8 ms·

I've mentioned this before, but WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (or

I've mentioned this before, but WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (or organization). -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. -- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great. -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation. For some people, remote working is really not good. And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...

DeepThoughts 6y ago
I’d like to propose a reframing of your scenarios for objectivity: WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios. WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself. Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.
- jetru 6y ago
  If everyone was as reasonable as you, the world would be a nice place
  - nosequel 6y ago
    Their name checks out.
- treis 6y ago
  I feel like it's an all or nothing proposition. If you have some WFH and some in the office over time the office folks will out politic the WFH folks. It's also hard to be a remote attendee of a meeting that's happening with some in person. Definitely feel like a third wheel. IMHO, if you mix WFH and office the WFH folks will end up like internal contractors that don't have the same advancement potential as their office colleagues.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I respectfully disagree. Many larger companies already are coordinating across multiple locations and timezones. One of the teams I work with has people on Eastern US time (though not all in the same office even before this) and Europe. Another group is in two geographically separated offices in Eastern Time. And other groups are just scattered all over.
    - tuna-piano 6y ago
      Just going to guess that whichever location the team has the most people and wherever manager works from become the places where big decisions are made and promotions come from. I've worked remote when the rest of the team is in an office, and it's definitely not for all positions/teams.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I agree that situations where N-1 of the team is physically located in an office and one person isn't tend to be difficult. But we're mostly now often talking about significant distribution/WFH. The groups I'm involved with were already distributed with not much in terms of a "home base."
  - spfzero 6y ago
    But it would have to be some really serious “advancement opportunity” to make up for the 90 minutes of your life spent commuting every day, no?
    - 6y ago
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  Can you provide some examples of WFO being such an issue? Is it mostly "commuting sucks"?
  - 22c 6y ago
    Commuting, (mostly) fixed hours, noise levels, personal space. To expand a bit on the fixed hours, early-birds tend to be fine with getting to the office early, but night owls will either get kicked out or have to deal with people vacuuming floors around them.
    - perryizgr8 6y ago
      Our workplace has a nice solution for this. Office timings are 8 to 5. Early birds can arrive at 8 and leave by 5. But this is not enforced. Many night owls only arrive by 11 or 12 and leave later or leave by 3 or 4 and continue work from home at their time. Leadership just needs to be flexible enough.
  - snegu 6y ago
    I think the biggest issue is that you need to live near your office. This usually means you have to spend a lot more on housing than you would otherwise. This is why I went remote - we couldn't afford any houses near my workplace.
  - treis 6y ago
    WFO nickels and dimes you on equipment. I can bill out 300k in hours a year but getting a company to spend $1,000 on monitors, chair, keyboard, etc. is like pulling teeth. They expect me to work on a 14" laptop and maybe an external monitor. At home I can use my setup.
    - perryizgr8 6y ago
      If I'm WFH why should I spend my money and use my equipment to work? I have a large gaming monitor, why should my company expect everyone to make similar purchases to be able to work properly? In office even though companies are miserly, they do provide a baseline of equipment that is good enough for most people.
- ksk 6y ago
  More companies would adopt WFH if they see the success (primarily economically) of other companies who adopt it. Its really as simple as that. Why would any company want to rent expensive commercial real-estate and other overhead if the end result was _worse_ for their bottom line. Personally, I believe that WFO is still the better way to function. Human collaboration is tied in closely with pre-existing conventions, using multiple modes of communication, and building camaraderie. I think its clear that conventions and ritualistic practices help a ton with social cohesion. Also we use multiple methods to communicate our ideas and feelings - verbal, non-verbal, physical, non-physical, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Someone punching the air when they've solved a hard problem, or some co-worker who isn't on your team that you only occasionally meet, excitedly telling you a fun story about their vacation or whatever. There is tons of communication that happens between humans in an office that is difficult if not impossible to replicate in a WFH environment. As a society, I think we'd be poorer for that if we lose it.
moksly 6y ago
I'm a working parent, with ADHD and only just recovering form depression and stress, and the increased WFH during 2020 has been the only thing that kept me from breaking. I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder. So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though. The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office. This is going to be one of the problems. Some people who desperately want to come back to the office do so and discover that most of their co-workers haven't. And some of those co-workers have, with management blessing, moved outside the easy "drop in for one day a week" radius. I expect office/remote workstyles are going to be popular questions in interviews over at least the next few years.
  - throwa112233 6y ago
    Maybe WeWork will make a comeback. People that need to have others around or need a commute so they can listen to pod casts can go to a shared workspace.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There are two separate things. One is people who want to be in-person with their team all day. People who want clear work-life separation (and who may not have space like a dedicated office at home). Co-working spaces can solve for the latter but not the former.
- thonos 6y ago
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Why is it so hard to send someone an email with an idea, or ask for a quick chat? What's great about WFH is that everyone is equally reachable, so you don't fall prey to proximity bias.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  It's impossible to replicate the informality via either email/IM or phone. It's spotting someone who is between tasks and bouncing an idea of them.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    My company and team have * a post-standup, periodic “coffee time” meeting my team has * multiple random channels my team and also company has, with such topics as ‘allow developers to yell, all messages here must be in all-caps-rage’ as well as a literal regular random channel that has lots of memes * an open, inclusive and encouraging culture where people promoting ideas at a team or department and possibly even company level is commonplace and encouraged. We haven’t had much of a lack of culture and idea generation. I’m sorry you’re suggesting you’re not experiencing this.
  - notfromhere 6y ago
    It’s not. This is purely a cultural issue.
    - richardwhiuk 6y ago
      Sure, if we can instantly change all of human culture and psychology, it's not a problem. In the real world, however...
somedudetbh 6y ago
>-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy. I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is. If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.
- lc9er 6y ago
  Exactly! It’s very, very difficult to focus for extended periods of time when your kid gets up and tries to walk away from their class every 10 minutes. Or wants a snack, to talk or play, because you now encompass the entirety of their social life.
- throwa112233 6y ago
  Yeah I find this frustrating as well. Many people conflating WFH and WFH during a pandemic.
arcticbull 6y ago
> -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?
- edoceo 6y ago
  Oh, one of my junior players has this as an issue now. And it manifest as scope creep for everything we assign. They just see other things that could be added, or add work to other layers of the stack. It's easier to keep folk on track when they are closer. It's why we use an always on RTC thing so it's easy for crew to ping me ad-hoc for guidance.
noahtallen 6y ago
> For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture. In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly. I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts! This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.
tuna-piano 6y ago
You've focused on the employee and not the employer. Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities. I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.

DeepThoughts 6y ago

I’d like to propose a reframing of your scenarios for objectivity: WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios. WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself. Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.

jetru 6y ago
If everyone was as reasonable as you, the world would be a nice place
- nosequel 6y ago
  Their name checks out.
treis 6y ago
I feel like it's an all or nothing proposition. If you have some WFH and some in the office over time the office folks will out politic the WFH folks. It's also hard to be a remote attendee of a meeting that's happening with some in person. Definitely feel like a third wheel. IMHO, if you mix WFH and office the WFH folks will end up like internal contractors that don't have the same advancement potential as their office colleagues.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I respectfully disagree. Many larger companies already are coordinating across multiple locations and timezones. One of the teams I work with has people on Eastern US time (though not all in the same office even before this) and Europe. Another group is in two geographically separated offices in Eastern Time. And other groups are just scattered all over.
  - tuna-piano 6y ago
    Just going to guess that whichever location the team has the most people and wherever manager works from become the places where big decisions are made and promotions come from. I've worked remote when the rest of the team is in an office, and it's definitely not for all positions/teams.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I agree that situations where N-1 of the team is physically located in an office and one person isn't tend to be difficult. But we're mostly now often talking about significant distribution/WFH. The groups I'm involved with were already distributed with not much in terms of a "home base."
- spfzero 6y ago
  But it would have to be some really serious “advancement opportunity” to make up for the 90 minutes of your life spent commuting every day, no?
  - 6y ago
richardwhiuk 6y ago
Can you provide some examples of WFO being such an issue? Is it mostly "commuting sucks"?
- 22c 6y ago
  Commuting, (mostly) fixed hours, noise levels, personal space. To expand a bit on the fixed hours, early-birds tend to be fine with getting to the office early, but night owls will either get kicked out or have to deal with people vacuuming floors around them.
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    Our workplace has a nice solution for this. Office timings are 8 to 5. Early birds can arrive at 8 and leave by 5. But this is not enforced. Many night owls only arrive by 11 or 12 and leave later or leave by 3 or 4 and continue work from home at their time. Leadership just needs to be flexible enough.
- snegu 6y ago
  I think the biggest issue is that you need to live near your office. This usually means you have to spend a lot more on housing than you would otherwise. This is why I went remote - we couldn't afford any houses near my workplace.
- treis 6y ago
  WFO nickels and dimes you on equipment. I can bill out 300k in hours a year but getting a company to spend $1,000 on monitors, chair, keyboard, etc. is like pulling teeth. They expect me to work on a 14" laptop and maybe an external monitor. At home I can use my setup.
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    If I'm WFH why should I spend my money and use my equipment to work? I have a large gaming monitor, why should my company expect everyone to make similar purchases to be able to work properly? In office even though companies are miserly, they do provide a baseline of equipment that is good enough for most people.
ksk 6y ago
More companies would adopt WFH if they see the success (primarily economically) of other companies who adopt it. Its really as simple as that. Why would any company want to rent expensive commercial real-estate and other overhead if the end result was _worse_ for their bottom line. Personally, I believe that WFO is still the better way to function. Human collaboration is tied in closely with pre-existing conventions, using multiple modes of communication, and building camaraderie. I think its clear that conventions and ritualistic practices help a ton with social cohesion. Also we use multiple methods to communicate our ideas and feelings - verbal, non-verbal, physical, non-physical, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Someone punching the air when they've solved a hard problem, or some co-worker who isn't on your team that you only occasionally meet, excitedly telling you a fun story about their vacation or whatever. There is tons of communication that happens between humans in an office that is difficult if not impossible to replicate in a WFH environment. As a society, I think we'd be poorer for that if we lose it.

moksly 6y ago

I'm a working parent, with ADHD and only just recovering form depression and stress, and the increased WFH during 2020 has been the only thing that kept me from breaking. I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder. So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though. The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.

ghaff 6y ago
>Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office. This is going to be one of the problems. Some people who desperately want to come back to the office do so and discover that most of their co-workers haven't. And some of those co-workers have, with management blessing, moved outside the easy "drop in for one day a week" radius. I expect office/remote workstyles are going to be popular questions in interviews over at least the next few years.
- throwa112233 6y ago
  Maybe WeWork will make a comeback. People that need to have others around or need a commute so they can listen to pod casts can go to a shared workspace.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There are two separate things. One is people who want to be in-person with their team all day. People who want clear work-life separation (and who may not have space like a dedicated office at home). Co-working spaces can solve for the latter but not the former.
thonos 6y ago

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Why is it so hard to send someone an email with an idea, or ask for a quick chat? What's great about WFH is that everyone is equally reachable, so you don't fall prey to proximity bias.

richardwhiuk 6y ago
It's impossible to replicate the informality via either email/IM or phone. It's spotting someone who is between tasks and bouncing an idea of them.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  My company and team have * a post-standup, periodic “coffee time” meeting my team has * multiple random channels my team and also company has, with such topics as ‘allow developers to yell, all messages here must be in all-caps-rage’ as well as a literal regular random channel that has lots of memes * an open, inclusive and encouraging culture where people promoting ideas at a team or department and possibly even company level is commonplace and encouraged. We haven’t had much of a lack of culture and idea generation. I’m sorry you’re suggesting you’re not experiencing this.
- notfromhere 6y ago
  It’s not. This is purely a cultural issue.
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    Sure, if we can instantly change all of human culture and psychology, it's not a problem. In the real world, however...

somedudetbh 6y ago

>-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy. I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is. If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.

lc9er 6y ago
Exactly! It’s very, very difficult to focus for extended periods of time when your kid gets up and tries to walk away from their class every 10 minutes. Or wants a snack, to talk or play, because you now encompass the entirety of their social life.
throwa112233 6y ago
Yeah I find this frustrating as well. Many people conflating WFH and WFH during a pandemic.

arcticbull 6y ago

> -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?

edoceo 6y ago
Oh, one of my junior players has this as an issue now. And it manifest as scope creep for everything we assign. They just see other things that could be added, or add work to other layers of the stack. It's easier to keep folk on track when they are closer. It's why we use an always on RTC thing so it's easy for crew to ping me ad-hoc for guidance.

noahtallen 6y ago

> For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture. In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly. I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts! This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.

tuna-piano 6y ago

You've focused on the employee and not the employer. Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities. I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.