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I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being officially encouraged by corporate policy). The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". My response to that is "What about the other 99.9% of my work time, when I don't need to interact with anyone?" Sigh. Since I had left the office, they had redone everything to be open plan, low walls, brighter lights, white noise over the speakers, etc. Contractors are packed like sardines, the noise is insane. We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. I'm not very happy anymore.

mpweiher 7y ago
> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. One of the crazier things that has happened. When the XP folk said "we do a standup", the idea was that meetings are useless and awful, you shouldn't have them, but if you're going to have them, then let's "encourage" brevity by having everyone stand. Add a few decades of agile certified consultants, sc(r)umification and now "agile" means "lots of meetings". Sigh.
- jbarberu 7y ago
  I'm so glad my team is distributed across different offices and we do our stand-ups at our desks. Having hypermobility in my knees, and most other joints, I get tired from standing still more than 2-3 minutes...
  - mpweiher 7y ago
    ...and only have those stand for whom it's not a burden. It seems nowadays the "standing" up has become some weird ritual that one must undergo, without questioning, as a sacrifice to the gods of "Agile". Bizarre. All the practices have a purpose. If they don't fit, don't do them. Figure out what works for you. Adjust, adapt. Think! No, the planes of productivity will not come to your fauxgile wooden landing strip.
    - jbarberu 7y ago
      Next time someone insists on standing, I'll counter with do pushups while you're talking instead. Should shut most people up fast enough.
- g051051 7y ago
  We recently spent weeks doing a backlog grooming meeting every day to get work lined up, only to have our priorities completely changed and all of the work discarded.
  - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
    Why would you spend weeks doing backlog grooming meetings every day? We do a single one-hour backlog grooming meeting before each sprint, to plan the work for that sprint. If you're planning out much further than that, that's not agile.
    - dustinmoris 7y ago
      True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request. Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.
      - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
        > Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile. I don't disagree with this. However, >True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request. This is like saying the first test should always fail because the tested code doesn't exist. While that's a good start, it usually takes a few sprints to release anything useful; especially if you have any hardware involved. Therefore, having a number of stories in a backlog really helps, especially if you do have to re-prioritize because hardware is delayed, etc.
      - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
        The backlog is not large and we don't use this meeting for prioritization. Our team uses backlog grooming to point tasks and assign them "definitions of done". This is done to solve two problems: getting everyone on the same page as far as how the task will be done, which also speeds up diff reviews, and to determine if the task should be split up into smaller tasks. When would you perform these tasks? > Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile. This is not at all what we do with this meeting.
- peteey 7y ago
  Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices. There's no such thing as having just half of your house on fire. If a fundamental business element like customers or leadership is missing, everything else will be bad. Waterfall and agile methods are equally damned when the something else is causing a company to under perform.
  - matwood 7y ago
    > Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices. I was talking to the CTO of a large non-tech company and he was so excited how the whole development organization had adopted agile. Later he told me that after the conference he had to fly to a huge meeting where they plan and schedule out the next 6 months to a year of development work.
    - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
      Are you sure he wasn't referring to roadmapping? You can plan what projects to take on in the next quarter or two with a product team while the engineering team remains agile in their operations.
      - matwood 7y ago
        Nope. It was a multi-day meeting where the entire development organization waterfall planned the next 6-12 months of work. This included due dates and all. For their org size, maybe that's how they have to do development, but it was nothing like any agile I've ever done.
coolvision 7y ago
>white noise over the speakers I'm fine with open spaces, but this would be the final straw for me
- jcims 7y ago
  Especially when they turn it on and off randomly. So weird...
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  Yeah, that sounds like actual torture.
- muro 7y ago
  I like the white (or pink?) noise. I expected to hate it and found the idea ridiculous, but it helped focus in an open space office.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Heh, painfully pinching your skin also helps at the dentist.
    - randcraw 7y ago
      I prefer smacking myself in the head with a hammer. In an open office, that is. The dentist is less painful.
- jofer 7y ago
  I know it seems crazy, but I've been in several offices that had this. It most cases it worked well and I never noticed it until it would occasionally quit working. The offices where it's worked best were not open, though. They had thin doors/walls and a small speaker (also doubled for the fire alarm/etc) in the ceiling of each office. The white noise was unnoticeable until it was off or you really looked for it. The main advantage was that you no longer heard every conversation on the floor. You'd still overhear bits of things in the adjacent rooms, but that's hard to avoid. When the white noise stopped working (happened every few months), you could hear every voice on the floor and every phone call... All in all, it sounds like torture, but done well, it's actually a really nice way of damping distracting ambient conversations/etc.
cheez 7y ago
> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. So true.
codingdave 7y ago
> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better... Good thing we have better tools for videoconferencing than ever. I can have a 15 minute face-to-face with anyone in my company, no matter where in the world they are.
- spurdoman77 7y ago
  Videoconferencing is OK, but it is still common to have issues with it. Bad image quality, setup by lowest common denominator etc. Often you use that 15 minutes just by trying to make it work properly.
  - g051051 7y ago
    At least in our company, it works pretty much flawlessly. We rarely have technical issues, and if we do it's a wider outage from our conferencing provider.
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    Yeah, agreed. Even places I've worked with wonderful internal IT still have problem users who can't figure videoconferencing, or have damaged/misconfigured their device in a way that prevents it. It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting. As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)
    - LeonM 7y ago
      Video conferencing is a problem that cannot be solved with software alone. I like to call it the 'last meter problem', as video conference issues are almost always caused by crappy consumer grade equipment. Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.
cs02rm0 7y ago
We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and should work fine remotely. And hey, one of the principles is that you give teams the environment they need to get the job done, not the environment management thinks they deserve. Unless you mean "Agile" as, say, UK government terms it, also known as waterfall. In which case, yes, you can expect to be required to be in meetings all day in a terrible office space. Feel my pain.
- g051051 7y ago
  I mean "Agile" as in, whatever stupid thing our current "leadership" wants it to be. regardless of what "agile" should stand for, it was immediately corrupted at our workplace to be "business as usual with a new name".
  - cs02rm0 7y ago
    Wish I had a fix for that. I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
    - slaymaker1907 7y ago
      Wow, I’m definitely doing that from now on, brilliant idea.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Agile introduces and requires meeting time. If you were doing Just Shut Up And Get It Done before, Agile is definitely meeting-heavy. Agile is agile compared to Waterfall, but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
  - 7y ago
dustinmoris 7y ago
> The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" I can't believe that people who are so out of touch with reality are still given so much responsibility at companies which they effectively unknowingly misuse to make everyone's life miserable. There's nothing wrong about a multi day email chain. Sometimes it's the best communication tool, because non-critical/important things can be more efficiently being discussed in an email chain which doesn't disrupt everyone's work day. Secondly it is a nice way of keeping a log of ideas, thoughts and compromises which essentially lead to the final conclusion/solution. This gets documented for free and people can reference back to that email chain in the future which is hugely valuable, especially when the "big boss" conveniently likes to forget his own decisions. Face to face lacks all of those nice features. Secondly... there's A LOT more alternatives and other options inbetween F2F and long email chains. People can work 99% remotely and travel into an office one every couple weeks or per month for team bonding time. Video conferencing is another great way of getting a F2F conversation done without the hassle of everyone being in the same physical place. More often video conferencing calls can even be more productive, because people are more conscious about the time spent in the call and also about the people who frequently contribute and those who just got invited along but never really participate. Makes it easier to trim attendees down to the ones who really need to be there and those who just can be sent a summary afterwards. I can only hope that your new big boss will quickly get sacked and replaced by some young blood who has heard of instant messaging and video conferencing. Good luck!
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I've chatted online (in text) virtually my entire life, way more than I've actually talked, face-to-face or otherwise. My reading/writing comprehension's really developed as a result. Not only do people like me (even in my age range) seem relatively rare though, but it feels like talking IRL has some... weird clarity to it. Maybe it's because the lower info bandwidth but higher emotional bandwidth (?) forces a kind of expedience you can't get otherwise. This seems especially useful in open-ended, "planning" conversations. Maybe you can hold on to a lot of that with video/audio conferencing, but lag and tech issues are always salient. (But I'm technologically proficient and physically lazy, so I'd still rather deal with those than going somewhere.)
LanceH 7y ago
25 years of this and not once has someone responsible for implementing the open plan included themselves in that plan. Sales and marketing somehow require offices as well. I've heard of the mythical "president in a cubicle" but never seen it. I would really have more respect if they just came out and said, "we're going cheap."
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  Our sales and marketing is in an open floor plan actually. HR, however, is not.
  - testvox 7y ago
    Same, HR and c level are the only ones left with real offices.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I actually did see it. The CEO and VPs all had noise-canceling headphones.
- g051051 7y ago
  Our structure is low-level employees, like me -> squad lead -> tribe lead -> VP -> SVP -> CTO. VP and above have offices. SVP was the one who cancelled WFH. The open plan office thing predates the SVP and CTO, who are the main part of the new "leadership" that came in over the last year.
- Paul-ish 7y ago
  When I was an intern at Mozilla 2 years ago the open floorplan included the CEO.
- Izkata 7y ago
  For us, everyone except HR and Accounts are on the open floor. Even the executives/VPs have to look for seating.
- akavi 7y ago
  Not true of any of the four places I've worked, startup and FAANG. Directors (at FAANG) and CEOs (at startups) sat at the same kind of desk the rest of us did (though of course, spent the vast majority of time in meetings)
gexla 7y ago
> Contractors are packed like sardines, the noise is insane. We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Contractors in general might be better off working in an office if they aren't in a gig which is well paying. As remote work takes off, a greater percentage of those people may not be getting paid enough to make working from home a viable option, yet they'll still have to fake it. Sure, you might have the problem of your car breaking down on your way to the office because you can't afford maintenance. But at home you can still run into computer issues or a spouse who makes your life difficult. I think we tend to imagine WFH scenarios as being well paid and cushy, but there's that other side as well. WFH could still put up barriers between people who can afford it and those who can't? OTOH, affording working from home is way cheaper than affording to move.
jdboyd 7y ago
> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain What if it takes you 4 hours to come up with a good answer?
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I've had plenty of face-to-face conversations with my boss demanding an answer to an immediately problem that basically ended with me saying, "I need to look into this," repeatedly until the conversation ended and I could actually work on it.
  - g051051 7y ago
    Ugh. I have to go through this all the time. Boss asks for estimates for things I haven't looked into. I tell him I don't know. He pesters me for a guess, which I refuse. Round and round we go...
wolco 7y ago
Happened to me. What I did was go into the office and constantly talk to the vp's and ceo. Not about anything important really boring weather/how are you doing? The more removed the person from my department the more I would go out of my way to talk to them. Start asking difficult questions at the all staff forums. Always threw in doubts in meetings with non-tech people. I asked for a special chair for my back. Started challenging our processes. Funny thing happened. People started to see me as an important person.. an expert. I started to work from home again slowly.. then never came back. A year later others were encouraged to wfh because of office space concerns. Get in there and make sure they regret pulling you back. Show your face everywhere. Make your voice heard. Take on all issues and then drop them.
- g051051 7y ago
  > Take on all issues and then drop them. Seems like a quick route to the unemployment line...no thanks!
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Yeah, sometimes.
- agd621 7y ago
  Im looking forward to your new book, Machiavelli.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Waste their time... quite diabolical. ((tips hat))
- chad_strategic 7y ago
  Well played! In the TV show "What we do in the shadows" this is called an energy vampire. (you suck out other energy) Also a great show.
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    Wow I only knew about the movie. Now I have a new TV show I have to watch.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
> The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" The big boss[0] would not like me. I follow up all conversations with an email. It eliminates the he said/he said conversations. I have an email that I can refer to as needed. [0] Boss seems to be appropriate here as opposed to manager or something. Doesn't sound like they manage well.
efa 7y ago
I had 10 wonderful years. You also save money on food. I'm too lazy to pack a lunch so working in the office means buying lunch every day. At home I just grab some leftovers in the fridge and heat it up. My favorite part is doing my shopping in the morning on a weekday when no one is there versus on a Saturday when its nuts. I was doing freelance work my schedule was totally flexible.
jayd16 7y ago
I'm not sure about the 15 minute meetings that could have been emails, however, I will say that pair programming and XP are useful tools. I'm not sure how easy that is to replicate in a fully remote office.
- ebiester 7y ago
  It's easier in a fully remote office. I've paired with people across the ocean using tools like Zoom and committing continuously. When specialty software is required, I've also worked on a common AWS instance used as a desktop with the driver connecting to the instance to type.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    To be honest, that doesn't sound easier to me.
- davidjnelson 7y ago
  Super easy remote. Hard in an office because people feel like they have to find a conference room. It’s weird people blab loudly all day about nothing but look at you weird if you are talking quietly to someone about actual work on a video chat.
- g051051 7y ago
  I've never understood how people think pair programming is a good thing. Unless you're working with a junior and training them, it's ridiculous to have two people sharing a single keyboard and trying to code together.
microcolonel 7y ago
It's not going to put your life back together, but these earmuffs really changed my quality of life for the better when I was working in offices; particularly those offices where people say things like "it's just white noise". https://amazon.com/dp/B00CPCHBCQ/ https://amazon.com/dp/B00CPCHBCQ/
eloff 7y ago
Time to find a new job. I've worked fully remote my whole career, first by necessity and then by choice. There are lots of companies out there.
- jackmodern 7y ago
  how do you find those companies?
  - turingbike 7y ago
    * Search "Who's Hiring?" for remote - https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/#%22remote%22 https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/#%22remote%22 https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com https://remoteok.io/ https://remoteok.io/ and of course, word-of-mouth / loose social connections.
    - Phlarp 7y ago
      Adding on to this; Linked-in recruiters. Say what you will about the constant cold emailing, if you set sane guidelines for them (only interested in 99-100% remote positions with comp above $x, using y or z technologies) there is an entire industry of people who will go and do a lot of the work for you. Just make a copy/pasta of your desires and reply to their copy/pasta with it; ask for job descriptions up front along with comp ranges, once they show something you like you can move forward with actually getting on the phone with them. This shouldn't be your only lead generation tool during a job search, but it is a ruthlessly effective force multiplier.
    - andreasklinger 7y ago
      FYI: I would also add angel.co/jobs AngelList has the largest amount of remote jobs right now out there (Disclaimer: work at AngelList)
      - wolco 7y ago
        What's a good strategy for hunting on AngelList? During a recent job search for remote roles, AngelList was one places I searched. I found a less serious crowd compared to indeed or linked-in about hiring now. Previously when working full time I connected with a founder over a two year period and ended up working on a year long project. What's the best way of connecting through AngelList? Are most people connecting over a period of time or do you find most are using it like a job board where they try to fill a position asap?
Phillips126 7y ago
I'm on my 2nd week back on-site after being remote for nearly 2 years, it's been a tough transition. On-top of getting what feels like a large pay-cut (1 hour commute, car maintenance/fuel, etc) and having to deal with a cramped cubicle in a noisy area, I feel that my family life is also suffering. My office hours end later than I like (5pm) and with my commute I am home just in time for dinner and to put my young kids to bed. I feel awful burdening my Wife with ALL Doctor appointments, getting kids off to school, making dinner, picking them up from daycare all while having a full-time job. We've discussed moving but that would improve my situation at the cost of the rest of my family (switching schools, further from family, etc). Why did we end up coming back on-site? My manager (who works in Finance!?) couldn't explain to the higher-ups what we have been up to (very non-technical person) and they decided we were too disconnected from the rest of the company. Never even had a chance to plead our case or discuss alternative options... not sure how much longer I will be here.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  That's why you need some sort of productivity journal. Show that you were completing X number of tasks per month, and after a couple months show them that your productivity is down 10-20% in terms of tasks completed. Make it extremely easy to present, and if your Manager agrees to work with you on it, make it look like the work to compile this report was all theirs. In other words make them look good and do their job for them. My FAVORITE EXAMPLE in the road map for Star Citizen. That game's development is at an agonizingly slow pace, but if you were the Manager who put together their roadmap it would be instant promotion. It's goddamn BEAUTIFUL. And their is no way the team could be fucking up if the Roadmap looks this good. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...
  - Phillips126 7y ago
    I've actually begun doing this now, but the company has decided to eliminate all future remote jobs (our department was the experiment I suppose). I would like to pass this journal keeping idea to anyone else remote. It likely would have saved me.
Phlarp 7y ago
I had a very similar experience at a previous company. Leave, management does not value you or your inputs to the business. You will be much much happier at another company that embraces remote work instead of grudgingly tolerating it. It's easier than ever to find remote first companies. Don't make the mistake of thinking management is mistaken and just needs to be educated. The big shake up, changing WFH and open office plans are all giant neon signs that say management is attempting to line their pockets off the misery of their employees.
JSavageReal 7y ago
This has basically been the story of every job I've had, except instead of being 100% remote I was wfh once or twice per week. I'd join a company under the condition that they allowed flexible hours and wfh. Then 6 months later managers would change and all of a sudden the way we'd been operating would no longer be acceptable. Always the person leading the charge towards eliminating wfh and remote work is some non-technical idiot who wants to make his mark by demonstrating his "leadership skills" and has no idea what engineers actually do. So D don't even take promises for flexible hours and remote work seriously anymore unless it's a fully distributed team. I hope the trend of increasingly distributed workforces continues to rise so that developers don't have to deal with this "ass-in-seat" nonsense anymore.
- Phlarp 7y ago
  Get it in writing.
- quicksilver03 7y ago
  Although that's not the attitude of the managers at my current company, the result is the same: remote work is discouraged to the point of being exceptional. Which makes me want to look for remote-only jobs, that unfortunately are relatively rare in Europe.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I've never understood these sorts of posts - surely at that point you just leave? You've effectively been fired anyway? I mean, I've taken remote jobs for which I could well be living 200+ miles away. Saying 'come in to the office' - lol, sure, perhaps once a week or something for a catch up. What gives? If my boss suddenly decided to no longer employ me as a software developer and instead "pivoted" to making hand grenades or something equally random, well, yeah, bye then?
  - teachrdan 7y ago
    In the US, that could be construed as "Constructive Dismissal," where your job changes so much you have to resign. In California, at least, you'd have a strong claim for unemployment while you looked for your next (remote!) job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
rolltiide 7y ago
> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Haha about sums it up Its not supposed to be that way though
naravara 7y ago
>The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". If only we had some sort of technology that allowed us to be able to get ahem FaceTime ahem while remote. What a wondrous world that could be!
rdtsc 7y ago
> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". It could be they really believe that. But it is often one of these real reasons: 1) They want some people to quit, but they don't want to lay them off explicitly to avoid looking bad. The idea being some employees won't relocate or enjoy driving to the office every day so they'll just leave. 2) They think people are lazy and don't work when they are at home. So they want them in the office to supervise them. 3) It makes them feel important walking around and seeing all their subordinates right there in one place. Sometimes it is just as simple as that.
r00fus 7y ago
In so many ways, your direct management team influences heavily your quality of life at work. If you're not tight with your manager (or whoever else is a strong dotted-line with power over your employment situation) then it's time to move (or at least make your discomfort known).
targonca 7y ago
>white noise over the speakers W-what? I know some people swear that white noise makes them concentrate better, but forcing everyone to listen to white noise? Wtf. I'm not even sure that's legal from an occupational health & safety standpoint.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  It is common. You have likely experienced it without even realizing it. The point of the white noise is to reduce the distance voices carry in open environments so they are less distracting. Some places crank it pretty loud, though, to the point where it becomes an irritant.
- mcguire 7y ago
  NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (yes, that's a thing), Marshall Space Flight Center Bldg. 4601. Offices for the important people, high cubicles for semi-important people, shorter cubicles for the peons. White noise generators to reduce the excess conversation interruptions. (It didn't help me, my cube was outside one of the few large, unallocated meeting rooms, which got used by everyone at MSFC. I got to listen to the meetings until I started working from home.) Oh, and the AC goes off at 3:00p.m. to save money. By 5:00, everyone still working is rather sweaty.
- joezydeco 7y ago
  It's the most common kneejerk reaction to employees that complain that the open office is too noisy - that loud conversations in the room or, hell, right over your shoulder are distracting you from focusing properly on your work. Instead of investigating the social fixes to the problem (asking people to take phone calls in private rooms, having arguments/meetings in private rooms, enabling sidetone in noise-cancelling headphones so people don't scream into conference calls), the proposed answer is a Simple Little Widget(tm) they can buy that will fix everything: the white noise generator. Except now you have a layer of white noise on top of all the loud conversations. And white noise doesn't mask human speech at all unless it's louder than the speech itself. So nothing is fixed.
Const-me 7y ago
> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain I agree with that. But 15 minutes phone or video call works just as well as a meeting in person. Speaking from experience, I’ve been working from home for 8 years now.
alfromspace 7y ago
Why are open-plan offices being pushed so hard, relentlessly, everywhere, all the time - when nearly everybody hates working in them, and all evidence points to them being unproductive and harmful?
- brokensegue 7y ago
  real estate is expensive?
BjoernKW 7y ago
> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged: Why is it better? Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up? If so how often does this happen? Why does this need arise? If you have to clarify matters in personal conversations all the time doesn't that tell you that your company's processes and communication behaviour are lacking?
- Diederich 7y ago
  > Why is it better? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but being remote does not exclude having face to face meetings. There is (finally) easy and reliable technology that facilitates that very thing. Highly diverse timezones can be a problem, but I've never know anybody working remotely to resist attending a relatively rare video conference call in order to quickly hash something out.
- hinkley 7y ago
  There are times when a face to face sorts out problems like nothing else, but there are a lot of people who value face-to-face over all else who are using those situations in bad faith. They know some social engineering tricks and they use little meetings as a stopgap for big deficiencies in other areas. Developers are smart. You might con them into a bad idea in that 15 minute meeting, but someday they'll figure out they've been had. Most won't take it lying down. In my experience, and talking to my peers, engineers don't come straight at you when they feel slighted. Especially if you're a big talker. They may not even gloat when they feel that the odds have been evened up. Not all 'bad luck' in companies is just bad luck. Some of it is work stoppage or malicious compliance by someone with a grievance who doesn't enjoy confrontation.
tripzilch 7y ago
What's this about white noise over the speakers? To sort of drown out other people's talking?

mpweiher 7y ago

> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. One of the crazier things that has happened. When the XP folk said "we do a standup", the idea was that meetings are useless and awful, you shouldn't have them, but if you're going to have them, then let's "encourage" brevity by having everyone stand. Add a few decades of agile certified consultants, sc(r)umification and now "agile" means "lots of meetings". Sigh.

jbarberu 7y ago
I'm so glad my team is distributed across different offices and we do our stand-ups at our desks. Having hypermobility in my knees, and most other joints, I get tired from standing still more than 2-3 minutes...
- mpweiher 7y ago
  ...and only have those stand for whom it's not a burden. It seems nowadays the "standing" up has become some weird ritual that one must undergo, without questioning, as a sacrifice to the gods of "Agile". Bizarre. All the practices have a purpose. If they don't fit, don't do them. Figure out what works for you. Adjust, adapt. Think! No, the planes of productivity will not come to your fauxgile wooden landing strip.
  - jbarberu 7y ago
    Next time someone insists on standing, I'll counter with do pushups while you're talking instead. Should shut most people up fast enough.
g051051 7y ago
We recently spent weeks doing a backlog grooming meeting every day to get work lined up, only to have our priorities completely changed and all of the work discarded.
- johnmaguire2013 7y ago
  Why would you spend weeks doing backlog grooming meetings every day? We do a single one-hour backlog grooming meeting before each sprint, to plan the work for that sprint. If you're planning out much further than that, that's not agile.
  - dustinmoris 7y ago
    True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request. Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      > Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile. I don't disagree with this. However, >True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request. This is like saying the first test should always fail because the tested code doesn't exist. While that's a good start, it usually takes a few sprints to release anything useful; especially if you have any hardware involved. Therefore, having a number of stories in a backlog really helps, especially if you do have to re-prioritize because hardware is delayed, etc.
    - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
      The backlog is not large and we don't use this meeting for prioritization. Our team uses backlog grooming to point tasks and assign them "definitions of done". This is done to solve two problems: getting everyone on the same page as far as how the task will be done, which also speeds up diff reviews, and to determine if the task should be split up into smaller tasks. When would you perform these tasks? > Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile. This is not at all what we do with this meeting.
peteey 7y ago
Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices. There's no such thing as having just half of your house on fire. If a fundamental business element like customers or leadership is missing, everything else will be bad. Waterfall and agile methods are equally damned when the something else is causing a company to under perform.
- matwood 7y ago
  > Agile and stand up meetings get a bad rap when poorly performing companies adopt the practices. I was talking to the CTO of a large non-tech company and he was so excited how the whole development organization had adopted agile. Later he told me that after the conference he had to fly to a huge meeting where they plan and schedule out the next 6 months to a year of development work.
  - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
    Are you sure he wasn't referring to roadmapping? You can plan what projects to take on in the next quarter or two with a product team while the engineering team remains agile in their operations.
    - matwood 7y ago
      Nope. It was a multi-day meeting where the entire development organization waterfall planned the next 6-12 months of work. This included due dates and all. For their org size, maybe that's how they have to do development, but it was nothing like any agile I've ever done.

coolvision 7y ago

>white noise over the speakers I'm fine with open spaces, but this would be the final straw for me

jcims 7y ago
Especially when they turn it on and off randomly. So weird...
cs02rm0 7y ago
Yeah, that sounds like actual torture.
muro 7y ago
I like the white (or pink?) noise. I expected to hate it and found the idea ridiculous, but it helped focus in an open space office.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Heh, painfully pinching your skin also helps at the dentist.
  - randcraw 7y ago
    I prefer smacking myself in the head with a hammer. In an open office, that is. The dentist is less painful.
jofer 7y ago
I know it seems crazy, but I've been in several offices that had this. It most cases it worked well and I never noticed it until it would occasionally quit working. The offices where it's worked best were not open, though. They had thin doors/walls and a small speaker (also doubled for the fire alarm/etc) in the ceiling of each office. The white noise was unnoticeable until it was off or you really looked for it. The main advantage was that you no longer heard every conversation on the floor. You'd still overhear bits of things in the adjacent rooms, but that's hard to avoid. When the white noise stopped working (happened every few months), you could hear every voice on the floor and every phone call... All in all, it sounds like torture, but done well, it's actually a really nice way of damping distracting ambient conversations/etc.

cheez 7y ago

> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. So true.

codingdave 7y ago

> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better... Good thing we have better tools for videoconferencing than ever. I can have a 15 minute face-to-face with anyone in my company, no matter where in the world they are.

spurdoman77 7y ago
Videoconferencing is OK, but it is still common to have issues with it. Bad image quality, setup by lowest common denominator etc. Often you use that 15 minutes just by trying to make it work properly.
- g051051 7y ago
  At least in our company, it works pretty much flawlessly. We rarely have technical issues, and if we do it's a wider outage from our conferencing provider.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  Yeah, agreed. Even places I've worked with wonderful internal IT still have problem users who can't figure videoconferencing, or have damaged/misconfigured their device in a way that prevents it. It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting. As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)
  - LeonM 7y ago
    Video conferencing is a problem that cannot be solved with software alone. I like to call it the 'last meter problem', as video conference issues are almost always caused by crappy consumer grade equipment. Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.

cs02rm0 7y ago

We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and should work fine remotely. And hey, one of the principles is that you give teams the environment they need to get the job done, not the environment management thinks they deserve. Unless you mean "Agile" as, say, UK government terms it, also known as waterfall. In which case, yes, you can expect to be required to be in meetings all day in a terrible office space. Feel my pain.

g051051 7y ago
I mean "Agile" as in, whatever stupid thing our current "leadership" wants it to be. regardless of what "agile" should stand for, it was immediately corrupted at our workplace to be "business as usual with a new name".
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  Wish I had a fix for that. I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
  - slaymaker1907 7y ago
    Wow, I’m definitely doing that from now on, brilliant idea.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
Agile introduces and requires meeting time. If you were doing Just Shut Up And Get It Done before, Agile is definitely meeting-heavy. Agile is agile compared to Waterfall, but overall it’s a process of no one trusting the workers to take on work and hit deadlines if they’re not in meetings telling you about it. The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
- 7y ago

dustinmoris 7y ago

> The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" I can't believe that people who are so out of touch with reality are still given so much responsibility at companies which they effectively unknowingly misuse to make everyone's life miserable. There's nothing wrong about a multi day email chain. Sometimes it's the best communication tool, because non-critical/important things can be more efficiently being discussed in an email chain which doesn't disrupt everyone's work day. Secondly it is a nice way of keeping a log of ideas, thoughts and compromises which essentially lead to the final conclusion/solution. This gets documented for free and people can reference back to that email chain in the future which is hugely valuable, especially when the "big boss" conveniently likes to forget his own decisions. Face to face lacks all of those nice features. Secondly... there's A LOT more alternatives and other options inbetween F2F and long email chains. People can work 99% remotely and travel into an office one every couple weeks or per month for team bonding time. Video conferencing is another great way of getting a F2F conversation done without the hassle of everyone being in the same physical place. More often video conferencing calls can even be more productive, because people are more conscious about the time spent in the call and also about the people who frequently contribute and those who just got invited along but never really participate. Makes it easier to trim attendees down to the ones who really need to be there and those who just can be sent a summary afterwards. I can only hope that your new big boss will quickly get sacked and replaced by some young blood who has heard of instant messaging and video conferencing. Good luck!

shrimp_emoji 7y ago
I've chatted online (in text) virtually my entire life, way more than I've actually talked, face-to-face or otherwise. My reading/writing comprehension's really developed as a result. Not only do people like me (even in my age range) seem relatively rare though, but it feels like talking IRL has some... weird clarity to it. Maybe it's because the lower info bandwidth but higher emotional bandwidth (?) forces a kind of expedience you can't get otherwise. This seems especially useful in open-ended, "planning" conversations. Maybe you can hold on to a lot of that with video/audio conferencing, but lag and tech issues are always salient. (But I'm technologically proficient and physically lazy, so I'd still rather deal with those than going somewhere.)

LanceH 7y ago

25 years of this and not once has someone responsible for implementing the open plan included themselves in that plan. Sales and marketing somehow require offices as well. I've heard of the mythical "president in a cubicle" but never seen it. I would really have more respect if they just came out and said, "we're going cheap."

thecatspaw 7y ago
Our sales and marketing is in an open floor plan actually. HR, however, is not.
- testvox 7y ago
  Same, HR and c level are the only ones left with real offices.
nerdponx 7y ago
I actually did see it. The CEO and VPs all had noise-canceling headphones.
g051051 7y ago
Our structure is low-level employees, like me -> squad lead -> tribe lead -> VP -> SVP -> CTO. VP and above have offices. SVP was the one who cancelled WFH. The open plan office thing predates the SVP and CTO, who are the main part of the new "leadership" that came in over the last year.
Paul-ish 7y ago
When I was an intern at Mozilla 2 years ago the open floorplan included the CEO.
Izkata 7y ago
For us, everyone except HR and Accounts are on the open floor. Even the executives/VPs have to look for seating.
akavi 7y ago
Not true of any of the four places I've worked, startup and FAANG. Directors (at FAANG) and CEOs (at startups) sat at the same kind of desk the rest of us did (though of course, spent the vast majority of time in meetings)

gexla 7y ago

> Contractors are packed like sardines, the noise is insane. We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Contractors in general might be better off working in an office if they aren't in a gig which is well paying. As remote work takes off, a greater percentage of those people may not be getting paid enough to make working from home a viable option, yet they'll still have to fake it. Sure, you might have the problem of your car breaking down on your way to the office because you can't afford maintenance. But at home you can still run into computer issues or a spouse who makes your life difficult. I think we tend to imagine WFH scenarios as being well paid and cushy, but there's that other side as well. WFH could still put up barriers between people who can afford it and those who can't? OTOH, affording working from home is way cheaper than affording to move.

jdboyd 7y ago

> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain What if it takes you 4 hours to come up with a good answer?

wccrawford 7y ago
I've had plenty of face-to-face conversations with my boss demanding an answer to an immediately problem that basically ended with me saying, "I need to look into this," repeatedly until the conversation ended and I could actually work on it.
- g051051 7y ago
  Ugh. I have to go through this all the time. Boss asks for estimates for things I haven't looked into. I tell him I don't know. He pesters me for a guess, which I refuse. Round and round we go...

wolco 7y ago

Happened to me. What I did was go into the office and constantly talk to the vp's and ceo. Not about anything important really boring weather/how are you doing? The more removed the person from my department the more I would go out of my way to talk to them. Start asking difficult questions at the all staff forums. Always threw in doubts in meetings with non-tech people. I asked for a special chair for my back. Started challenging our processes. Funny thing happened. People started to see me as an important person.. an expert. I started to work from home again slowly.. then never came back. A year later others were encouraged to wfh because of office space concerns. Get in there and make sure they regret pulling you back. Show your face everywhere. Make your voice heard. Take on all issues and then drop them.

g051051 7y ago
> Take on all issues and then drop them. Seems like a quick route to the unemployment line...no thanks!
- jacobush 7y ago
  Yeah, sometimes.
agd621 7y ago
Im looking forward to your new book, Machiavelli.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Waste their time... quite diabolical. ((tips hat))
chad_strategic 7y ago
Well played! In the TV show "What we do in the shadows" this is called an energy vampire. (you suck out other energy) Also a great show.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Wow I only knew about the movie. Now I have a new TV show I have to watch.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

> The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" The big boss[0] would not like me. I follow up all conversations with an email. It eliminates the he said/he said conversations. I have an email that I can refer to as needed. [0] Boss seems to be appropriate here as opposed to manager or something. Doesn't sound like they manage well.

efa 7y ago

I had 10 wonderful years. You also save money on food. I'm too lazy to pack a lunch so working in the office means buying lunch every day. At home I just grab some leftovers in the fridge and heat it up. My favorite part is doing my shopping in the morning on a weekday when no one is there versus on a Saturday when its nuts. I was doing freelance work my schedule was totally flexible.

jayd16 7y ago

I'm not sure about the 15 minute meetings that could have been emails, however, I will say that pair programming and XP are useful tools. I'm not sure how easy that is to replicate in a fully remote office.

ebiester 7y ago
It's easier in a fully remote office. I've paired with people across the ocean using tools like Zoom and committing continuously. When specialty software is required, I've also worked on a common AWS instance used as a desktop with the driver connecting to the instance to type.
- jayd16 7y ago
  To be honest, that doesn't sound easier to me.
davidjnelson 7y ago
Super easy remote. Hard in an office because people feel like they have to find a conference room. It’s weird people blab loudly all day about nothing but look at you weird if you are talking quietly to someone about actual work on a video chat.
g051051 7y ago
I've never understood how people think pair programming is a good thing. Unless you're working with a junior and training them, it's ridiculous to have two people sharing a single keyboard and trying to code together.

microcolonel 7y ago

It's not going to put your life back together, but these earmuffs really changed my quality of life for the better when I was working in offices; particularly those offices where people say things like "it's just white noise". https://amazon.com/dp/B00CPCHBCQ/ https://amazon.com/dp/B00CPCHBCQ/

eloff 7y ago

Time to find a new job. I've worked fully remote my whole career, first by necessity and then by choice. There are lots of companies out there.

jackmodern 7y ago
how do you find those companies?
- turingbike 7y ago
  * Search "Who's Hiring?" for remote - https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/#%22remote%22 https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/#%22remote%22 https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com https://remoteok.io/ https://remoteok.io/ and of course, word-of-mouth / loose social connections.
  - Phlarp 7y ago
    Adding on to this; Linked-in recruiters. Say what you will about the constant cold emailing, if you set sane guidelines for them (only interested in 99-100% remote positions with comp above $x, using y or z technologies) there is an entire industry of people who will go and do a lot of the work for you. Just make a copy/pasta of your desires and reply to their copy/pasta with it; ask for job descriptions up front along with comp ranges, once they show something you like you can move forward with actually getting on the phone with them. This shouldn't be your only lead generation tool during a job search, but it is a ruthlessly effective force multiplier.
  - andreasklinger 7y ago
    FYI: I would also add angel.co/jobs AngelList has the largest amount of remote jobs right now out there (Disclaimer: work at AngelList)
    - wolco 7y ago
      What's a good strategy for hunting on AngelList? During a recent job search for remote roles, AngelList was one places I searched. I found a less serious crowd compared to indeed or linked-in about hiring now. Previously when working full time I connected with a founder over a two year period and ended up working on a year long project. What's the best way of connecting through AngelList? Are most people connecting over a period of time or do you find most are using it like a job board where they try to fill a position asap?

Phillips126 7y ago

I'm on my 2nd week back on-site after being remote for nearly 2 years, it's been a tough transition. On-top of getting what feels like a large pay-cut (1 hour commute, car maintenance/fuel, etc) and having to deal with a cramped cubicle in a noisy area, I feel that my family life is also suffering. My office hours end later than I like (5pm) and with my commute I am home just in time for dinner and to put my young kids to bed. I feel awful burdening my Wife with ALL Doctor appointments, getting kids off to school, making dinner, picking them up from daycare all while having a full-time job. We've discussed moving but that would improve my situation at the cost of the rest of my family (switching schools, further from family, etc). Why did we end up coming back on-site? My manager (who works in Finance!?) couldn't explain to the higher-ups what we have been up to (very non-technical person) and they decided we were too disconnected from the rest of the company. Never even had a chance to plead our case or discuss alternative options... not sure how much longer I will be here.

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
That's why you need some sort of productivity journal. Show that you were completing X number of tasks per month, and after a couple months show them that your productivity is down 10-20% in terms of tasks completed. Make it extremely easy to present, and if your Manager agrees to work with you on it, make it look like the work to compile this report was all theirs. In other words make them look good and do their job for them. My FAVORITE EXAMPLE in the road map for Star Citizen. That game's development is at an agonizingly slow pace, but if you were the Manager who put together their roadmap it would be instant promotion. It's goddamn BEAUTIFUL. And their is no way the team could be fucking up if the Roadmap looks this good. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...
- Phillips126 7y ago
  I've actually begun doing this now, but the company has decided to eliminate all future remote jobs (our department was the experiment I suppose). I would like to pass this journal keeping idea to anyone else remote. It likely would have saved me.

Phlarp 7y ago

I had a very similar experience at a previous company. Leave, management does not value you or your inputs to the business. You will be much much happier at another company that embraces remote work instead of grudgingly tolerating it. It's easier than ever to find remote first companies. Don't make the mistake of thinking management is mistaken and just needs to be educated. The big shake up, changing WFH and open office plans are all giant neon signs that say management is attempting to line their pockets off the misery of their employees.

JSavageReal 7y ago

This has basically been the story of every job I've had, except instead of being 100% remote I was wfh once or twice per week. I'd join a company under the condition that they allowed flexible hours and wfh. Then 6 months later managers would change and all of a sudden the way we'd been operating would no longer be acceptable. Always the person leading the charge towards eliminating wfh and remote work is some non-technical idiot who wants to make his mark by demonstrating his "leadership skills" and has no idea what engineers actually do. So D don't even take promises for flexible hours and remote work seriously anymore unless it's a fully distributed team. I hope the trend of increasingly distributed workforces continues to rise so that developers don't have to deal with this "ass-in-seat" nonsense anymore.

Phlarp 7y ago
Get it in writing.
quicksilver03 7y ago
Although that's not the attitude of the managers at my current company, the result is the same: remote work is discouraged to the point of being exceptional. Which makes me want to look for remote-only jobs, that unfortunately are relatively rare in Europe.
esotericn 7y ago
I've never understood these sorts of posts - surely at that point you just leave? You've effectively been fired anyway? I mean, I've taken remote jobs for which I could well be living 200+ miles away. Saying 'come in to the office' - lol, sure, perhaps once a week or something for a catch up. What gives? If my boss suddenly decided to no longer employ me as a software developer and instead "pivoted" to making hand grenades or something equally random, well, yeah, bye then?
- teachrdan 7y ago
  In the US, that could be construed as "Constructive Dismissal," where your job changes so much you have to resign. In California, at least, you'd have a strong claim for unemployment while you looked for your next (remote!) job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

rolltiide 7y ago

> We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings. Haha about sums it up Its not supposed to be that way though

naravara 7y ago

>The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". If only we had some sort of technology that allowed us to be able to get ahem FaceTime ahem while remote. What a wondrous world that could be!

rdtsc 7y ago

> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". It could be they really believe that. But it is often one of these real reasons: 1) They want some people to quit, but they don't want to lay them off explicitly to avoid looking bad. The idea being some employees won't relocate or enjoy driving to the office every day so they'll just leave. 2) They think people are lazy and don't work when they are at home. So they want them in the office to supervise them. 3) It makes them feel important walking around and seeing all their subordinates right there in one place. Sometimes it is just as simple as that.

r00fus 7y ago

In so many ways, your direct management team influences heavily your quality of life at work. If you're not tight with your manager (or whoever else is a strong dotted-line with power over your employment situation) then it's time to move (or at least make your discomfort known).

targonca 7y ago

>white noise over the speakers W-what? I know some people swear that white noise makes them concentrate better, but forcing everyone to listen to white noise? Wtf. I'm not even sure that's legal from an occupational health & safety standpoint.

rootusrootus 7y ago
It is common. You have likely experienced it without even realizing it. The point of the white noise is to reduce the distance voices carry in open environments so they are less distracting. Some places crank it pretty loud, though, to the point where it becomes an irritant.
mcguire 7y ago
NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (yes, that's a thing), Marshall Space Flight Center Bldg. 4601. Offices for the important people, high cubicles for semi-important people, shorter cubicles for the peons. White noise generators to reduce the excess conversation interruptions. (It didn't help me, my cube was outside one of the few large, unallocated meeting rooms, which got used by everyone at MSFC. I got to listen to the meetings until I started working from home.) Oh, and the AC goes off at 3:00p.m. to save money. By 5:00, everyone still working is rather sweaty.
joezydeco 7y ago
It's the most common kneejerk reaction to employees that complain that the open office is too noisy - that loud conversations in the room or, hell, right over your shoulder are distracting you from focusing properly on your work. Instead of investigating the social fixes to the problem (asking people to take phone calls in private rooms, having arguments/meetings in private rooms, enabling sidetone in noise-cancelling headphones so people don't scream into conference calls), the proposed answer is a Simple Little Widget(tm) they can buy that will fix everything: the white noise generator. Except now you have a layer of white noise on top of all the loud conversations. And white noise doesn't mask human speech at all unless it's louder than the speech itself. So nothing is fixed.

Const-me 7y ago

> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain I agree with that. But 15 minutes phone or video call works just as well as a meeting in person. Speaking from experience, I’ve been working from home for 8 years now.

alfromspace 7y ago

Why are open-plan offices being pushed so hard, relentlessly, everywhere, all the time - when nearly everybody hates working in them, and all evidence points to them being unproductive and harmful?

brokensegue 7y ago
real estate is expensive?

BjoernKW 7y ago

> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged: Why is it better? Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up? If so how often does this happen? Why does this need arise? If you have to clarify matters in personal conversations all the time doesn't that tell you that your company's processes and communication behaviour are lacking?

Diederich 7y ago
> Why is it better? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but being remote does not exclude having face to face meetings. There is (finally) easy and reliable technology that facilitates that very thing. Highly diverse timezones can be a problem, but I've never know anybody working remotely to resist attending a relatively rare video conference call in order to quickly hash something out.
hinkley 7y ago
There are times when a face to face sorts out problems like nothing else, but there are a lot of people who value face-to-face over all else who are using those situations in bad faith. They know some social engineering tricks and they use little meetings as a stopgap for big deficiencies in other areas. Developers are smart. You might con them into a bad idea in that 15 minute meeting, but someday they'll figure out they've been had. Most won't take it lying down. In my experience, and talking to my peers, engineers don't come straight at you when they feel slighted. Especially if you're a big talker. They may not even gloat when they feel that the odds have been evened up. Not all 'bad luck' in companies is just bad luck. Some of it is work stoppage or malicious compliance by someone with a grievance who doesn't enjoy confrontation.

tripzilch 7y ago

What's this about white noise over the speakers? To sort of drown out other people's talking?