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"Three months into the pandemic, the argument about the moral and economic superiority of the modern office is over. Remote work works." So, I have worked (mos

"Three months into the pandemic, the argument about the moral and economic superiority of the modern office is over. Remote work works." So, I have worked (mostly) remotely for years, and I don't think I agree with this. It works for some people, in some situations. There are absolutely times when you need to be in the office with other people, and even if my client is in another town I have to drive over there to talk to people in person. This from a person who works one of the most remote-friendly jobs (computer programmer), who is obviously not opposed to the idea because I do it myself most of the time. But I think what a lot of people discovered is that working remotely _doesn't_ work. It probably also works worse over time, as the personal contacts made in person, fray after a longer and longer period without in-office conversations. I would not be surprised if some companies, currently paying sky-high salaries for employees in very high cost of living areas, find it attractive to enable more remote work. If and where it works, great. But the idea that everyone will do it in the future, is just fantasy.

troughway 6y ago
There is a massive echo chamber around remote work within tech circles - including HN, mostly driven by an extremely small, but extremely loud minority. This coincides with the kind of bubbles that people live in, which isn't all that surprising.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  Management's convenient insistence that remote work hinders collaboration is a bubble, I agree.
onion2k 6y ago
Is there a difference between the statements "Remote work works" and "It works for some people, in some situations." It's not like Basecamp said "Remote work works for everyone all the time in every situation ever." They just said it does work, as a counterpoint to the traditional IT company belief that tech is something that's hard to do remotely because of those "watercooler moments". To be honest, they don't even say it's necessarily better than office-based work as far as the work is concerned; they only say it's possible, and morally and economically better. It could be morally and economically better despite producing worse results. That would need to be measured at any given company who tried it. C-19 lockdown has proven that pretty much every tech company is capable of working remotely. "Remote work works" is true.
- 6510 6y ago
  On the short term it works. We will have to see about the long run.
  - Bootwizard 6y ago
    Why will we have to see? It's not like this is the first time anyone has worked remotely. People have been working remotely for decades, which is proof that it works for those people. In fact entire companies recently (last 5ish years) have created entirely remote companies.
    - rossdavidh 6y ago
      In at least some companies (e.g. Yahoo), they decided it worked, and then later decided no, it didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of backpedaling on remote work, after six months or so.
      - 6510 6y ago
        Elsewhere on HN I read mention that it works wonderfully until you want a raise.
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        The Yahoo situation was that mgmt. counted people who said they worked remotely vs. "vpn" connections, and mgmt. said that they found employees were lying about actually doing work. Some of the things not clarified were: - engineers had alternate vpn and connection methods, so what was the breakdown of engineers vs. non-engineers? Were all VPN connections counted (I don't think they were.) - a large percentage of the staff had mentally checked out, evidenced by the gym being full between 1 pm and 5 pm. That was a bigger issue, since showing up is meaningless if you're not engaged. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as Mayer's job was to preserve the value of the Alibaba holdings, not do anything at Yahoo, hence the logo font change and ymail facelifts. - does one have to be on a vpn connection to do work? Employees can edit a Word document without being connected. - I think the parking lots were full, so some staff staying home was a good thing, rather than circling the block for who knows how long. So if you're going to use stats, they should be based on results, not something as fuzzy as "vpn" counts, as in the Yahoo case. Unless your agenda is "let's ban remote work." Source: worked there.
hrktb 6y ago
> It works for some people, in some situations. Wouldn’t this be a general truth of every work environments ? Big office in a metropolitan area, small office in a small town, huge office and factory in a completely remote area, shared offices around the world with membership access to any instance, shared office with rotation between member who work remotely otherwise. I can’t see a single setting that would work for everyone, or even more than 80% of the workforce. Remote is just a flavor among all of these, and we’re at a point where we can agree it works for some. That’s good enough IMO.
jimmydddd 6y ago
I agree regarding the personal contacts. I've been working remotely for 10 years. But I think it works for me because I have a network of colleagues that I met and became friends with while working in offices over a previous 10 year period.
- codersteve 6y ago
  Bingo. I think this is the only reason it's working for my group right now and people declaring it "successful". Like someone said above, we have no idea of the long term consequences.
gregd 6y ago
I've worked remotely now for just shy of 10 years in a row and more like 15 years total out of a 25 year IT career. I have found the biggest hurdles to remote work usually boil down to one thing, your clients or employer and fellow employees, who still "go into" an office, need to buy into the remote worker situation. This usually entails wrapping their heads around fewer meetings (even adhoc ones) and utilizing online tools exclusively...namely Slack, Teams, Skype, etc. What has helped tremendously is that since most companies adopted a sudden and an across the board "work from home" policy, it's forced collaboration via different avenues. Those of us who already worked from home, now are included in meetings and discussions that we would normally be left out of because our face wasn't physically in an office. I'm hopeful that we'll see a broader adoption rate even for those that still like the physical office, will be able to work from home on an as wanted basis..sick kid....sick spouse...deliveries expected...plumbing needs fixed..etc.
- Angostura 6y ago
  I've found that the biggest problem was missing those things that got discussed informally around the office. There would be interesting problems you could solve, but you rarely heard about them.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    I've become quite adept over the years at building up contacts across different parts of the business org, just through quick "water cooler" chats with people I meet while I'm making a cuppa. I'll even go to a different floor from time to time just to expose me to more people. The convenience factor of "Hi, how are you doing?" turning in to a little bit more of a conversation, in a circumstance when I know I'm not disturbing them in the middle of something. I don't get that with Slack etc. I'm really enjoying a bunch of the aspects of working from home, and picking up a strong preference for it, but I can't help but wonder about the impact less casual contact with other teams is having on overall performance. There's a lot you can get solved, much faster, by having friendly contacts all over the place (which of course, you have to be careful not to abuse or they'll stop being friendly contacts). That applies both to problems I'm dealing with, and problems they're dealing with that we'd never know about under other circumstances.
chooseaname 6y ago
I have worked remote full time for over half decade now and for the couple years before that it was optional. My opinion is that the work environment should he more fluid. There should be an option to WFH or office but whatever you choose on whatever particular day the environment should accommodate that.
6510 6y ago
The jobs that (no doubt) require face to face interaction will just have to be named differently. > I would not be surprised if some companies, currently paying sky-high salaries for employees in very high cost of living areas, find it attractive to enable more remote work. Billions will be struggling to survive at the bottom until we pay people more for what they do than where they live. I don't see why the disrupt mantra should only apply everywhere else? I can find really bad coders who can live comfortably on 400 euro per month. They are mostly bad because there is no entrance to the ivory tower. I was rather shocked by the laser like focus in people living on next to nothing. There is no casual chit chat, no time to read random articles about disrupting email and no room for a joke.
kwanbix 6y ago
I believe if anything this pandemic has shown, is that remote work is much worse than in office work. Boring Video meetings. Lack of interactions. It takes two or three times to do the same things remotely in my line of work (Product Manager). It is good to have the flexibility of working remotely, but I will never choose it as my way of working.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  what is the psychology behind those countless, sometimes day-long meetings? A mix of collective procrastination and signaling of business? I'm not opposed to small, high interaction (not passive listening!) calls that are time-boxed; but somebody, somewhere will have to do actual work. The allocation between coordination/planning and execution seems way off in many companies.
draw_down 6y ago
This issue gets litigated to death on here. This is about the launch of a new product, not whether you had fun working at home during quarantine, come on
kiliancs 6y ago
It's hard to disagree that "it depends", but it's also hard to disagree that "remote work", generally, "works", and that it does so in contradiction with the assumptions and skepticism towards it that were much more established before the pandemic.
Tainnor 6y ago
Remote work has its advantages and disadvantages, objectively speaking. Subjectively, remote work doesn't work for me. It's depressing and I feel disconnected. I need physical human interaction.
randomsearch 6y ago
I absolutely love a lot of the Basecamp philosophy, I just don’t get the remote work thing. But they’re right about almost everything (or, I agree with them which to a human is the same thing), so they must be right about this too. So what am I missing? Remote work is lonely, isolating. You don’t have the same connection to a team. We don’t “go remote” with our friends and family as a policy (why bother reopening the pubs?) so what is it about colleagues that makes you think you don’t need to interact face to face with them? Humans are monkeys in suits and this biochemical robot needs proper input please. Ideation of any kind is garbage over Zoom. Ideation needs whiteboards and tea and hand gestures and walks outside and background noise and serendipity. I need that look you make that says “stupid” so we don’t waste any many time on this. I need to hear you sigh with exasperation. When things go wrong I don’t want to ask a slack channel wall of text for help, I want my team to pull together and buzz through it, supporting each other with their physical presence. I don’t want fucking emoticons I want real emotions.
- codersteve 6y ago
  >>We don’t “go remote” with our friends and family as a policy Not as a policy, but we probably do more of it to our detriment. It's a really excellent point.

troughway 6y ago

There is a massive echo chamber around remote work within tech circles - including HN, mostly driven by an extremely small, but extremely loud minority. This coincides with the kind of bubbles that people live in, which isn't all that surprising.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Management's convenient insistence that remote work hinders collaboration is a bubble, I agree.

onion2k 6y ago

Is there a difference between the statements "Remote work works" and "It works for some people, in some situations." It's not like Basecamp said "Remote work works for everyone all the time in every situation ever." They just said it does work, as a counterpoint to the traditional IT company belief that tech is something that's hard to do remotely because of those "watercooler moments". To be honest, they don't even say it's necessarily better than office-based work as far as the work is concerned; they only say it's possible, and morally and economically better. It could be morally and economically better despite producing worse results. That would need to be measured at any given company who tried it. C-19 lockdown has proven that pretty much every tech company is capable of working remotely. "Remote work works" is true.

6510 6y ago
On the short term it works. We will have to see about the long run.
- Bootwizard 6y ago
  Why will we have to see? It's not like this is the first time anyone has worked remotely. People have been working remotely for decades, which is proof that it works for those people. In fact entire companies recently (last 5ish years) have created entirely remote companies.
  - rossdavidh 6y ago
    In at least some companies (e.g. Yahoo), they decided it worked, and then later decided no, it didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of backpedaling on remote work, after six months or so.
    - 6510 6y ago
      Elsewhere on HN I read mention that it works wonderfully until you want a raise.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      The Yahoo situation was that mgmt. counted people who said they worked remotely vs. "vpn" connections, and mgmt. said that they found employees were lying about actually doing work. Some of the things not clarified were: - engineers had alternate vpn and connection methods, so what was the breakdown of engineers vs. non-engineers? Were all VPN connections counted (I don't think they were.) - a large percentage of the staff had mentally checked out, evidenced by the gym being full between 1 pm and 5 pm. That was a bigger issue, since showing up is meaningless if you're not engaged. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as Mayer's job was to preserve the value of the Alibaba holdings, not do anything at Yahoo, hence the logo font change and ymail facelifts. - does one have to be on a vpn connection to do work? Employees can edit a Word document without being connected. - I think the parking lots were full, so some staff staying home was a good thing, rather than circling the block for who knows how long. So if you're going to use stats, they should be based on results, not something as fuzzy as "vpn" counts, as in the Yahoo case. Unless your agenda is "let's ban remote work." Source: worked there.

hrktb 6y ago

> It works for some people, in some situations. Wouldn’t this be a general truth of every work environments ? Big office in a metropolitan area, small office in a small town, huge office and factory in a completely remote area, shared offices around the world with membership access to any instance, shared office with rotation between member who work remotely otherwise. I can’t see a single setting that would work for everyone, or even more than 80% of the workforce. Remote is just a flavor among all of these, and we’re at a point where we can agree it works for some. That’s good enough IMO.

jimmydddd 6y ago

I agree regarding the personal contacts. I've been working remotely for 10 years. But I think it works for me because I have a network of colleagues that I met and became friends with while working in offices over a previous 10 year period.

codersteve 6y ago
Bingo. I think this is the only reason it's working for my group right now and people declaring it "successful". Like someone said above, we have no idea of the long term consequences.

gregd 6y ago

I've worked remotely now for just shy of 10 years in a row and more like 15 years total out of a 25 year IT career. I have found the biggest hurdles to remote work usually boil down to one thing, your clients or employer and fellow employees, who still "go into" an office, need to buy into the remote worker situation. This usually entails wrapping their heads around fewer meetings (even adhoc ones) and utilizing online tools exclusively...namely Slack, Teams, Skype, etc. What has helped tremendously is that since most companies adopted a sudden and an across the board "work from home" policy, it's forced collaboration via different avenues. Those of us who already worked from home, now are included in meetings and discussions that we would normally be left out of because our face wasn't physically in an office. I'm hopeful that we'll see a broader adoption rate even for those that still like the physical office, will be able to work from home on an as wanted basis..sick kid....sick spouse...deliveries expected...plumbing needs fixed..etc.

Angostura 6y ago
I've found that the biggest problem was missing those things that got discussed informally around the office. There would be interesting problems you could solve, but you rarely heard about them.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  I've become quite adept over the years at building up contacts across different parts of the business org, just through quick "water cooler" chats with people I meet while I'm making a cuppa. I'll even go to a different floor from time to time just to expose me to more people. The convenience factor of "Hi, how are you doing?" turning in to a little bit more of a conversation, in a circumstance when I know I'm not disturbing them in the middle of something. I don't get that with Slack etc. I'm really enjoying a bunch of the aspects of working from home, and picking up a strong preference for it, but I can't help but wonder about the impact less casual contact with other teams is having on overall performance. There's a lot you can get solved, much faster, by having friendly contacts all over the place (which of course, you have to be careful not to abuse or they'll stop being friendly contacts). That applies both to problems I'm dealing with, and problems they're dealing with that we'd never know about under other circumstances.

chooseaname 6y ago

I have worked remote full time for over half decade now and for the couple years before that it was optional. My opinion is that the work environment should he more fluid. There should be an option to WFH or office but whatever you choose on whatever particular day the environment should accommodate that.

6510 6y ago

The jobs that (no doubt) require face to face interaction will just have to be named differently. > I would not be surprised if some companies, currently paying sky-high salaries for employees in very high cost of living areas, find it attractive to enable more remote work. Billions will be struggling to survive at the bottom until we pay people more for what they do than where they live. I don't see why the disrupt mantra should only apply everywhere else? I can find really bad coders who can live comfortably on 400 euro per month. They are mostly bad because there is no entrance to the ivory tower. I was rather shocked by the laser like focus in people living on next to nothing. There is no casual chit chat, no time to read random articles about disrupting email and no room for a joke.

kwanbix 6y ago

I believe if anything this pandemic has shown, is that remote work is much worse than in office work. Boring Video meetings. Lack of interactions. It takes two or three times to do the same things remotely in my line of work (Product Manager). It is good to have the flexibility of working remotely, but I will never choose it as my way of working.

mxschumacher 6y ago
what is the psychology behind those countless, sometimes day-long meetings? A mix of collective procrastination and signaling of business? I'm not opposed to small, high interaction (not passive listening!) calls that are time-boxed; but somebody, somewhere will have to do actual work. The allocation between coordination/planning and execution seems way off in many companies.

draw_down 6y ago

This issue gets litigated to death on here. This is about the launch of a new product, not whether you had fun working at home during quarantine, come on

kiliancs 6y ago

It's hard to disagree that "it depends", but it's also hard to disagree that "remote work", generally, "works", and that it does so in contradiction with the assumptions and skepticism towards it that were much more established before the pandemic.

Tainnor 6y ago

Remote work has its advantages and disadvantages, objectively speaking. Subjectively, remote work doesn't work for me. It's depressing and I feel disconnected. I need physical human interaction.

randomsearch 6y ago

I absolutely love a lot of the Basecamp philosophy, I just don’t get the remote work thing. But they’re right about almost everything (or, I agree with them which to a human is the same thing), so they must be right about this too. So what am I missing? Remote work is lonely, isolating. You don’t have the same connection to a team. We don’t “go remote” with our friends and family as a policy (why bother reopening the pubs?) so what is it about colleagues that makes you think you don’t need to interact face to face with them? Humans are monkeys in suits and this biochemical robot needs proper input please. Ideation of any kind is garbage over Zoom. Ideation needs whiteboards and tea and hand gestures and walks outside and background noise and serendipity. I need that look you make that says “stupid” so we don’t waste any many time on this. I need to hear you sigh with exasperation. When things go wrong I don’t want to ask a slack channel wall of text for help, I want my team to pull together and buzz through it, supporting each other with their physical presence. I don’t want fucking emoticons I want real emotions.

codersteve 6y ago
>>We don’t “go remote” with our friends and family as a policy Not as a policy, but we probably do more of it to our detriment. It's a really excellent point.