
| I've worked from home for more than 10 years and after
| covid I signed up for a co-working space to go a couple of
| days a week, work and hang out. Since everyone is doing
| different things than what I do, I love it. Designers,
| sales, photographers, lawyer and other IT peeps.
|
| Always someone to chat with when taking a break and getting
| a coffee.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > People do make friends at work, and that's a good thing.
| But it should never be your primary place of making friends.
|
| Yeah... _good luck with that._
|
| Not to say that people don't make friends outside work, but
| there are many variables involved with that.
|
| But just use Meetup.com, right? Sure, if you want to spend a
| few hours with people of retirement age, not if there's
| anything wrong with that.
|
| Not having friends is just the surface level of the issue. If
| all you want is friends and friends alone, then that really
| isn't _that_ hard to arrange.
|
| If the use of "friends", however, is those who are in your
| age cohort as well as _romantic_ possibilities, that 's an
| entirely different beast that can be ironically difficult to
| conquer once college life has been long since left in the
| dust.
|
| For many, if not most, the office was the deciding factor as
| to whom you would associate with in adulthood. Plenty of
| people have met long time friends as well as their husbands
| and wives at the office. With remote work, this is extremely
| difficult to pull off. I've been fortunate to have made one
| or two good friends through my years of remote work, but I
| had 100x more social opportunities back when I worked in a
| physical office. I miss the fact that I could have a best
| work friend kind of like how I usually had a best school
| friend as a child. But it's usually impractical to make such
| connections when all you have is Slack and Zoom, neither of
| which are good for shared 1-on-1 experiences. There's no
| chance to say "Hey, wanna run to Starbucks with me?"
|
| I wouldn't give up remote work entirely, but I'm finding
| there's a lot left to be desired that would be met in an
| office. The office is the missing variable that gets people
| to spend sufficient amount of time together on shared goals.
| That's not easily going to be replicated by introducing
| yourself to random people in town.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Meetup works great in many cities and plenty of young
| people use it. If you're joining a tricot or bingo group
| though don't be surprised at finding yourself surrounded
| with "retirement age" members.
|
| In some cities it's unused though. When I lived in Athens
| it was terrible, just crypto groups used it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That has not been my experience in the LA region for many
| years. Some get some RSVPs, but be prepared for everyone
| to drop out the very last minute or not show up. Long
| ago, it was pretty great.
| barefeg wrote:
| Completely understand your point of view. In my case,
| growing up I was interested in computers, and back then
| (late 90' early 00') kids my age were not into that. So
| after school I would roam forums. I would some times
| exchange IM with people I shared interests with, and chat
| with them every day. Most of them were adults and young
| adults, I didn't know where they lived, how they looked, or
| their names. However I never felt the need to meet them in
| person. And my interactions felt as real (or even more)
| than interactions in the physical world.
|
| Fast forwarding to now, I find myself mentally fine when
| working from home. Of course things are different since I
| have family to interact with at home, but for me, not
| engaging with colleagues about non-work related things is
| what makes remote work not as fun as the olden times. This
| is also harder to arrange because my colleagues would
| rather go out or do something else rather that keep
| chatting with me about something else.
| kccqzy wrote:
| You are confusing between friends at work and the employer
| itself. Layoffs are irrelevant: your friends (including those
| at work) will support you if you are laid off, unlike your
| employer.
|
| Also, once you make a friend at work you can meet outside the
| workplace, or communicate with non-work communication
| channels.
| ipaddr wrote:
| But you won't because the reason why you spent time
| together was someone paid you to. How many people are you
| still hanging out with the company you worked 10 or 5 years
| ago? Very few if any..
| wetpaws wrote:
| This should be a problem of your therapist, not your coworkers.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Guess what? My team can't get enough remote work - they're
| not going to go into the office.
|
| This may sounds crazy but I actually like to go to the office
| when I'm team isn't there! The place is lively and there are
| other people who aren't in my team, and I prefer to interact
| with them (perhaps it's less stressful as we're less likely to
| talk about ongoing team work, or they won't require my
| assistance).
| Volundr wrote:
| I hear you and doubt nothing about your plight, but frankly
| that feels like a you problem. I can sympathize while also
| rejecting the idea that I should have to come into the office
| so your not lonely.
|
| Have you considered a co-working space? It seems like that
| could get you what your looking for. Beyond that I'd look to
| get creative around finding ways to get social outside work. A
| martial arts or social dance class for example. Frankly I think
| it's much healthier if your coworkers aren't the core of your
| social life.
|
| FWIW I too had this problem at the start of the pandemic. My
| solution was to build a gym and workout with my friends 3x a
| week. Obviously this isn't a solution for your plight in a new
| city.
| cal85 wrote:
| > frankly that feels like a you problem
|
| It's also a me problem, so there's at least two of us.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've asked around my friend and coworkers group all 20s and
| everyone feels this way. Remote work is terrible for young
| people.
| smashers1114 wrote:
| Not true of my friend and coworker group. You should
| think carefully of confounding factors before taking
| anecdotal data and extrapolating to something that
| applies to a much larger group.
| Insanity wrote:
| Anecdata, but my friends in the 22 - 26 range don't feel
| this way. _But_, they have an active social life
| (football club together) and go out together every
| weekend or every other weekend. And they don't mind
| remote work. So I don't think it's an age issue, but more
| a socializing issue?
| Gigachad wrote:
| It probably would have been better if I hadn't moved out
| of my parents house. For a brief moment I was living the
| dream in the city with a 5 minute walk to work, then I
| found myself remote working sitting on a Monday thinking
| about the dinner party with friends I've planned for
| Saturday for the weekly social interaction.
| projectazorian wrote:
| Your username is "gigachad" and you never considered the
| option of going to a gym on weekdays? Not going to say I
| have made lifetime friends at the gym but I have nice
| conversations with other regulars fairly often, it's a
| good serotonin top-up.
|
| Even works for finding romantic partners as well if
| you're not creepy about it, in fact two regulars at my
| gym just got married.
|
| There's always the bar as well but of course alcohol-
| based socializing is not quite so healthy.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yes I've spent significant time at the gym. It doesn't
| fill the void of spending 8 hours working alone.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I have a strong social group but am also in the single
| 20s group, and realized I cannot stand remote work.
| dag11 wrote:
| Me three. I happen to have a strong friend group, but being
| single and living alone, the first few months of the
| pandemic were miserable from a solitary confinement
| standpoint. Even in recent years if I have to WFH for any
| reason, it's just the worst thing. Plus I'm just not
| productive when I'm working home alone.
|
| I'm extremely thankful that my company is mostly comprised
| of people who prefer and thrive working in our one office.
| And no, I'm not using my coworkers as my friend group.
| Despite loving some of my work friends, my strongest
| friends are all outside the office. But the office
| environment and the people in it give me life.
|
| When it comes time to look for a next job (if ever), the
| biggest requirement by far will be a working environment
| that's mostly, if not entirely, in office.
|
| I'm 27 for reference, but I've felt this way ever since the
| start of my career.
| lumost wrote:
| Was a me problem as well, I joined a local coworking space,
| started grad school, and joined a local community focused
| CrossFit.
|
| I used to love the office, but I never see anyone there.
| Once is started focusing on local community activities
| things got better. I'd suggest adjusting your hours such
| that 5-8 pm are free for social activities. I usually start
| work at 10, break for dinner, and then do an hour or two
| before bed.
| Volundr wrote:
| 100%, I'm sure there is far more than two of you. As
| mentioned I had the problem at the start of the pandemic
| and had to reflect on why work was the majority of my
| social life, and I think that reflection led me to a better
| place.
|
| That turn of phrase was to meant to mean it's your problem
| to find a solution too, I should not have to change my
| behavior to accommodate you wishing for a bustling office.
| It was not meant to imply that you are alone in feeling
| that way and I apologize if it was taken that way. Anyone
| having a hard time with remote is in good company.
|
| Again if they are available in your area I'd recommend
| checking out co-working spaces. They are great ways to work
| around others who feel the same as you, and, as a bonus
| won't come and go with the job. Part of the reason I feel
| so strongly that your core socialization shouldn't be work
| is because so many of those connections, even the ones you
| thought were close, will disappear with the job.
| lairv wrote:
| At least three you can count me in as well
|
| It's funny how people (in this thread and in general when
| the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making
| friends or just socialize at work, when most friendships
| starts because some people happen to spend 8h/day at the
| same school/university
| hypothesis wrote:
| It's funny how people find it necessary to participate in
| in-group/out-group dynamics/politics at work, long past
| high school.
|
| What if one could get paid for doing a job without any of
| that by skipping "socialize at work" altogether?
| brewdad wrote:
| That works fine until your workplace is 3 people or more.
| Human nature can't be wished away.
| antisthenes wrote:
| There's a thing called CC on your email client. It
| certainly lets you add more than 3 people.
| virtual_void wrote:
| I don't see people finding the fact infuriating. People
| are upset because they feel like people are asking them
| to come in to the office because someone else wants to
| socialise.
|
| Enforced socialisation doesn't seem reasonable any more
| than denying that some people like to socialise at work.
| Two sets of people, two different needs.
| lairv wrote:
| I don't agree with the first sentence but it's just the
| feeling I have when reading some posts
|
| I agree with the rest though, now that people had a taste
| of WFH, you can't force them to come to office just for
| the sake of socialization. My point was to acknowledge
| the issue that some people used to see work as a place to
| socialize just like high-school or university, and this
| way of socializing has been suddenly taken away from them
| with WFH, and there is nothing weird in that
| Volundr wrote:
| > It's funny how people (in this thread and in general
| when the topic comes) find infuriating the idea of making
| friends or just socialize at work
|
| I have yet to see someone find this idea "infuriating".
| What people find infuriating is people who want to drag
| everyone else back to the office so they can pretend we
| are friends.
|
| > most friendships starts because some people happen to
| spend 8h/day at the same school/university.
|
| "Most" feels very strong here. I have exactly 2 friends I
| am still in touch with from high school, unless you count
| social media connections. None from college, but
| admittedly, that was a pretty isolating time in my life
| due to the combined demands of work and school. Anecdata,
| but looking at my friend group, I'd say this is pretty
| representative. Which is a perfect example of why I
| advocate strongly for finding friends outside work. Turns
| out "we were forced into the same building" just isn't
| the basis for a lasting relationship people hope it is,
| and these often dry up when the constraint is removed.
| jltsiren wrote:
| You should look at the bigger picture. People usually find
| friends as a byproduct of of some activity, such as work,
| studies, hobbies, or activism. If you remove the activity
| people spend a third of their waking hours on from the list,
| the result is a massive reduction in the number of friends
| people have. And it's going to hit the people who can't
| easily make friends the hardest.
|
| This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that affects
| the entire society. Social isolation feeds many undesirable
| things, such as political polarization and extremism. If a
| society wants to survive, it has to deal with the issue
| somehow.
| Volundr wrote:
| > This is not an individual problem. It's an issue that
| affects the entire society. Social isolation feeds many
| undesirable things, such as political polarization and
| extremism. If a society wants to survive, it has to deal
| with the issue somehow.
|
| Agreed, and I think the best way is for people to realize
| that "the people I chat with at the water-cooler" are not
| my friends, and take action based on that. Job loss and
| retirement are often terribly isolating events for people
| for exactly the reason your specify. Work is 1/2 of their
| waking life and they rely on it too heavily for their
| social needs.
|
| Forcing the majority who prefer work from home to work from
| the office because a minority of people will feel lonely
| does not "benefit society". It hides a real problem that
| some people have while sacrificing the rest of us to do so.
| If the majority of us wanted to work in the office this
| would be a non-issue. GP would've simply gone to the
| office, found the majority of their co-workers there and
| been perfectly happy, while those of us who wanted WFH were
| happily home. Better to tackle the problem head on than
| sweep it under the rug.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The friends you meet at work are no different from the
| friends you meet at dance/martial arts class. They are
| tied to an activity, and if you quit the activity, you
| are likely to lose most of them.
|
| The core problem is that remote work can easily mean 8
| hours/day of social isolation. Especially because those
| are the hours people have the most energy to try new
| things. If people spend that time avoiding social
| contacts, they are obviously not going to make many
| friends.
|
| Historically, neighbors were a key source of friends,
| because they were the community you lived in. 20th
| century changed that. Today neighbors are simply people
| who happen to sleep near you temporarily. They are
| probably away from home during the day, their jobs are
| unrelated to yours, and they will likely relocate sooner
| or later.
|
| Who will form the community you will spend your time with
| by default, if it's no longer your neighbors or
| coworkers?
| asdadsdad wrote:
| This is much more than a one person's problem, but it's a
| general issue that many older people with well-established
| lives don't sympathize with unfortunately. As much as others
| can deny, work is source of most people's friendships,
| relationships, mentorships, and other social interactions.
| There's hardly a substitute for that outside.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's a symptom of societies that require you to work way
| too much and get everything (status, health care,
| socialization) from your job.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is true but also "fix all of society" is a hard
| first step and there are folks who are unhappy now.
| camgunz wrote:
| Oh I'm not saying that, I'm saying this is HN and most
| people posting here have the ability to take a step back
| from work and build a social life for the sake of their
| mental health. Working yourself literally to death isn't
| cool.
|
| I also think it's fair to say that a lot of people are
| happy going to work and a lot of people really aren't. I
| feel like all of these threads are super passionate with
| one side trying to convince the (super unconvince-able)
| other side, which is why my responses are something like
| "get a situation together that works for you". "Convince
| millions of other people they're wrong and you're right
| about something they care about deeply" is a steeper
| climb.
| asdadsdad wrote:
| Would you like college to be remote too? School? Let's
| all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom and live most
| of our lives like that?
| camgunz wrote:
| > Would you like college to be remote too?
|
| I think the university system is pretty hamstrung by the
| number of students it can accept. A lot of grad programs
| are coming online (I used to work at 2U which does this)
| and this is good both for students and the school as more
| students get an education and the school gets more
| income. Whether or not I want it to happen (I think it's
| probably an important part of reforming the university
| system) it seems like it's happening anyway.
|
| > School?
|
| I think most studies show this is pretty bad, so no.
|
| > Let's all wake up in our pijamas, hop on a zoom
|
| Probably twice a week I get through the whole work day in
| my PJs and I'm great at my job, so that sounds fine.
|
| > live most of our lives like that?
|
| Nah I'll go to the grocery store in the AM for supplies
| in my PJs but that's the extent of it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| For many college is remote. That's the new norm for many.
| Volundr wrote:
| It was common even before the pandemic. Plenty of
| colleges offered certain courses or even full degrees
| remotely.
| Adraghast wrote:
| > general issue that many older people with well-
| established lives don't sympathize with unfortunately
|
| Many young adults have friends.
|
| > As much as others can deny, work is source of most
| people's friendships, relationships, mentorships, and other
| social interactions.
|
| I will deny it. Citation or speak for yourself.
| Volundr wrote:
| > This is much more than a one person's problem
|
| 100% agree, that was poor phrasing on my part, it was meant
| to communicate where the responsibility for fixing the
| problem lies, not claim the problem was isolated to a
| single, or even small number of people.
|
| > There's hardly a substitute for that outside.
|
| Strongly, 100% disagree. Work friendships tend to be
| fleeting, causing job loss or retirement to be isolating
| events. Yes lasting friendships can and do form in the
| workplace (I've formed some even while working remotely!),
| but getting laid off is a great way to discover just how
| many of those work friendships were of convenience.
|
| Meanwhile there are tons of ways to meet people outside of
| work. Dance classes, workshops, exercise classes, book
| clubs, beekeeping clubs, etc. I submit that a person who
| can't form friendships outside of work is unlikely to form
| the lasting kind at work, and is better off in the long
| wrong examining why that is, rather than papering over it
| with a temporary bandaide.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I can second the GP's testimony, even though I'm not new to
| my city / have a decent social life outside work.
|
| The only thing that fixed up was moving to a company that was
| mostly in-office, with a few people hybrid/remote. Being able
| to interact _in person_ with people _working on the same
| project as me_ was rejuvenating, and that might be
| understating it.
| inoop wrote:
| If you're in NYC and want to grab lunch let me know
| Gigachad wrote:
| My story is very similar to yours. Used to be ok with remote
| work but then I had a break up last year and need to get back
| to the office. Unfortunately all the tech jobs are in other
| cities of Australia so I can only get remote jobs.
|
| Made the decision this month to pack up everything and move to
| Melbourne so I can work in the office among other things.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Welcome. Plenty of 3 day in the office and even 5 day in the
| office tech jobs here.
|
| Also great cafes you can work from on the remote work days.
|
| PT and urban sprawl sucks though, which is why I did the
| opposite and work remotely 100% now.
| wnolens wrote:
| Are you me? Jesus I took a regular job in January 2020 because
| I was over being a contract developer working at home. No luck
| now..
|
| I agree fully with you. I'm in my 30s though everything else
| the same. I would definitely feel oppositely if I had a partner
| and kids (like my brother) but I don't.
|
| People saying it's a "you" problem are missing the big picture.
| For a lot of people, the workplace is a primary context in
| their life.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Same and same. Also, I hate how these days it's somehow
| shameful to even think about making friends at the workplace,
| that somehow work friends are work friends and can never be
| your "real friends". Looking at my parents' generation, most of
| their current friendships are people they met at work. In fact
| my parents met _each other_ at work.
|
| We go to school and make friends with other people at school.
| Why is it wild that you'd want to go to work and make friends
| with other people at work?
| Volundr wrote:
| Work friends can 100% be real friends. There is nothing
| shameful about making these at work. There's also nothing
| about remote that makes it impossible. I know, I've done it.
|
| That said I would be very, very careful about assuming your
| work friends _are_ real friends. People are often surprised
| to discover which connections vanish when you quit working
| together. Hence why I strongly advocate for finding friends
| outside of work. Makes it much less likely you get laid off
| or leave your job one day and suddenly find yourself lonely.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You go to school to learn so you can earn not make friends.
| You are paying tens of thousands a year to be taught by the
| best and you think it's for socializing. Think of all the
| people who cannot afford school is there no way for them to
| make friends.
| kelnos wrote:
| I've made plenty of real, meaningful, long-term friendships
| at work. But I also have solid friend groups of people I've
| met outside work. I value all of them, but I'm not going to
| give up the opportunity to have more flexible working
| arrangements because some people seem to think they can only
| make friends at work.
|
| > _We go to school and make friends with other people at
| school. Why is it wild that you 'd want to go to work and
| make friends with other people at work?_
|
| "Want" and "need" aren't the same thing. We made friends at
| school because we had no choice. We were required to go to
| school, so of course the result is that we'd end up making
| friends there. But even as children, we had other
| opportunities to make friends: recreational sports leagues,
| boy/girl scouts, church groups (if that was your family's
| thing), volunteering, etc. Sure, I'm not saying those sorts
| of things could replace socialization at school.
|
| But in the adult world, we've already been socialized, and we
| should be able to meet people outside of required, structured
| activities. It's a shame that some people perhaps didn't
| learn that as well as others, but I don't think that's a
| problem best solved by requiring unrelated people to come to
| an office, when remote work offers so much more flexibility
| and many more possibilities.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| This is exactly the attitude that I'm protesting against. I
| don't agree that you can make even close to the same depth
| of friendship with someone who you see 2 hours a week, vs
| someone you see 8 hours a day 5 days a week for months.
| Work or school are really the only places where you can
| spend that much time with someone.
|
| Then again, part of the problem is that people have
| forgotten what real friendships are like. "Friends" these
| days are just people you go to
| restaurants/clubs/concerts/vacations/hiking/camping with so
| that you don't have to go alone. That's not friendship.
| That's just people you hang out with.
|
| It might cure the itch for a real friendship, but don't
| confuse it for one.
| whynaut wrote:
| > that's not friendship, that's just people you hang out
| with
|
| weird I thought you were talking about coworkers for a
| second
| Volundr wrote:
| > I don't agree that you can make even close to the same
| depth of friendship with someone who you see 2 hours a
| week, vs someone you see 8 hours a day 5 days a week for
| months.
|
| With the exception of fast food, I have never, ever spent
| this kind of time with a co-worker. I don't deny jobs
| like this exist, but it would certainly be the exception
| for all the tech jobs I've worked.
| virtual_void wrote:
| You're assuming your feelings about how other people make
| meaningful relationships are universal. It can be true
| for you yet untrue for others. It seems a bit much to
| state it as fact.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Establishing a common goalpost is critical to even
| discussing this topic. I agree that "meaningful" is
| personal and subjective, but it's also incorrect to take
| the lowest common denominator definition of friendship as
| the valid one.
| virtual_void wrote:
| Totally agree re your first sentence. The second sentence
| is stating things as fact with regards to how _you_ feel
| about relationships.
|
| I don't see how a persons feelings about how _they_ think
| about relationships can be invalid.
| thebradbain wrote:
| Look, I have plenty of close friends of many years who I
| see every single day. My home is essentially a community
| gathering spot at this point. My social calendar is as
| packed, if not more packed, than my work calendar. And
| for me personally there's no overlap between the two. I
| am friendly with all of my colleagues, but I would not
| call them friends.
|
| Forcing me to come into an office would not change that;
| I completely understand that those in a new city without
| a strong group of friends would benefit from going to the
| office-- and at most jobs they're already free to go in
| if they choose, to work alongside people who also
| _choose_ to go into the office. Choose is the key word
| here. Work for me is a job first, and I'm not looking to
| make a best friend at work, so don't force me to come in
| for that reason alone.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Yeah, some of the people I work with I've known for 20 years!
| For me it's weird to imagine spending a large chunk of your
| life with these people and not forming some sort of personal
| connection.
| crocowhile wrote:
| > but no time - I was working all day
|
| This is your problem. The rest is a red-herring.
| krippe wrote:
| So I'm supposed to deal with the hassle of commuting, losing
| hours of my day, because YOU are starved for human connections?
| Get out of here...
| [deleted]
| krabizzwainch wrote:
| If you care that little about the social interaction at work,
| then you probably aren't someone that we are talking about or
| miss working with...
| whynaut wrote:
| And yet you have an issue with them _not_ wanting to come
| in!
| krabizzwainch wrote:
| I literally never said that.
| [deleted]
| Gigachad wrote:
| Gen Z and A are going to have serious problems. Work and
| School are biggest sources of friends. The two things they
| missed out on. I doubt many friends were made in the chat box
| of an online class.
| kelnos wrote:
| School goes on until you're 18 or so (and even later if you
| go to university). Two-ish years of online schooling
| certainly hurt a bit, but is a small percentage of
| available childhood socialization time.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's so many small things chipping away at young people's
| social lives, car dependant design, remote schooling,
| remote work, the loss of public spaces and facilities,
| social media, etc. We can see the trend, young people are
| constantly getting more lonely and isolated, but we only
| make changes that make it worse.
| matrisking wrote:
| Yeesh. Who said you're supposed to do anything?
| kelnos wrote:
| Literally everyone in these threads advocating for a return
| to office?
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem is that the solution is entirely within your grasp,
| but you've decided that the only way to solve your problem is
| through in-office socialization.
|
| Find co-workers who are local and suggest meeting for lunch or
| dinner on occasion. Hopefully you've developed some level of
| rapport through video calls and chats so this won't feel weird
| to you. Your company/team should be organizing regular get-
| togethers anyway. If not, they are failing at doing remote
| work. I hesitate to say "find a new company where they are
| better at this", but that's better than "require everyone to
| come into an office to fix your social life".
|
| Beyond that, don't center your social life around work. Go to
| meetups dedicated to topics and activities you're interested
| in. Just get out and walk!
|
| > _I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was
| working all day. The maker space closed early. I 'm creative, I
| like working. I just wanted to go to an office. That's all I
| wanted. I wanted a routine. I wanted to commute and people
| watch. I wanted to feel like I was living life._
|
| That seems to be a problem you've created for yourself, and
| it's a bit selfish to want to require everyone else to go to an
| office in order to make your choices work for you.
|
| Stop working all day. Set boundaries with your employer. If the
| maker space really closes by 5pm, negotiate a more flexible
| work schedule where you get to take a 2-hour break (or
| something) around lunch or in the afternoon so you can go to
| the maker space, but then you work later into the evening, or
| get up earlier in the morning to start work. Also, I'm not sure
| how any of this would have changed if you were working in an
| office: the maker space would still close early, and you still
| would be working all the time and be unable to get there during
| their open hours.
|
| If you want to people-watch, take a 30-minute walk in the
| morning and in the evening, to replace what a commute would be
| like.
|
| > _I 'm an optimistic person, yet I slip into depression
| because the only thing I want - to be able to go into an office
| - will not happen for me._
|
| This is a bit much, frankly. If you really truly are so
| inflexible that you can't imagine a good life without an office
| job, find a new job that has an office you can go to! This
| isn't rocket science. These jobs exist. Stop advocating making
| life worse for all of the people whose lives have been markedly
| improved by the extra opportunities for remote work, just
| because you can't figure out your own life.
| AnEro wrote:
| I've been thinking the same, for me, it's also the work hours
| were to get ahead I have to do 60 hours on the business side
| AND homework to get more skills. Even just a part-time job or
| something to have a mental reset, money would be tight but
| every angle I see it could be easier to be happier.
| watwut wrote:
| > Day in, day out. All alone. I don't have a girlfriend,
| friends, or a life in this city.
|
| You expect to find a girlfriend on the job? I don't mean it as
| a snark. But in office means that work and communiting takes
| even more of your life. Unless she comes from the job, which is
| unlikely in male dominated profession, being with team won't
| get you girlfriend.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I slip into depression because the only thing I want - to be
| able to go into an office - will not happen for me._
|
| There are tons of companies that still have offices. Get a job
| with one.
| gtvwill wrote:
| I feel ya, try being a remote area drillers offsider. Week
| after week, in the dark on night shift. No radio to even hear
| another humans voice because there isn't any reception in the
| middle of nowhere. No one to talk to. Hella wrecks your mental
| health.
|
| Makes you appreciate the jebus out of f2f hands on trades.
| Stuff where your actually involved with people and the results
| of your work aren't a constant reminder of how detached from
| society you truly are.
| fsociety wrote:
| > I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was
| working all day.
|
| This is the problem in my opinion. Not the fact that you were
| working all day, but generally that our work now bleeds into
| personal lives or leaves no time for it.
| danaris wrote:
| This is actually a symptom of a much larger problem with our
| society as it exists today, which is that we've systematically
| dismantled all our communities and support systems outside of
| work and the (immediate) family.
|
| Humans are social creatures, and for the vast majority of human
| history, we've existed in communities of various shapes.
| Evolutionarily, psychologically, and even physiologically, it's
| not healthy for us to be going to work for 8 hours--with or
| without people--then retreating to a home with just our
| immediate families 5 days a week, (nearly) 52 weeks a year.
|
| The shift in zoning after WWII to heavily prioritize hard
| separation between residential and commercial areas (motivated,
| in no small part, by racism) is a major culprit in the creation
| of this new lifestyle, and disruption of previous forms of
| order. (Though I believe the first big shift was probably the
| Industrial Revolution.)
|
| I don't have much of a solution to offer in the short term,
| because it's not a short-term kind of problem. However, I do
| know that there's a movement called Intentional Communities[0]
| that's supposed to be working on counteracting it; perhaps you
| could look them up and see if there's anything in your area.
|
| [0] https://www.ic.org
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| I understand this completely, having worked remotely since
| February 2019. Can't wait to meet people more often.
| otikik wrote:
| > I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was
| working all day
|
| That's your decision. Very convenient for your employer.
| Perhaps not so convenient to you, given that you are getting
| depressed.
|
| > My team can't get enough remote work - they're not going to
| go into the office.
|
| That's their decision.
| PureParadigm wrote:
| Your feelings are shared by many others our age. Friends at
| work are important, especially if you're living alone. I live
| alone in a city with friends within reach, but only having
| friends outside of work is not enough social interaction for
| me.
|
| Consider how much social time there is in high school and
| college. There was barely a moment to be alone. Classes are
| full of discussion, meals are eaten together, and shooting the
| shit with siblings or roommates fills in all the other time. If
| you forego social interaction during work hours, I don't see
| how the math adds up to get back to the baseline from high
| school and college.
|
| It sounds like you have an office to go to even though your
| team doesn't come in often. This is the case for me too, but
| luckily I'm at a big enough company where there are people my
| age on other teams. At first, barely anyone came in, but
| someone has to break the deadlock so I kept coming in every day
| regardless. Fast forward a year and there is a group of
| 20-somethings that come in every day. I've formed some of the
| best friendships of my life here. I recommend going into the
| office every day even if it's going to be empty. It's a good
| routine anyway to get out of the house.
|
| While I don't have any personally, I'd also recommend
| housemates. A lot of my friends from work have housemates and I
| feel like it's an easy way to build a large friend group since
| you can share each other's friends. It especially seems to help
| those who are new to the city and don't have a friend group
| yet. Your housemates can also easily become your friends!
|
| I really sympathize with your situation. You're simply asking
| for what used to be normal to return. Don't lose hope - there
| are so many of us like you and we just need to find each other.
| porcoda wrote:
| One thing I've learned from 30-ish years in the industry is
| that companies change in one way or another and sometimes those
| changes make the job or job environment lose something that I
| really liked. The shift to remote is one such change: it may
| have taken away a critical social aspect of a job that you
| realize is important to you. I often found it was virtually
| impossible to resist or change such shifts in my employers, so
| instead of staying put and being unhappy I tended to just move
| somewhere new that fit my needs. I think that will be true for
| the remote vs in office jobs: instead of being miserable in a
| remote-focused company, people who value in person can
| gravitate to the employers that emphasize the office
| experience. It sounds like you might need to consider that:
| it's easier to make an individual change to find a fit for what
| you need than to expect an entire company or industry to adapt
| for you.
|
| It's also normal to find such changes unpleasant and sad. Every
| time I found myself moving since an employer changed in a way I
| didn't like, I was sad since something I really liked had
| disappeared. That's normal. What becomes unhealthy is clinging
| to the thing-that-used-to-be and not acknowledging that it
| changed and likely won't ever return to what it used to be.
| wtp1saac wrote:
| Relating to this a lot. I've barely had much in person social
| interaction since 2020, where college for me ended up remote
| for the pandemic. Was a relief when classes went back in person
| a year later, but too little too late for me to build up any
| meaningful social interactions there, and now I'm in a remote
| job to the opposite end of the country (and other parts of the
| world with even more disparate timezones), so I'm pretty much
| in a similar boat of no meaningful in person interaction.
|
| I like technology as an auxiliary means of communicating with
| people, but having pretty much 95-100% of my interactions occur
| over texting and calling (people don't even usually bother to
| turn on their cameras) has been a personal hell, and honestly
| has soured my opinion of the entire internet. Beyond just work,
| what few personal relationships I do have at this point are
| usually also remote, so actually spending real life time with
| people is this far distant tertiary form of interacting, when
| it's the natural bloody thing we're evolved to do as a species.
|
| Now you have companies like Meta investing in the metaverse
| "future" where we sit in VR headsets, trade crypto for fake
| digital goods, have romantic relationships with virtual
| avatars, and sit in virtual offices so our twenty-poly
| character models can discuss around a fake whiteboard. I just
| want to be around people again.
| shadeslayer wrote:
| I've been in the same place you are now. I completely agree
| with the need for a healthy routine to be able to keep
| depression at bay and not having a environment to socialize
| robs you of key experiences we all need to have in our youths
| in order to be well adjusted later in life.
|
| Having said that, you're in a great place to make a few key
| changes that might help! I moved to another country and learnt
| a new language and a whole new culture when I was in the same
| place as you!
|
| Perhaps that's not a option for you, but maybe you could travel
| to a new city for a week or two! Trial out a few places and see
| what fits you. It takes a bit of effort and persistence, at the
| cost of routine, but having a fresh start might be the thing
| that gets you out of this.
|
| Edit: You might want to look up Croissant to go and meet other
| remote co workers, there's a fair few of us around the world ;)
| tacotacotaco wrote:
| "I was working all day." Are you getting paid to work 16 hour
| days? If not then stop giving your employer free work. You're
| devaluing your skill.
|
| Go for a walk outside. Say hello to a stranger.
|
| Volunteer at the library e.g. helping illiterate adults learn
| to read, or helping English as a second language speakers by
| chatting with them.
|
| Go to a game store. They usually have open board/card/rpg games
| you can join. Some bars also have this.
|
| Look online for activity groups in your area e.g. a photography
| group that walks around the city together. A gardening group. A
| sewing group. A painting group. Some of these might be
| advertised at your local library. Some might even meet there.
| Can't find one your interested in? Make your own.
|
| Look at public events in your city. Some of these are run by
| non-profits that would love if you volunteered to assist. Be
| careful about what you volunteer for though. Since you are
| looking for human interactions do not offer to help with their
| website, for example, since that is solitary work. These events
| need plenty of on-hand help.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think you're the most honest pro-office person here. Everyone
| else is making justifications that dance around this idea that
| they need the office for the human connection. What you
| describe is very real and I understand that it hurts.
|
| I think what's happening is that we're in the shaking out phase
| where companies are deciding whether they'll be
| remote/hybrid/office. Each company will make that decision
| based on the preferences of the people with the most influence,
| and because opinions vary so widely there will be lots of
| diversity in outcomes.
|
| And that's a really good thing. It's unfair that those of us
| who can't stand being in an office were made to go into the
| office to satisfy the social needs of other people who aren't
| getting enough socialization in their personal life. But it's
| also not right for people like you to feel like you have no
| choice but to be isolated.
|
| What we need is for people to not feel trapped in a job that
| has the wrong balance of remote and in-person. If you are the
| only one of your coworkers who feels the way that you do, maybe
| the answer is to find a company where the majority of employees
| share your desire for in-person work. I know that sounds
| overwhelming right now, but once you've made the leap once you
| won't be stuck in the wrong alignment again.
| monksy wrote:
| I agree with your statement about him being the most honest
| person here. The most I can give him credit for is that
| you're already out and it keeps you from going back to your
| house.
|
| Everytime I read that "humans are social creatures" it's a
| dog whistle for "i want to see people miserable and pressured
| to do it"
| dsugarman wrote:
| Put yourself in the executives shoes for a second, they're
| not stupid people, they know how large the risk of blowback
| is and how many employees they might disenfranchise or lose.
| They're that confident that remote work is a bigger threat to
| their long-term performance and they don't want to get lapped
| by the companies with an in-office culture
| lolinder wrote:
| This argument is an appeal to authority that I just can't
| buy. You don't have to be a stupid person to succumb to
| your own biases, you just have to be human, and plenty of
| executives make irrational decisions based on their
| subjective feelings.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| FWIW, I read GP's comment as more an elaboration of
| incentive structures rather than an appeal to authority.
|
| You're still right that plenty of people make irrational
| decisions under _whatever_ incentive structure they 're
| in, but I think that the steelman version of GP's
| argument would probably go something like:
| If we see a large % of companies going full-RTO, then
| maybe there's something to be said for the bet that RTO
| is a long-term competitive advantage.
|
| ...or, they might all just be lemmings, too. It's hard to
| say just yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see if
| there's an effect on stock performance over the next 10
| years based on what companies decide now. (I feel like
| that's probably how long it'll take for the full impact
| on company culture to play out.)
| jraph wrote:
| I tried office work and enjoyed meeting coworkers. Made some
| friends there. I'm working from home and like it so much
| though. I somehow live my best life alone during the day for
| work and see people several times in the week outside work, but
| I personally think that's a great way to both avoid commute
| time. I live in a city where I have a lot of friends, and it
| was always clear to me that remote work would work for me only
| if I could meet people regularly. I also practice piano, and I
| am in a choir with a hundred people that allows me to
| constantly meet people. I need to see people and would not like
| spending days without seeing anybody.
|
| You can't bet only on work for meeting people. It can work by
| luck, but an ex coworker of mine recently left my ex-company
| and the city, because he was only seeing coworkers and didn't
| manage to meet people in the city, they ended up feeling
| lonely, aka work from the office didn't fix their loneliness.
| It's also a matter of social skills, and joining groups, and
| stuff like this if you don't have an established social group
| yet.
|
| I also think remote work is not for everybody, and preferences
| might evolve during someone's life. I guess there will be
| office-first companies for people who prefer being at the
| office, remote-first companies for us preferring remote work,
| and hybrid ones if they manage to pull if off. That's very hard
| but somehow my current company is very successful in this, but
| you will need to have remote-first habits in such an hybrid
| setting, like using the chat / mail / whatever even between
| people at the office at the same time for many things.
|
| So I have four pieces of advice for you, each one can suffice:
|
| - move to a city where you already have friends - make sure it
| allows you to meet new people too.
|
| - join clubs, do stuff outside work. Work is a mean to have a
| good life, don't spend all of your life at work, that's
| nonsense, unless it's absolutely what you love and you are
| happy, but that's not your case
|
| - join an office-first or hybrid company. You don't need to
| stay at a remote company if you don't like it
|
| - you can still be at a remote company, but go to a coworking
| space. Try it out! I have a coworker who does this. You can
| have a routine, meet the same people everyday and have breaks /
| eat lunch with them, etc exactly like coworkers, just that you
| don't work on the same things. Not the same thing as working at
| the same place with people who you work with but I guess that
| can be enriching / rewarding too in its own way.
|
| Finding a coworking space was my plan B if I figured I didn't
| like working from home in the end. My company would be willing
| to pay for it. Hasn't happened yet but I personally think
| that's a great way to both avoid commute time, see people
| during the day, address the loneliness of remote work, and not
| be limited by the choice of whatever companies are near you.
|
| Good luck, I hope you will find a solution that works out for
| you!
| xylo wrote:
| I have the same feeling of solitary confinement. I now dream of
| working at Costco or Whole Foods to have some social
| interaction.
| [deleted]
| krabizzwainch wrote:
| I am there 100% too. And yet every time I bring it up somewhere
| like reddit I get responses like "just deal with it, I'm not
| coming into the office just because you are lonely." Chances
| are that these are not the people that I would miss in an
| office environment in general. I probably wasn't having fun
| office conversations with them.
|
| I need my habits and routines, and I just don't make myself
| stick to the routines when I stay home. Less of a reason to
| shower at the same time or at all, less of a reason to take
| walking breaks during work hours.
|
| It has come down to me being able to handle a bullshit job when
| I like the people I work with and see them often enough to
| where we are inbetween work friends and real friends. But a
| bullshit job where my coworkers aren't even interesting or nice
| to talk to? I'm just not gonna want to work with them ever
| again.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Blaming the fact that you don't have any friends or romantic
| partners or a "life in this city" on remote working is
| absolutely absurd. Relying on a corporate office to bring you
| those things is most likely going to end in disappointment. Get
| a job that doesn't demand your entire wakeful life on this
| earth and find some hobbies you can share with people where
| you're not constrained by the weirdness of office politics and
| culture.
| abyssin wrote:
| I left the tech sector because of the same issue, although I
| have a family and friends. I'm poorer and my situation is quite
| unstable. But I no longer have to endure this depressing
| loneliness during work hours.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > I tried to join clubs and a maker space, but no time - I was
| working all day.
|
| Benefit of remote work is generally that its flexible and you
| can schedule time in the day to get out and do things than
| otherwise the usual office grind would prevent.
|
| Your employer shouldn't care that you're out at noon but
| working at 7pm instead as long as the work is getting done.
|
| Sounds like you also have boundary issues where you're working
| all the time and killing yourself, quite voluntarily, for your
| job. You should consider just stopping doing that. You probably
| won't fall behind.
|
| If you have remote work and a rigid schedule like you're
| constantly oncall and dying because of the work, then find
| better and more human remote work.
| camgunz wrote:
| I have every sympathy for you--social contact is a basic human
| need. But I see this argument here and there and I feel like I
| have to point out that this is an argument for you to get
| social contact, not to make millions of people commute to/from
| work every day.
|
| Getting on the social on-ramp is hard, especially if you live
| in a culture where overwork is praised and normalized. I had
| that problem too (I moved from the US to the Netherlands and
| this was one of the major reasons why). I super suggest taking
| a step back from work--it's clearly keeping you from doing
| other things that are critical for your mental health--and then
| using that time to invest in other parts of your life.
| monksy wrote:
| I was a remote worker for an earlier part of my 20s as a
| consultant.
|
| What you have to do is you have to be proactive about your
| social activities and find a thing that allows you to do that.
| I ended up starting my own social group off of reddit. That
| helped a lot and taught me a lot about groups.
|
| Couchsurfing was great for the social aspect. Another thing to
| note: Just because you are around coworkers it doesn't mean
| you'll relate to them well. Some have a tendancy to stab you in
| the back.
| djbusby wrote:
| My solution is to go to the pub once or twice (or thrice) a
| week
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have no opinion on whether or not remote is good (I work
| alone, at home, and I'm fine with it, but I also understand the
| draw of office life).
|
| I would strongly suggest volunteer work, as a way to socialize.
| Geeks have _extremely_ valuable skills, and can give a great
| deal, to most volunteer efforts.
|
| In my case, I have been involved in a fellowship, for my entire
| adult life, and it richly satisfies my socialization needs. I
| also do a great deal of tech volunteer work for it.
|
| I wish you luck, but I'm not sure that returning to the office
| would fix things.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| I'm a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the
| vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don't know how to
| manage remote teams, don't want to do real performance
| management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they
| solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my
| cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health
| to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path
| of building and managing a remote team successfully is different
| than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less
| relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active
| in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does
| genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to
| the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance
| based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to
| capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated
| Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env
| are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the
| companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low
| cost areas, you don't need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things.
| There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed
| senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be
| 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or
| negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders
| don't want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have
| a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they
| want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior
| leaders at a company feel this way, that's usually enough to
| "roll back" to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who
| haven't taken on the new management style whole hog don't have
| any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the
| hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and
| learned how to do it right aren't doing RTO BUT remote done right
| definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer
| locally competitive salaries for globally average work.
| sf_manager1 wrote:
| [dead]
| danaris wrote:
| > They have a playbook that worked
|
| The playbook worked _for them_ , but that doesn't mean it
| worked for the people they were managing, or the company they
| worked for.
|
| My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for
| the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the
| employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that
| means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is
| stealing from the company."
|
| It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if
| you weren't at your post, you clearly _weren 't_ working, and
| it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you
| were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like
| robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while
| they are at work.
| fishcrackers wrote:
| sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Yea. It could be! It's my job to work really hard and have a
| huge impact so that option seems like a bad idea. I expect to
| one day be fired or demoted for someone better who can help
| the company grow more than I can.
| 21eleven wrote:
| I worked at an American company (smallish ad tech) that was
| fully remote and the CTO was a citizen of a LATAM country
| while CEO and most engineers (but not all) were USA based.
| Worked great.
| gedy wrote:
| No wait! Um, they need to have these important and
| serendipitous hallway conversations in SF office!
| thisarticle wrote:
| Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they'll get
| outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great
| CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren't
| already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper
| country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing
| with that in the US.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same
| access to capital. There is no country even close to the US
| in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are
| the exception, not the norm.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is
| moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense,
| as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less
| desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in
| poorer countries people have high appetite for
| money/work.
|
| For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but
| now they are launching their own startups as well, some
| quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start
| accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for
| global inequality.
| thisarticle wrote:
| How much capital does someone need if wages are low and
| you're building an auto-scale enabled SaaS business
| without an office?
| lampington wrote:
| Lower taxes? Which countries are you thinking of?
| (Genuinely interested not a rhetorical question; IME many
| poorer countries have higher taxes, in percentage terms.)
| phil21 wrote:
| > Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they'll
| get outsourced.
|
| Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome.
| They just also know that the runway is likely to extend
| beyond their working career because they control most
| business decisions for the foreseeable future.
|
| They still operate on a relationship basis with
| ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix
| performance model for everyone else. Those relationships
| are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the
| industry.
|
| I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into
| companies from low cost regions and they have all been
| utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current
| generation of senior execs.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Why not have the ceo in latam as well? What's the US
| advantage?
| peyton wrote:
| Access to capital.
| hfbff wrote:
| This has been my experience too. The transactional vs familiar
| thing is a tradeoff IMHO and people will have different
| preferences.
|
| Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work.
| My email is in my About if you have the time!
| giantg2 wrote:
| "You can find very committed senior talent in latam for
| 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k,"
|
| You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior
| dev in the Philly region is generous.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business.
|
| It's always disheartening to me though that it's just so easy
| for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift
| sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture
| are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides
| to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from
| issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and
| other things.
|
| Maybe I'm just old, but it feels almost heartless to be
| compared by the numbers that someone should just "hire in Latin
| American because they have less leverage".
|
| Just treat your employees well. No you don't need to hire in
| traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or
| by default, but you don't have to go all the way to latam
| either.
|
| I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and
| ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
| golergka wrote:
| > No you don't need to hire in traditionally geographical
| Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don't
| have to go all the way to latam either.
|
| I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped
| about this advice not to hire them.
| no_wizard wrote:
| It's not that. It's about hiring developers with the same
| divinity and respect across the board.
|
| It's meant as a counter ti the idea of hiring them just
| because they're "cheaper"
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I believe for every person out there like the parent poster
| there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow.
| It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to
| people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also
| incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire
| people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity
| and respect.
| peyton wrote:
| The people who think like that want RTO, which is part of
| what GP is saying. The disposable resource people champion
| remote work.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are "the company
| is the employees, we all work together in office" and
| "the company employs labor to solve our customers
| problems, and the company does this in the most cost
| effective way possible".
| phil21 wrote:
| Yep. This.
|
| I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
|
| Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I
| can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area
| of the world and actually get an employee that sticks
| around for a decade vs. a year?
|
| It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if
| you have the management infrastructure in place.
| bsuvc wrote:
| > when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low
| cost area of the world and actually get an employee that
| sticks around for a decade vs. a year
|
| This is fantasy.
| onethought wrote:
| Having done this for over ten years. It's not. It's
| actually way easier than people think.
| bsuvc wrote:
| Over 20 years of seeing this attempted by large companies
| and I have have never seen it work out well for them.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't some talented developers
| working for cheap, but most of the time you get what you
| pay for.
| phil21 wrote:
| It's not. The fantasy is thinking anyone outside the US
| not taking down $300k/yr is untalented.
|
| It's not interesting to discuss outliers. Millions are
| being made playing this talent/wage arbitrage as we
| speak. The top 1% of engineers is not interesting to
| discuss, and certainly is not representative of the
| average FAANG employee (or salary).
|
| Edit: Direct personal experience during my entire working
| career. Are there bubbles of super-talent completely out
| of my reach for such a pleb? Absolutely. But those folks
| are not interesting to the vast majority of companies
| needing basic but competent IT talent. Many folks here
| seem to be under the impression they are in that pool.
| Time will tell.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Unless you're a front of the field AI researcher or have
| other extremely specific domain knowledge in high demand
| areas then this is reality, get accustomed to it.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| > I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this
| and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
|
| LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them
| "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here
| at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > the vibe I get in my peer group
|
| You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore
| you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an
| existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the
| position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer
| group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage
| remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-
| proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what
| experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert?
| What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that
| you assembled at a discount?
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B
| companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think
| you're seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to
| SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in
| cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe
| the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe
| it's Portugal. Pick your choice, they're all 1/2 cost or less
| of SFBA/NYC, and if you're all remote locale doesn't really
| matter.
| peyton wrote:
| Yep, people are starting to look elsewhere.
| onethought wrote:
| I agree with this. The natural conclusion of "I want to
| work remote" is the equalisation of global wages. This is
| great for developing countries with highly skilled English
| speaking people and terrible for entitled software
| developers earning 2-10x their remote counterparts.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > You can find very committed senior talent in latam for
| 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam
| folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in
| month 12
|
| Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless
| of location.
|
| Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate
| salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a
| complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self
| determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing
| to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of
| money now. But you're going to be building a brittle,
| disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what
| ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
| phil21 wrote:
| > Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth
| regardless of location.
|
| What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who
| have all the options? sure.
|
| 80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates
| already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for
| the same budget.
|
| Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground
| is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the
| cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In
| quantity.
| nprateem wrote:
| Your 'worth' is determined by the market rate. Try moving to
| Pakistan and getting paid $250k without an SV network to fall
| back on.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus
| more negotiating leverage. It doesn't mean they're better at
| the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain
| space dedicated to "how do I retain this employee" and less
| brain space dedicated to "how can I make my customers happy
| and grow my business" which is a losing trade. The winning
| play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales,
| and if the people you hire don't work out then fire them
| quickly because you're paying top if market and there is a
| lot of talent liquidity in that band. It's the Netflix model,
| but global. Not really a new playbook.
| lampington wrote:
| "Fire them quickly" isn't always easy in some
| jurisdictions, though, at least without some _very_ careful
| planning -- and sometimes not even then.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Are you saying that there is no quality talent outside of the
| US then, since US salaries are not a thing outside of the US?
|
| To give you an idea, Google Warsaw pays just a touch above
| 100k to local senior engineers.
| joxel wrote:
| You're c-suite material all right. A natural hate for someone
| asking for more compensation. Hope your startup fails.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| It's a combination of the following: 1. Hr and management
| Karen's/Joe's looking for control 2. People who hate their
| families and want a socially acceptable way to get away from
| them. 3. Corner office types who spent their careers trying to
| get one just to have COVID and cloud services make them realize
| it was all a mirage anyway.
|
| At least this is what I've seen. I don't have a problem with
| hybrid schedules but the last in office place I went to did a
| Monday, Wednesday, Thursday hybrid week. FFS, it was awful. Id
| have all of this go juice for Monday, lose it for work from home
| Tuesday and be miserable for Wednesday and Thursday. Just do
| Monday through Wednesday in office or Tuesday through Thursday.
| Just keep all the in office days together.
| Kharvok wrote:
| Some of my teams were fully remote about eight weeks in 2020,
| while others have been remote the entire time. I don't believe in
| full RTO, just hybrid.
|
| 1. The last few years have demonstrated that projects with teams
| that are primarily remote require a higher degree of project
| overhead staffing. I think this is most evident with very small
| teams. For example, it's fairly easy for a small internal tool
| team to coordinate their work without a project manager, design,
| or business analyst if they are in close phyiscal proximity. The
| struggle is when you distance that team from larger
| products/project. Even in the minimal case creating visibility
| for that small team into larger workstreams requires overhead
| itself. With the macro environment and with leaders being forced
| to tighten the belt, this is less and less possible. All
| communication has to be structured fully remotely. That structure
| requires management.
|
| 2. I've found about 20% of people have the ability to maintain a
| professional work environment at home. I'm constantly seeing in
| meetings where highly compensated employees are providing
| childcare during working hours. I'm all for flexibility, but it
| becomes a distraction.
|
| 3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop skills
| from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees in
| software engineering roles that started in a fully remote
| environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then
| came to work in a hybrid setting.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated
| employees are providing childcare during working hours
|
| Do you really think it's good, and that people should be
| separated from their children for 8-10 hours (or more if
| commuting) each day? I don't.
|
| Also, since you don't want your employees to get distracted by
| childcare, does your office offer daycare for their children?
|
| Edit: And yes, they daycare question is also met with awkward
| silence from the management on each all-hands I've heard it
| asked before.
| chrismatheson wrote:
| Not that I'm particularly defending RTO. But specifically on
| the daycare thing. No. They offer you a large salary and let
| you choose and organise what works for you. Not deciding for
| you and staffing some daycare as an afterthought on the 3rd
| floor or whatever :)
|
| IMHO most "perks" are just someone else spending your money
| for you.
| deely3 wrote:
| 1. > All communication has to be structured fully remotely.
| That structure requires management.
|
| As opposed to work from office where management does not
| required because... Managers already present in the office?
|
| 2. Erm. From my exp 20% of people have to learn to how to
| maintain a professional work environment at home. Thats just a
| skill, nothing more.
|
| 3. Agree.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > 3.Junior employees have little to no ability to develop
| skills from seniors. I have hired entire classes of employees
| in software engineering roles that started in a fully remote
| environment, realized they weren't learning anything, and then
| came to work in a hybrid setting.
|
| How often were they mentored by senior engineers? Daily
| meetings? Weekly? Who developed the training program? Who wrote
| the documentation?
| trynewideas wrote:
| > I'm constantly seeing in meetings where highly compensated
| employees are providing childcare during working hours.
|
| If you think _that 's_ bad, you should've seen what they did at
| the office during work hours for their kids when they were
| required to leave the house.
| dsugarman wrote:
| Far too many of these posts since the pandemic, it's OK if you
| personally feel more productive at home but if you seriously
| can't understand the benefits of working together physically then
| you have a serious mental block. There's some emotional reason
| why you don't want to hear why people find office work
| productive. You should at least be able to recite an opposing
| argument if not empathize with it (let alone agree with it). If
| you can't do that then you can't make a logical decision and
| instead you're making a faith based decision. A plug I make to
| everyone and I'm surprised more engineers don't engage in it;
| therapy is usually helpful in debugging what's going on in our
| brains and how our emotions are affecting our ability to navigate
| with logic.
| deely3 wrote:
| > you seriously can't understand the benefits of working
| together physically then you have a serious mental block.
|
| But we working together, just remotely. Could you explain
| please, for us with "serious mental block" why do you feel that
| you need to be near me physically to do any work?
| treis wrote:
| I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it obvious
| like doing meal prep during refinement but others are just kind
| of ghosts during the day. Even as a fellow team member reviewing
| code it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working. Assume
| my EM has less of an idea than I do and anyone above them is
| totally in the dark.
| rumdonut wrote:
| They are. My former employer briefly had WFH due to COVID. It
| ended with a small number of people getting fired and the rest
| coming back 5 days a week. People just weren't working, and
| they had some astonishing IT stats that hinted at how bad it
| was.
|
| Over at Google, there's an internal study that shows raw code
| checkins have dropped dramatically since WFH. I'm pretty sure
| Sundar's 20% more productivity comment came directly from the
| numbers in those slides.
|
| It does not surprise me that Zuckerberg and Benioff have gone
| the length of calling out their employees' productivity
| directly. I'm really surprised this comment is this far down,
| when it's been painfully obvious at the couple companies I've
| worked at through the pandemic that productivity is the
| elephant in the room. Some CEOs dress it in corpspeak about
| collaboration, but if Google, Meta, and Salesforce are all
| complaining of worker productivity, I think that's the true
| reason. I think we're too afraid to take an honest look at how
| productive we are, which will ultimately be the demise of WFH
| we want to defend so badly.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > it's hard to tell how much my coworkers are working
|
| In a rare occasion I get a desk anywhere near a coworker when
| we are in the office, I also find it hard to know how much they
| are working.
|
| The physical presence in the same city, building, or even sat
| right next to each other, goes not give me any information.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm working within minutes of waking up, and shower during my
| lunch break -- taking about 20 minutes total, instead of the
| hour spent on an office lunch. I take a minute or ten to do
| chores like laundry, meal prep or dishes, usually no more than
| twice a day -- in the office, I take similar length breaks and
| often end up socializing with others. I often find overlooked
| solutions during my breaks, which are spaced out to prevent
| eye, neck and wrist strain, or to blow off frustration with a
| difficult issue. That isn't abusing WFH, it's using time
| wisely. I can't speak for the people ghosting, but doing chores
| is _not_ abusing WFH.
| treis wrote:
| >That isn't abusing WFH
|
| Did anyone say it was?
| klyrs wrote:
| Your words.
|
| > I think a lot of people are abusing WFH. Some make it
| obvious like doing meal prep during refinement...
|
| What does "it" refer to in that sentence, if not the
| immediately preceding "abusing WFH?"
| treis wrote:
| Which of the things you mentioned are equivalent to doing
| a distracting task during a meeting you're supposed to be
| paying attention to?
| cweagans wrote:
| You may be surprised to know that one can do meal prep
| _and_ pay attention to sprint refinement at the same
| time. For me, having something to do with my hands while
| talking helps to keep me focused.
| treis wrote:
| You're supposed to be actively participating in
| refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking
| up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and
| other things of that nature. You can't do that with raw
| chicken on your hands or while walking to the fridge to
| get veggies.
|
| The fact that this has to be explained to people is why
| there's a push to return to the office.
| thinking4real wrote:
| "The fact that this has to be explained to people is why
| there's a push to return to the office."
|
| Here we have _your_ reason for wanting people in the
| office - you're an irrational micromanaging bully who's
| inflated ego make you think you're somehow above
| strangers and are entitled to lecture them about how they
| are supposed to work
|
| You make evaluations of people without knowing their
| story. You make assumptions and feel valid in rushing
| into those assumptions to put someone beneath you
|
| I'm glad people like you are being phased out of many
| industries now that WFH is here to stay
| treis wrote:
| > irrational micromanaging bully
|
| The fact that having a standard of "pay attention in
| meetings & don't be a ghost" gets you labelled an
| "irrational micromanaging bully" is exactly why
| management pushes for a return to office. It's just way
| less of a hassle for them than having these sorts of
| battles.
|
| > evaluations of people without knowing their story.
|
| Pot meet kettle
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Is that... something that ever happens in a meeting in
| person?
| cweagans wrote:
| Maybe put your condescension away for a second and try to
| understand a different perspective.
|
| Your refinements work a little different than mine. In
| mine, the SME or the person who opened the issue (often
| the same person) reads the story, gives any extra
| context, answers questions, etc., we assign a point
| value, and move on. Refinement can be a discussion -- it
| doesn't always have to be a research session.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| > You're supposed to be actively participating in
| refinement. Reading the story being talked about, looking
| up documentation, checking on potential solutions, and
| other things of that nature.
|
| That's a load of context that wasn't clear from your
| original comment. The jargon "refinement" is not used
| where I work.
|
| > The fact that this has to be explained to people is why
| there's a push to return to the office.
|
| That you then need to backfill assumed context is not
| going to be solved by returning to office. That it's now
| been clarified in text, in a work situation, could be
| turned into a resource to be referenced in a future
| conversation. In the office, the explanation would be
| ephemeral, and may need frequent repetition until
| somebody overcomes the hurdle of committing it to text.
| treis wrote:
| I'm not sure how this context is relevant. The point is
| that you're supposed to be paying attention and I've not
| yet met a human that can pay attention to two things at
| once as well as they can to one. I've met a lot that
| think they can but not any that actually could.
|
| This is why return to office is an attractive option.
| People are definitely not bringing veggies to chop or
| laundry to fold to a conference room. And most of them
| are going to pay attention to a person in their presence
| talking to them because of basic social niceties. It
| solves the problem with much less hassle than actually
| having to identify and cull people who can't handle WFH.
| klyrs wrote:
| I can talk and listen while chopping veg, but okay
| Ensorceled wrote:
| "A lot of people are abusing WFH" doesn't mean "all" so ask
| yourself why you are assuming this internet stranger has
| unfairly lumped you, personally and specifically, into the
| "abusing" group and taking offense?
| throw248989 wrote:
| I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a
| day. The rest of the time they do other personal things but are
| still available online. They get told they're doing a great job
| and hit all the important targets.
|
| This person also routinely ignores/mutes as many meetings as
| possible and frequently multi-tasks in the gym, house chores,
| etc. Had that person been in the office they'd have had their
| time wasted on useless all-hands meetings, etc., so now
| everybody's happy (because that person hasn't had to quit,
| because life's too short).
|
| Working based on hours doesn't work remote. It should be based
| on deliverables.
| treis wrote:
| >I know someone who basically only actually works 3-4 hours a
| day.
|
| I'm not sure if people are even doing that. And really if you
| tack on a couple hours of pointless meetings we're pretty
| close to 40 hours a week. They're within spitting distance of
| an expected work week and if they're responsive and hitting
| targets then who cares. I'm talking about people I think work
| more like 3-4 hours a week.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| Caring about the raw amount of time people put into their jobs
| sounds like a middle management thing to do -- rewarding
| showing up and putting in hours like it was PR.
|
| If the results are there, and in accordance with the employment
| contract, time shouldn't matter.
| treis wrote:
| Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of
| agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's
| better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not
| producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they
| let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But,
| again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they
| worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately
| just took longer than expected.
|
| And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem.
| Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of
| systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means
| share with the world.
|
| Time does matter because the agreement between companies and
| workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary
| if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more
| money if it makes the company millions.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yeah I really doubt many people here would be happy about
| being grilled constantly about their output. I'd rather
| work in a high trust environment, but this requires
| actually having trust which is pretty hard remote.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| To me this reads as wanting to crunch developers out of
| more value than one is paying them.
| treis wrote:
| Expecting people to pay attention during meetings and not
| be a ghost during a day is crunching developers? Give me
| a break. We're all highly paid professionals. It's not
| unreasonable to be expected to act like it.
| bilvar wrote:
| I swear the entitlement in this industry is off charts.
| bawolff wrote:
| When people were in the office, were you able to tell the
| difference between someone staring blankly at a screen vs
| actually doing work for six hours?
| treis wrote:
| I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen
| for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A
| much smaller temptation than all the entertainment
| options in your house and abound.
| wankle wrote:
| Contractors get to set their hours. Employees are expected to
| be performing services for their employers for a minimum of
| 30 hours per week: https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-
| act/employers/identifyin....
|
| If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a
| movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether
| you're performing a service for your employer.
| throw248989 wrote:
| Ever read "Thinking fast and slow"? You can more
| effectively problem-solve when not actively trying to solve
| them, so it seems completely reasonable to me to distract
| your conscious mind while pondering a problem.
| doggerland wrote:
| I'm an academic in the humanities, and we've had working from
| home (except for teaching) for decades. You have a range of
| people from those who just come in to teach during term time and
| otherwise work from home 2.5 hours away by train, to those who
| are in the office all day every day. We also have big get-
| togethers in the form of conferences.
|
| My experience since 2020 has pushed me against working from home,
| in particular research seminars are far worse online. The quality
| of questions is much worse, and engagement is visibly worse than
| when we have them in person.
|
| As for research... a lot of research ideas come from corridor
| chat. If you have an idea for a paper and Dave down the corridor
| is an expert in the area, it's much easier to test the idea out
| on him as you walk back together from a seminar than to email
| him. Maybe it _shouldn 't_ make a difference, but it does.
| kbrackson wrote:
| Because there are people
| anonu wrote:
| I'm a wfh proponent. However, could the mission to the moon have
| been done from home, today? In the timeframe that it was
| completed? I'm sure there's good arguments on either side. But
| there's something special about the face to face connection that
| you can't replace with emails and video conference. I believe
| humans are more effective at getting things done, in person.
|
| Another fact is that today's managers are all from a time before
| cellphones existed... For the most part. If you're 30 something
| years old, you remember when you still picked up a book or hung
| out with your friends at the mall. Which makes me believe that it
| will take a generational shift for us to truly abandon the
| office... Whether that's a good thing or bad.
| koala_man wrote:
| I heard from one large tech company that was pressured by the
| city to bring people back in order to prop up the city's downtown
| service sector.
|
| The company caved because they depended on city approval for some
| licenses.
|
| The person who told me this was an analyst tasked with cherry
| picking data to justify the decision that had already been made
| on political grounds.
|
| (This was after a few drinks and has not been independently
| verified)
| factsarelolz wrote:
| [dead]
| namaria wrote:
| The desire to not be involved in professional cherry picking
| was a big factor in my decision to steer clear of data
| engineering / data science jobs early on.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Am employer, but only after covid- during covid i wanted to get
| back to the office as soon as i was vaccinated. The reason for
| that is that i missed my coworkers. I missed the spontaneous
| connections, the conversations, the hang outs. People are social
| beings, and being fully remote means a lesser emotional
| connection. I don't like that.
| bri3d wrote:
| For those who are replying with "all my projects were remote
| before anyway" or "I was on video conference before fully remote
| work too!" - how many of these co-workers on video were at
| another office site, or had worked at an office site before
| "going remote?"
|
| Before 2020, I also had video attendees in almost every meeting,
| but they were either at another office site where they still had
| a peer group and some co-located team members, or had a long
| tenure at the company and had been "allowed" to work remotely.
|
| In my opinion these previous remote-attendee situations are
| totally different dynamics from running a fully remote team.
| There is a special, major challenge in managing a team where many
| team members have never met one another, a coworker of any kind,
| or their management in person. It's a surmountable challenge and
| I think some of this can be explained by the cynical "employers
| would rather let remote employees go than learn something new"
| take, but working in and managing a remote team is still a unique
| experience IMO.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| Fully remote teams didn't come out of Zeus head fully formed in
| March, 2020. There was less of them, but they existed.
|
| I consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in
| separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a
| major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well
| between locations as it does inside each location. It's much
| better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.
| wankle wrote:
| I've worked on fully remote teams since the mid-2000's.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| it's funny that some assume that before 2019 remote work didn't
| exist and everything was done in-office... :-)
| bri3d wrote:
| Of course remote work existed before 2019, but there are also
| an enormous wealth of statistics indicating that it was not
| very common. On the flip side, some Hacker News users assume
| that because they had an extremely rare remote job before
| 2019, it's the "normal state" of the world.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> what are your primary motivations dragging us back into the
| office?_
|
| The truth is, for a great many jobs it's impossible to measure
| work well enough to tell if you worked 1 day or 5 last week.
|
| You're debugging a memory leak? Well, maybe it was very difficult
| to find. You're reviewing grant proposals? Who's to say how
| carefully you read them? You say it was very difficult to make
| this page work on chrome, firefox _and_ safari? Well, if you say
| so.
|
| Meanwhile, employers have read articles about "quiet quitting".
|
| I suspect employers fear we're on the golf course, working a
| second full-time job, or reading HN. Sending people back to the
| office assures them that's not the case.
| braingenious wrote:
| It is much easier to perform the display of "valuable manager"
| when you can hover over people.
|
| Employees that perform just fine without being micromanaged are a
| threat to the livelihoods of people whose entire jobs are
| scheduling meetings and arranging office pizza parties.
| avsteele wrote:
| I'm an employer, but my opinion would be the same regardless.
|
| The script is something like this:
|
| Person1: Arg! This thing!
|
| Person2: What ya working on?
|
| Person1: <...> is giving me trouble.
|
| Person1 then figures it out while trying to explain it, or
| Person2 has a helpful idea. Happens multiple times a week. If you
| were working at home you wouldn't even know you were missing out
| on this interaction.
|
| Also, WFH is also just too distracting if you have a
| family/roommates etc...
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of jobs where regular, informal face to
| fact interaction didn't help me solve problems faster, but not in
| my line of work.
|
| I have some interaction with Federal employees too. They have
| been out of the office for a long time. You now have more a
| problem getting a hold of someone who is nominally 'at their
| desk'. I don't know why this is, but its a fact.
| detaro wrote:
| Yes, such conversations happen all the time at work. Online, in
| chat.
| ilyt wrote:
| We bitch like that on corporate chat, works the same
| pythonbase wrote:
| Short answer: Control.
|
| Traditional employers want their employees back in the office
| since they are unable to control them otherwise. Employers and
| managers who have failed to grasp the concepts of remote working,
| lack in async communication, and have trust issues with their
| staff, want to keep a physical headcount of the sheep
| thisarticle wrote:
| All of those sound like problems the employer has, not anything
| the employee is doing wrong.
| rihegher wrote:
| I have been working remotely almost exclusively for the last 13
| years. One thing I've realized (and experimented) is that it is
| super easy to make a team of full remote developers to jump
| ship together since they don't have to move to a new place if
| they stay in remote positions. In addition they can continue
| working within the same team if all the team agree to change
| company together. And I think this can be quite scary from an
| employer point of view.
| thunky wrote:
| 78 comments as of now and I can't find one from an actual
| employer, only people speaking for employers.
| bartchamdo wrote:
| Sadly, the biggest employer motivation is some have very long
| leases and don't want to look stupid to the board for having
| signed up for useless office space with a decade still on their
| lease. Others are motivated by ego, being able to walk down isles
| watching their minions tools away. However, never meeting people
| IRL definitely reduces collaboration and performance on highly
| iterative and collaborative projects compared to everyone going
| and meeting IRL. Meeting at least quarterly for 3-4 days can make
| things work, but time in an office is better. Again, if you work
| on a team. If you are and IC, quarterly if probably fine or
| entirely remote might be fine too.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Perhaps those of us that would enjoy some in person socialization
| should meet up in person? If you're in the Bay Area I'd be happy
| to get coffee as a group, maybe even make it a thing where it's
| available frequently.
| calsy wrote:
| Dragging us back.. says it all really. The majority of companies
| weren't supporting remote work as a new flexible way for their
| employees to work. They were supporting remote work because it
| was the only way to get ANY work done at all during the pandemic.
| There is always value in face to face interaction and
| compartmentalising work from our personal lives.
| peschu wrote:
| Additionally to all the comments, I think it is a challenge for
| most middle managers and up. Because it becomes obvious who can
| manage people and who can not. Who is capable of planning tasks
| and who is not. They have less personal/social leverage => they
| need to be professionals... and 50% are not ...
|
| In the office there is always an illusion of control and it's
| easier to come up with ad-hoc tasks.
|
| But in my opinion, managers who don't know what their employees
| do via remote. They know even less what happens in the office.
| But sure every one looks busy when the boss is walking the
| floor... :D maybe that gives them a good feeling.
|
| I personally prefer a mixed week, like 2 days in the office and 3
| days remote. But I would say the remote days are more productive
| in a sense of getting stuff done.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| Managers don't have much idea what employees are doing, them
| being on site gives them a feeling of things being in control.
| It is not that surprising, if you think about it business on
| all level is just a guessing game, and people try to take the
| reduce their uncertaincies.
| kbrackson wrote:
| Because there are people who can self-drive and get themselves to
| work and become productive without having to be reminded/ridden.
|
| Then there are people who need someone over them (and that's ok).
|
| Most people think they are the self starting type. Most people
| are LYING or WRONG about their ability to self start & self
| manage. Most people simply are NOT more productive but think they
| are. The numbers state otherwise. I'm all for remote work for
| high performers and self starters but everyone places themselves
| in that category and it's only true for a small percentage.
| maartn wrote:
| Microsoft did a very interesting research about this amongst 60k+
| employees. Read it to find out why serendipity is a good thing
| and hardening already existing relationships is not good for the
| whole:
|
| "Furthermore, the shift to firm-wide remote work caused employees
| to spend a greater share of their collaboration time with their
| stronger ties, which are better suited to information transfer,
| and a smaller share of their time with weak ties, which are more
| likely to provide access to new information."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4
| klooney wrote:
| That resonates with my experience.
| scandox wrote:
| I'm not currently an employer.
|
| I think over time remote is going to lose. Once the revolution is
| over and things mature remote working will become far more
| invasive and controlling than it is now. Then on-site companies
| will start out-performing remote, especially very large
| companies.
|
| I reckon many employers make the same calculation and want to
| head it off.
| burna_aws_acct wrote:
| [dead]
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Serendipity.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Because they have assets sitting there empty and accountants are
| like wtf you gotta make use of this were stuck in the contract
| for x years. There ya have it. Simplified but mostly the cause,
| if ya company rents space to operate and tells you reasons other
| than above they are probably lying through their teeth at ya.
| It's got zero to do with what they think is good for you the
| worker or some water cooler innovation bs and everything to do
| with profit,loss and expenditure.
| solatic wrote:
| Remote work requires a certain culture and skillset. You must be
| a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive online even when
| not prompted by management. You must self-document and self-
| promote.
|
| Believe it or not, many, many people are not good at that or
| don't fit that mold. Yet they can still be productive. They just
| require more supervision and the ability to express themselves in
| a manner that suits them.
|
| If remote work suits you, and doesn't suit your management or
| your management's culture, don't try to change your whole
| company. It won't work. Instead, search for a company that is a
| better fit for you.
| rewgs wrote:
| > You must be a good writer, type quickly, be self-expressive
| online even when not prompted by management. You must self-
| document and self-promote.
|
| This right here. One of the failings of remote work being
| talked about in the comments here is, IMO, easily attributable
| to the company's focus on spoken (whether in-person or via
| Zoom) communication rather than written.
|
| I have a _strong_ preference for written communication with
| regards to work, whereas most of the companies I 've worked for
| have preferred spoken. My preference isn't superficial, it's
| based on what appear to be obvious advantages -- past
| communication can be referred to again later, planning and
| documentation kind of organically occur via written
| communication, complex ideas can be given more time to be
| developed in an email vs off the cuff/probably worse
| explanations when spoken. The few times I can get people to
| _actually_ just read the long email I just wrote, outlining a
| whole plan and my justifications for certain decisions,
| everything is super smooth.
|
| But most of the time, peoples' eyes glaze over and they go "wow
| this seems like a lot, let's plan a Zoom meeting to discuss."
| The meeting happens somewhere within 1 - 10 days, usually being
| pushed at least once, I explain everything I wrote (often times
| just reading straight from the email), but then at a certain
| point peoples' eyes glaze over once again and they say "sounds
| like we're really getting into the weeds here, do you mind
| typing this up into an email that I can read later?" I then
| proceed to scream into the void.
|
| Rinse and repeat, and after literal weeks, finally the contents
| of a perfectly cogent email that could have been read and
| understood in ~10 - 15 minutes have finally sunk in. It is
| absolutely maddening.
|
| A strong culture of written communication is now one of the
| single most important things I look for in a company. I'm not
| against spoken communication, far from it -- having actual in-
| person or at least Zoom time is nice, and for brainstorming or
| discussing a plan, written communication isn't as good (though
| I've had quite a few great Slack brainstorming sessions). I'm
| not a shut-in, very sociable, and I enjoy a nice balance of
| remote and in-person work. But for _work,_ which is by
| definition something for which I strive to minimize time spent
| /sanity lost and maximize income received, written
| communication is far and away my preferred method.
| kunthar wrote:
| Of course to control better and coordinate effort for the
| _profit_ better! There is no _but_ in the most of coding
| business. We all know we have access to the information needed on
| the internet. This is something aimed for PROFIT. Not for your
| lives to make better!
| xiaodai wrote:
| People slack off when they r at home
| k__ wrote:
| Shitty management/lack of processes.
|
| That's it.
|
| And I think it's understandable. Management is hard.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Not an employer but the answer is obvious: control.
|
| It is true you can get some organic team-building and spontaneous
| collaboration but the cost of that is so high, it's no
| justification. Not having to commute, being able to live in a
| lower cost area, having flexibility to run errands, etc are of
| such monumental value to people.
|
| But the real lesson here I think a lot of people are learning to
| their surprise is that tech companies are really no different to
| any other companies.. Moves like forcing you into the office and
| all the entails (commuting, face time, regular hours, no real
| breaks, unpaid overtime) has the same motivation as layoffs for
| the "recession": to suppress labor costs.
|
| 15 years ago we had collusion by Apple, Google and otehrs to
| suppress wages through collusion not to "poach". Now? Other
| companies laying off 5-10% of staff gives every other company the
| freedom to do the same. It's all the same: to suppress labor.
|
| So forcing you into the office is both about control and
| increasing organic attrition. Some people have made new lives in
| the last 2 years and can't just come back to the office. A
| certain paercentage of those will quit. Great. No severance.
|
| Many tech workers with so many good years and high-demand for our
| services have fallen into the trap of thinking they're somehow
| above the adversarial (exploitative) pressures other people are
| subject to. Fancy offices, Herman Miller chairs and "free" food
| play into this delusion.
| paulgb wrote:
| I suspect HN skews senior/established in our careers, but it's
| interesting comparing the sentiment of people on here (almost
| universally pro-remote) with candidates I've talked to when we've
| listed roles. A lot of candidates, especially more junior ones,
| explicitly want an in-person office culture.
| polio wrote:
| It's very easy to forget about people who are remote.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Is it an in-person job? Then no one who wants that job would be
| stupid enough to say otherwise.
| paulgb wrote:
| We're a small team (3) who works in-person by coincidence of
| being local, but we are explicitly open to remote within
| overlapping time zones.
| sunsunsunsun wrote:
| Seriously, if you're junior then you're more desperate and
| you're going to straight face lie about your opinions to make
| yourself more hireable.
| paulgb wrote:
| I'm sure there's some of that, but is it really that hard
| to imagine that someone at the beginning of their career
| would get more out of being in-person? I certainly
| benefitted from that at the beginning of my career.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Here at ardour.org "head office" (my home in a small village in
| new mexico), we just had a 5-6 day hangout of myself and the
| other main developer. We have spent years collaborating online on
| this large project, but in those few days we were able to resolve
| some high level design issues (well, we _hope_ we resolved them)
| that have proved resistant to online discussion.
|
| This experience isn't enough to justify the idea that we (or
| anyone else) should work in close physical proximity all the
| time. But it does point to one of the plusses of doing this at
| least occasionally.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm an employee and I've been working remotely since long before
| the pandemic. But occasionally I'll roll into the office when
| they have free lunch, because I know a bunch of people will be
| there. And when I do that, I always get a chance to meet up with
| some coworkers and end up getting a lot done.
|
| And sometimes we have a leadership meeting where I fly into the
| corporate HQ, as do my coworkers, and we have an all day in-
| person meeting with no one remote. And it's amazing how much we
| can get done in a day.
|
| Sometimes it's just a lot easier to discuss a contentious subject
| where we don't all agree in person, and see body language, and
| not have to deal with the weird gaps that happen with online
| meetings.
|
| That being said, I won't ever return to the office full time. The
| boosts in productivity only happen because it's not a regular
| occurrence, and it's a huge hassle to get there and back.
|
| But I do see the upside to occasional work in the office.
|
| Also, I used to work at a company that had no remote employees,
| so we were all in the office every day. _That_ was nice, because
| if you needed to talk to someone you could just wander over and
| hash out an issue right then and there, and you could have
| meaningful hallway conversations, and we were just generally
| closer as humans. But that only works if you have no remote
| employees, and I 'm not sure that's feasible anymore, at least in
| software. People got too used to remote work. But if I ever found
| a company like that where everyone came in every day, and it was
| close to my home, I'd be willing to do it.
| closeparen wrote:
| >Nearly every meeting I've had in an office since 2014 has been a
| video conference with remote people.
|
| C-level leaders at my company set a mandate for our "distributed
| sites" to be relatively autonomous with their own missions and
| roadmaps. But middle and line-level managers keep making
| exceptions, finding it expedient to use India and LatAm teams as
| extra hands for projects run out of the US, for example. So as an
| employee you experience most of your collaboration being remote.
| Your EM and your skip get it. But HR and the CEO don't.
|
| We're in a situation now where almost nobody _knows_ anyone in
| their management chain who cares about their attendance, but the
| CEO and HR have made clear that they will be firing people who
| aren 't badging in.
| Bootvis wrote:
| I'm not in the position to set policy but if I had to give a
| reason: mentoring of juniors. This could be done over chat and
| webcam but it appears to me this is not a great fit for
| everybody.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Junior and some mid employees seem to do worse - at least in the
| small amount of data I've seen since the pandemic. This is likely
| part culture, which emphasizes individual performance rather than
| team performance. If you're a netflix-style organization that
| only hires seniors then this is less important.
|
| I think hybrid, with ~2 days a week - one dedicated to any team
| meetings and the other pure work is a good compromise plus
| regular in-person summits if you have a geographically
| distributed team. Don't just get in-person to meet, working
| together allows you to learn the the many subtle things about
| people's workflows that may be good or bad.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Well, the recent graduates will be fine because they've spent
| the last couple years learning remotely and getting work done.
| You have to develop that skill.
| trfflhntr wrote:
| The company I'm with since 2015, was founded in 1989 and has been
| fully remote since that time. As a remote working for 8+ years, I
| found the initial transition difficult (came from brick and
| mortar) but now I cannot imagine going back to that. The
| collaboration and spontaneous connections work just fine remote,
| at least they have in my experiences.
| conductr wrote:
| It's usually the executive class of employees making these
| decisions, and they want to convey business as usual to the board
| and others that they report to. They also work differently than
| almost everyone else. They usually have meeting all day and the
| topics and decisions being made benefit greatly from the in
| person dynamics. They also get a lot done by just dropping by
| other peoples desks and quickly having an impromptu conversation.
|
| They're pretty removed from the way you work as a non-executive
| and don't really care that you can accomplish your job just as
| easily remotely. In their mind, it's not best for the company.
|
| They've also lived the mandatory WFH days and the whole decision
| making processes slowed down or they just put a lot of things on
| hold because it couldn't fully or appropriately be decided
| without difficult meeting logistics. These are things you're
| unlikely to be aware of as a non-executive.
| dalyons wrote:
| I think it's mostly this! And it's not necessarily malicious -
| the exec folk have lost sight of the way most people work. To
| them it's "obvious" that the office is better, because it IS
| better for their type of work.
|
| Managers schedule VS makers schedule.
|
| Add to that exec level are usually already rich enough that
| they don't have commute or schooling problems to deal with. So
| they just can't understand why RTO isn't popular!
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