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There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why this is not likely to work over the long term: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/126

There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why this is not likely to work over the long term: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720 It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote. But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely.

alexhutcheson 6y ago
A counterpoint would be that other companies, including Stripe, have found ways to make this work with some deliberate effort: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub-one-year https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub-one-year
timsally 6y ago
> But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely. Fully concur. Senior leadership needs to lead by example, whether it be remote work, taking paternity leave, or using a healthy amount of vacation. As some have pointed out, remote work as some companies has the potential to become the new "Unlimited Vacation"-- i.e. technically the policy but employees worried about advancement are unlikely to take advantage. Props to Quora leadership for leading by example.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  I don't know, I don't really personally need "leading by example". That would mean a leading position getting into the details of the code and that's not going to happen. I need clearly defined goals though and freedom to choose technology to achieve them. That is possible remotely the same as in an office, only that in an office costs me time unnecessarily, which is frustrating.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    "Leading by example" does not mean a leader doing the same job as you.
    - zelphirkalt 6y ago
      OK, that's fair and constructive criticism, I take that! You got a point there. Now it would be great to know, in what aspects a leading person can act in certain ways, that I can copy while doing my job. It also needs to be things, that I don't already do. That would be even more constructive criticism. You got a point though, and I will think about what those things could be, that someone in a leading position does, that I could copy as behaviors, that are ethically good and also good for the job.
  - mitchdoogle 6y ago
    I think the context here is that if a company advertises perks like unlimited vacation, and remote work, then you want to see that employees who take advantage of the perks are not at a disadvantage when it comes to the work they do or advancement in the company. If company leadership is taking frequent vacations and working from home often, it's a better sign that you won't be disadvantaged for doing that than if the company leadership was always working and always in the office. My first question after someone mentions unlimited vacation is "how much vacation did the boss use last year?". If it's less than 4 weeks, I would view that company as being dishonest about their vacation policy. The same thing applies to the number of hours worked. I value work-life balance and so if my boss is working 60 hours a week, I will know that company is not for me, because the boss would view me and my insistence on working 40 hours or less as uncommitted to company goals.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Senior leadership needs to lead by example I was having dinner with a friend of mine who is a senior manager at a well-known SV company that has "unlimited vacation." He was telling me that the CEO absolutely sets an example of taking unplugged vacations. In fact, he told me that they had a PR person a while back who just couldn't deal with the CEO being out of pocket for an extended time to the point where they just quit.
pcbro141 6y ago
> CEO and SLT will be remote What's an SLT?
- redplasticcup 6y ago
  Senior Leadership Team
- ceocoder 6y ago
  I’m assuming senior leadership team based on Adam’s tweet.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
The question is, does that 'community' effect offer a measurable, competitive advantage to businesses with offices vs those that don't? If no competitive edge is present, it is wasted spending that could be redirected into more fruitful efforts: growing R&D, etc.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  The parent comment isn't comparing fully remote with fully in the office. The issue they see (and discussed in the linked twitter thread) is in a company with some office, and some remote, remote workers will be left out from activities that take place in the office, and those physically present will do better career-wise.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    The parent isn't, but considering the full range of options is still a useful discussion to have, which is why I added my comment. It all comes down to money. The twitter thread prophesied losing all of your best talent in a half office / half remote setup. Your best, most skilled talent sticks around first and foremost for their premium compensation, above all other factors.
chongli 6y ago
a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely Which makes it sound like a bad thing. I would turn that around and say that remote work changes the relationship an employee has with their family and neighbourhood. Now what sounds better? I think it’s time we revived our relationships outside of work and started building communities to live in, not just to work in.
nbardy 6y ago
Wholeheartedly agree I worked remotely for the first 6 years or so of my career and hybrid approaches turn the remote team into second class citizens more like contractors.
- foogazi 6y ago
  Wonder if it ever happens the other way around? Does the office team ever turn into second class citizens?
  - elbear 6y ago
    I would say it depends on where the decision makers are.
    - foogazi 6y ago
      So it would not be about remote-first vs office-first as others have said If you are not invited to the VIP zoom meeting you are also second class no matter where you are
ryanSrich 6y ago
I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote work. It's not distributed. It's a nightmare. Every single person in the company, including executives, needs to be remote.
- aeternum 6y ago
  My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack. We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up. Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless. Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.
  - hoka 6y ago
    And what is the breakdown of executives, managers, etc between on-prem and remote?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Ar my company, which is (normally) a mixture of on-prem (at many different offices) and remote/WFH, I'm sure all of the senior leadership team have offices somewhere. But many/most of their reports and other people they coordinate with are in different offices/remote and most of them are traveling most of the time anyway. In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls. West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.
dangelo 6y ago
Sid explicitly says he expects we (Quora) avoided the pitfalls of hybrid companies in this comment: https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora/comment/2841193 https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora/comment/...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Two Stanford grad students explicitly stated how they expected to avoid the pitfalls of advertising-based search engines. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Inherent system dynamics in the mirror are larger than they appear. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/cd/22/06cd223f6b942dc74d85c93f07b0396c.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/cd/22/06cd223f6b942dc74d85c93f0...
- sytse 6y ago
  Thanks for linking. I missed the 6 hour 'coordination time' when I made that comment. I think that async as the default is very important to be remote first https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...
  - sytse 6y ago
    Based on this I mentioned Quora as an example on https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/stages/#remote-first https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/stages/#...
kamaal 6y ago
There are lots of reasons this will not work: In several organizations, there are a range of middle management layers who only do communications and lights on work. These people will be laid off in as little as a year when their positions start becoming obsolete. Really once the brokers get separated from party the culling will be ruthless. To me the biggest opposition will come from middle management layers. The obvious reason cited will be 'collaboration','productivity' etc, but the real reason will be saving their own jobs. There is also an added problem of work being easily shipped out to foreign lands. Outsourcing is likely to increase and that will invite more backlash. New hire onboarding is one more area of problem, mostly because of the absence of face to face initial assistance in getting onboard. This is true for big companies given the range of in house systems and tech some one needs to be aware of before starting to contribute. Lastly, I feel even at individual levels this will effect us all bad. Most programmers are bad at exercise and sitting at home will only amplify unhealthy lifestyles and eating habits. I expect such people will get worse off over time, obesity and diseases will increase. Absence of peer pressure/influence on skill gaining is one area I suspect will suffer in the absence of an office.
ignoramous 6y ago
Sid's twitter-thread mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264341436138270720.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264341436138270720.html
WildGreenLeave 6y ago
> Employees will discover that the company didn't make the shift from rewarding attendance to rewarding output, and that remote workers are not getting promoted at an equal rate because they are less visible. Jeff Morris Jr. had a good take on this in [0] Personally, I don't see this as a big problem. I never considered being promoted the way up in the (admittedly, just a few) companies I worked in. Mostly because I don't feel like working at the same place for a long time and because switching jobs will most likely give you a better pay too. Obviously, this is coming from someone in his mid twenties that has only worked in 2 places and then went freelance and mostly remote for businesses in The Netherlands. So maybe people do disagree at other places. [0]: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264345783433740288 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264345783433740288

alexhutcheson 6y ago

A counterpoint would be that other companies, including Stripe, have found ways to make this work with some deliberate effort: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub-one-year https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub-one-year

timsally 6y ago

> But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely. Fully concur. Senior leadership needs to lead by example, whether it be remote work, taking paternity leave, or using a healthy amount of vacation. As some have pointed out, remote work as some companies has the potential to become the new "Unlimited Vacation"-- i.e. technically the policy but employees worried about advancement are unlikely to take advantage. Props to Quora leadership for leading by example.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
I don't know, I don't really personally need "leading by example". That would mean a leading position getting into the details of the code and that's not going to happen. I need clearly defined goals though and freedom to choose technology to achieve them. That is possible remotely the same as in an office, only that in an office costs me time unnecessarily, which is frustrating.
- Angostura 6y ago
  "Leading by example" does not mean a leader doing the same job as you.
  - zelphirkalt 6y ago
    OK, that's fair and constructive criticism, I take that! You got a point there. Now it would be great to know, in what aspects a leading person can act in certain ways, that I can copy while doing my job. It also needs to be things, that I don't already do. That would be even more constructive criticism. You got a point though, and I will think about what those things could be, that someone in a leading position does, that I could copy as behaviors, that are ethically good and also good for the job.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  I think the context here is that if a company advertises perks like unlimited vacation, and remote work, then you want to see that employees who take advantage of the perks are not at a disadvantage when it comes to the work they do or advancement in the company. If company leadership is taking frequent vacations and working from home often, it's a better sign that you won't be disadvantaged for doing that than if the company leadership was always working and always in the office. My first question after someone mentions unlimited vacation is "how much vacation did the boss use last year?". If it's less than 4 weeks, I would view that company as being dishonest about their vacation policy. The same thing applies to the number of hours worked. I value work-life balance and so if my boss is working 60 hours a week, I will know that company is not for me, because the boss would view me and my insistence on working 40 hours or less as uncommitted to company goals.
ghaff 6y ago
>Senior leadership needs to lead by example I was having dinner with a friend of mine who is a senior manager at a well-known SV company that has "unlimited vacation." He was telling me that the CEO absolutely sets an example of taking unplugged vacations. In fact, he told me that they had a PR person a while back who just couldn't deal with the CEO being out of pocket for an extended time to the point where they just quit.

pcbro141 6y ago

> CEO and SLT will be remote What's an SLT?

redplasticcup 6y ago
Senior Leadership Team
ceocoder 6y ago
I’m assuming senior leadership team based on Adam’s tweet.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

The question is, does that 'community' effect offer a measurable, competitive advantage to businesses with offices vs those that don't? If no competitive edge is present, it is wasted spending that could be redirected into more fruitful efforts: growing R&D, etc.

albntomat0 6y ago
The parent comment isn't comparing fully remote with fully in the office. The issue they see (and discussed in the linked twitter thread) is in a company with some office, and some remote, remote workers will be left out from activities that take place in the office, and those physically present will do better career-wise.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  The parent isn't, but considering the full range of options is still a useful discussion to have, which is why I added my comment. It all comes down to money. The twitter thread prophesied losing all of your best talent in a half office / half remote setup. Your best, most skilled talent sticks around first and foremost for their premium compensation, above all other factors.

chongli 6y ago

a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely Which makes it sound like a bad thing. I would turn that around and say that remote work changes the relationship an employee has with their family and neighbourhood. Now what sounds better? I think it’s time we revived our relationships outside of work and started building communities to live in, not just to work in.

nbardy 6y ago

Wholeheartedly agree I worked remotely for the first 6 years or so of my career and hybrid approaches turn the remote team into second class citizens more like contractors.

foogazi 6y ago
Wonder if it ever happens the other way around? Does the office team ever turn into second class citizens?
- elbear 6y ago
  I would say it depends on where the decision makers are.
  - foogazi 6y ago
    So it would not be about remote-first vs office-first as others have said If you are not invited to the VIP zoom meeting you are also second class no matter where you are

ryanSrich 6y ago

I'm as big of a remote work supporter as you'll find. I'm often crucified for how anti-office I am. Having said that, a hybrid model is absolutely not remote work. It's not distributed. It's a nightmare. Every single person in the company, including executives, needs to be remote.

aeternum 6y ago
My company has made the hybrid model work. We've had a mix of fully remote along with two physical offices. It's really not all that complex, conference rooms have to have a video conference system that is added by default to all meetings. Ad-hoc meetings can start video with a single button press and a short code/url sent over slack. We strongly encourage employees to keep discussions in 'public' slack rooms rather than private messages. This can be noisy but allows for inclusivity. Team members are free to choose which channels to join and are encouraged configure alerting to manage the noise. Only takes a few minutes to set up. Performance needs to be measured by work output rather than time in the office, but companies should be doing that regardless. Face-to-face on-boarding and intros to the team are preferable so we would fly in new-hires wherever possible for the first couple weeks. Beneficial but not required.
- hoka 6y ago
  And what is the breakdown of executives, managers, etc between on-prem and remote?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Ar my company, which is (normally) a mixture of on-prem (at many different offices) and remote/WFH, I'm sure all of the senior leadership team have offices somewhere. But many/most of their reports and other people they coordinate with are in different offices/remote and most of them are traveling most of the time anyway. In think the opinions of a lot of people here are shaped by small companies where everyone is on a floor or two of a building. At global companies, the reality is that people are pretty distributed and you have late night and early morning phone calls. West Coast to Europe is tough for day-to-day synchronous communications. We don't have many people on the West Coast and are pretty much East Coast-centric (and Europe to a lesser degree). And that coordination works fairly well.

dangelo 6y ago

Sid explicitly says he expects we (Quora) avoided the pitfalls of hybrid companies in this comment: https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora/comment/2841193 https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora/comment/...

dredmorbius 6y ago
Two Stanford grad students explicitly stated how they expected to avoid the pitfalls of advertising-based search engines. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Inherent system dynamics in the mirror are larger than they appear. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/cd/22/06cd223f6b942dc74d85c93f07b0396c.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/cd/22/06cd223f6b942dc74d85c93f0...
sytse 6y ago
Thanks for linking. I missed the 6 hour 'coordination time' when I made that comment. I think that async as the default is very important to be remote first https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...
- sytse 6y ago
  Based on this I mentioned Quora as an example on https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/stages/#remote-first https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/stages/#...

kamaal 6y ago

There are lots of reasons this will not work: In several organizations, there are a range of middle management layers who only do communications and lights on work. These people will be laid off in as little as a year when their positions start becoming obsolete. Really once the brokers get separated from party the culling will be ruthless. To me the biggest opposition will come from middle management layers. The obvious reason cited will be 'collaboration','productivity' etc, but the real reason will be saving their own jobs. There is also an added problem of work being easily shipped out to foreign lands. Outsourcing is likely to increase and that will invite more backlash. New hire onboarding is one more area of problem, mostly because of the absence of face to face initial assistance in getting onboard. This is true for big companies given the range of in house systems and tech some one needs to be aware of before starting to contribute. Lastly, I feel even at individual levels this will effect us all bad. Most programmers are bad at exercise and sitting at home will only amplify unhealthy lifestyles and eating habits. I expect such people will get worse off over time, obesity and diseases will increase. Absence of peer pressure/influence on skill gaining is one area I suspect will suffer in the absence of an office.

ignoramous 6y ago

Sid's twitter-thread mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264341436138270720.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264341436138270720.html

WildGreenLeave 6y ago

> Employees will discover that the company didn't make the shift from rewarding attendance to rewarding output, and that remote workers are not getting promoted at an equal rate because they are less visible. Jeff Morris Jr. had a good take on this in [0] Personally, I don't see this as a big problem. I never considered being promoted the way up in the (admittedly, just a few) companies I worked in. Mostly because I don't feel like working at the same place for a long time and because switching jobs will most likely give you a better pay too. Obviously, this is coming from someone in his mid twenties that has only worked in 2 places and then went freelance and mostly remote for businesses in The Netherlands. So maybe people do disagree at other places. [0]: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264345783433740288 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264345783433740288