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1. WFH is not for everyone. There are people with kids and no dedicated workplace at home. There are people with low motivation and self-control, and office rou

1. WFH is not for everyone. There are people with kids and no dedicated workplace at home. There are people with low motivation and self-control, and office routine just helps them to keep up. 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. 3. WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers should put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication, documentation and checking. I never saw a single manager who likes WFH. And the management are the ones who decides.

torvald 6y ago
> You can't mix WFH with work in office. While I agree, I think there is room for organizations to at least be remote friendly. I'd love to work for an organization that allowed for WFH in the middle of build cycles/sprints and keeping a more strict at-office policy during planing phases of projects.
danans 6y ago
> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. You don't provide the line of thinking behind this statement. Why do you think this is the case? Also, even taking your statement at face value, you can still have a setup where there are fewer days in the office and more days working from home for every employee. Basically, have flexible in-office hours, whether that means only certain days, or certain parts of certain days. This sort of flexibility could be of great benefit to the employee who has kids, or is just tired of sitting in traffic or crowded trains 5 days a week. As a bonus, it could reduce crowding on transit lines during peak hours.
- rlt 6y ago
  I’ve worked at companies where this was done right and wrong. From my experience, if most employees are in an office and only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees) actively work to make sure they’re included in as much as possible. If it’s in the company’s culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to be included, they’re going to have a bad time. If those conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings with video chat, then it might work. I think it’s probably better to just have whole teams be entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.
- jen729w 6y ago
  This is what I came here to say. As usual, arguments (just in the general) are polarised: it’s either in the office 40 hours a week or work from a beach in Thailand and nothing in between. How about the sensible reality where we have an office, that we can get to, but we aren’t expected to turn up there every day just because? Where I work from home a few days a week to get that tricky stuff done – heaps harder in a distracting office – but then I go in a few days to connect with colleagues, catch up on the conversations, overhear things across the partition? This saves my sanity, money, and time, and saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? (Not that I disagree with the sentiment that all processes should be made WFH-friendly. I think that’s very sensible. But it doesn’t mean that I necessarily must WFH the whole time.)
  - TACIXAT 6y ago
    I believe their argument is that if you have one remote person you need to have a remote culture so that person is not left out of communications. If you rely on the office to communicate, a remote person is going to really miss out.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? Only if you hotel, which a lot of people don't want. In general, I agree with you. But if that's the norm it means people still need to live at least somewhat accessible to the office. For even one day per week, a 3 hour each way commute isn't really sustainable. And what if a team consists almost entirely of people who want to come in 3 or 4 days per week? They'll likely end up just ghosting the one person who will reluctantly drag themselves in 1 day per week.
- SergeAx 6y ago
  Sorry, I was too consumed by making a clear statements and didn't put enough effort into arguments. First of all, I am talking about teams of 20+ employees, e.g. 3 pizz-teams or more. This is a number when you definitely need two levels of management, event if one of them consists of makers-managers, e.g. teamleads. That is the scale where you can't keep all the data in one head. So the information is distributed among employees, managers and no one has a full pucture. Some people know their segments with specifics, some has a helicopter view with coarse details. Now, in office-based team you have a privilege to keep most of the data in the heads, because everyone can just walk to anyone and talk to them at the end of the day (pun intended). You have those daily stand-ups, weekly all-hands, but most of the data are still don't have a hard copies. Of course you are writing specs, maybe you are writing docs, chances are you are writing company-wide weekly updates (and wondering if anyone actually reading it). I know a lot of companies where people just changed in-person meetings to Zoom and are thinking they are fully remote now, In fact, they are just burning through data savings in their employees heads. It becomes visible rignt about now, after about 6 months of this quasi-remote. Teams are slowly turning into mess where right hand has no idea about left one. What took couple of weeks now takes month or even longer. So, managers are trying to fight it with more conference-calling, more reporting, itemized plans and Gant diagrams, putting some pressure to engineers. At the same time engineers are trying to restore horisontal communications via chats, which leads to distraction and further loss of productivity. This is because remote teams should work in a completely different manner. Great example is Gitlab, check out their handbook [0]. Mind you - that this is just a tip of the iceberg, they are incredibly transparent, but they are showing less than 5% of what they have. So, in fully remote company you should organize all processes and workflows in a manner when no one should be synchronized with anyone in real time. You should ditch conference-calling almost entirely and record remaining video meetings to be available later. You should switch from chats back to emails, yes! You have to write down everything: specs, docs, meeting protocols, decisions - both accepted and rejected. And this is just a beginning: you also should keep all those in an actual state. Do you know a lot of companies where documentation and code are 100% coherent 100% of the time? I don't. And of course most of this work is falling onto managers' shoulders: not only writing stuff by themselves, but checking that everyone else is writing stuff too. Some people (even in this thread) may say that their company is doing just fine without all this and they are just happy saving commuting time. But I am sure they are just being ineffective, which means sooner or later they will be predated by more effective competitors. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
commandlinefan 6y ago
> single employee working remotelyl I can’t disagree with any of your points, but for the past decade, I’ve mostly worked for huge corporations with multiple offices in multiple cities, and have only rarely worked with anybody I’m in the same building (or even the same city) as, including my boss. Until this year, they’ve demanded I physically drive to the office anyway, but there’s never been any reason; I’ve been on zoom calls all day anyway.
golemiprague 6y ago
I have been working for years in a company that mixed WFH and office, it depends how you do it. In our case we meet at the office periodically to catch up but not every day not everybody and not in every location. The schedule is built according to teams, their specific work needs and time constraints. It require some level of trust but from my experience comparing to office only or wfh only places I worked for, the combined approach is the best. We are mostly people with families so a bit more responsible and appreciative of having time at home but also wanting to escape home from time to time if you know what i mean. So it works perfect.
DenisM 6y ago
> I never saw a single manager who likes WFH I do. But you've never seen me, so there is truth to your words. The employees are quite productive, I hate commuting, and Zoom works remarkably well to stay connected. Not as well as it could be, but it's finally "over the hill". Two things worry me: - The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so we might be on borrowed time right now. - Onboarding new employees might become more difficult absent ongoing visual contact.
- SergeAx 6y ago
  If you were working in a truly remote company, onboarding would be the first process polishied to diamond facet condition. I think your company is not "living on borrowed time", but burning through information capital saved during previous years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Booleans 6y ago
  > The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so we might be on borrowed time right now. With WFH I feel like my social life is better than ever, even with the "quarantine". Due to the flexibility of work days I can meet friends outside at parks and enjoy socializing at a safe distance. This may change in the winter.
BeetleB 6y ago
> WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers should put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication, documentation and checking. I don't understand the connection between the first and second statements. Can you clarify? How does WFH put more burden on management?
Nursie 6y ago
Those people with kids would presumably have to make other arrangements if they were in an office?
nocman 6y ago
> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. ^ This is not true. Where I work we have a mix of people who work exclusively from home, some who work some days at home and some in-office, and some who work exclusively from the office. This is including managers (some of whom like working from home, btw). Some people's jobs work better with one arrangement, some with another. It was like that before March, and now way more people work exclusively from home. Now I'm sure there are some jobs where having a mix complicates things too much, but it is definitely not universally true that having a mix never works. My workplace is no special case either, I know of others that work the same way. [ edited to remove unintentional indentation ]
- ec109685 6y ago
  Is it better now that everyone is working from home now?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Not in general of course but in the way you're asking, yes. My broader team was already pretty distributed around North America and Europe already. And other groups I work with were pretty distributed as well. But some were in offices and would do calls from conference rooms. It is better, to at least some degree, with everyone now on their own camera/microphone. (And in fact a couple sub-teams already had a rule that everyone did calls from their own computer/phone.)
  - nocman 6y ago
    I like it better, and the other developers like it better. It is a very good fit for our jobs, and has advantages that all of us very much appreciate. I haven't done a company-wide survey :-D However, I have not seen complaints from anyone just dying to get back to the office.
dukeyukey 6y ago
> I never saw a single manager who likes WFH. You never saw them because they were WFH :D But seriously, I've had managers who were happy to WFH a few times a week, though that team was pretty much self-managing on a day-to-day basis with the manager mostly there to make organisational decisions and to provide cover from above.

torvald 6y ago

> You can't mix WFH with work in office. While I agree, I think there is room for organizations to at least be remote friendly. I'd love to work for an organization that allowed for WFH in the middle of build cycles/sprints and keeping a more strict at-office policy during planing phases of projects.

danans 6y ago

> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. You don't provide the line of thinking behind this statement. Why do you think this is the case? Also, even taking your statement at face value, you can still have a setup where there are fewer days in the office and more days working from home for every employee. Basically, have flexible in-office hours, whether that means only certain days, or certain parts of certain days. This sort of flexibility could be of great benefit to the employee who has kids, or is just tired of sitting in traffic or crowded trains 5 days a week. As a bonus, it could reduce crowding on transit lines during peak hours.

rlt 6y ago
I’ve worked at companies where this was done right and wrong. From my experience, if most employees are in an office and only a minority are remote, the remote employees are at a big disadvantage, unless the company (or remote employees) actively work to make sure they’re included in as much as possible. If it’s in the company’s culture to have lots of ad-hoc in-person conversations where remote employees are unlikely to be included, they’re going to have a bad time. If those conversations mostly happen in chat or scheduled meetings with video chat, then it might work. I think it’s probably better to just have whole teams be entirely (or at least majority) remote, or entirely onsite.
jen729w 6y ago
This is what I came here to say. As usual, arguments (just in the general) are polarised: it’s either in the office 40 hours a week or work from a beach in Thailand and nothing in between. How about the sensible reality where we have an office, that we can get to, but we aren’t expected to turn up there every day just because? Where I work from home a few days a week to get that tricky stuff done – heaps harder in a distracting office – but then I go in a few days to connect with colleagues, catch up on the conversations, overhear things across the partition? This saves my sanity, money, and time, and saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? (Not that I disagree with the sentiment that all processes should be made WFH-friendly. I think that’s very sensible. But it doesn’t mean that I necessarily must WFH the whole time.)
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  I believe their argument is that if you have one remote person you need to have a remote culture so that person is not left out of communications. If you rely on the office to communicate, a remote person is going to really miss out.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >saves my employer ~50% of their office space. Win-win, surely? Only if you hotel, which a lot of people don't want. In general, I agree with you. But if that's the norm it means people still need to live at least somewhat accessible to the office. For even one day per week, a 3 hour each way commute isn't really sustainable. And what if a team consists almost entirely of people who want to come in 3 or 4 days per week? They'll likely end up just ghosting the one person who will reluctantly drag themselves in 1 day per week.
SergeAx 6y ago
Sorry, I was too consumed by making a clear statements and didn't put enough effort into arguments. First of all, I am talking about teams of 20+ employees, e.g. 3 pizz-teams or more. This is a number when you definitely need two levels of management, event if one of them consists of makers-managers, e.g. teamleads. That is the scale where you can't keep all the data in one head. So the information is distributed among employees, managers and no one has a full pucture. Some people know their segments with specifics, some has a helicopter view with coarse details. Now, in office-based team you have a privilege to keep most of the data in the heads, because everyone can just walk to anyone and talk to them at the end of the day (pun intended). You have those daily stand-ups, weekly all-hands, but most of the data are still don't have a hard copies. Of course you are writing specs, maybe you are writing docs, chances are you are writing company-wide weekly updates (and wondering if anyone actually reading it). I know a lot of companies where people just changed in-person meetings to Zoom and are thinking they are fully remote now, In fact, they are just burning through data savings in their employees heads. It becomes visible rignt about now, after about 6 months of this quasi-remote. Teams are slowly turning into mess where right hand has no idea about left one. What took couple of weeks now takes month or even longer. So, managers are trying to fight it with more conference-calling, more reporting, itemized plans and Gant diagrams, putting some pressure to engineers. At the same time engineers are trying to restore horisontal communications via chats, which leads to distraction and further loss of productivity. This is because remote teams should work in a completely different manner. Great example is Gitlab, check out their handbook [0]. Mind you - that this is just a tip of the iceberg, they are incredibly transparent, but they are showing less than 5% of what they have. So, in fully remote company you should organize all processes and workflows in a manner when no one should be synchronized with anyone in real time. You should ditch conference-calling almost entirely and record remaining video meetings to be available later. You should switch from chats back to emails, yes! You have to write down everything: specs, docs, meeting protocols, decisions - both accepted and rejected. And this is just a beginning: you also should keep all those in an actual state. Do you know a lot of companies where documentation and code are 100% coherent 100% of the time? I don't. And of course most of this work is falling onto managers' shoulders: not only writing stuff by themselves, but checking that everyone else is writing stuff too. Some people (even in this thread) may say that their company is doing just fine without all this and they are just happy saving commuting time. But I am sure they are just being ineffective, which means sooner or later they will be predated by more effective competitors. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

commandlinefan 6y ago

> single employee working remotelyl I can’t disagree with any of your points, but for the past decade, I’ve mostly worked for huge corporations with multiple offices in multiple cities, and have only rarely worked with anybody I’m in the same building (or even the same city) as, including my boss. Until this year, they’ve demanded I physically drive to the office anyway, but there’s never been any reason; I’ve been on zoom calls all day anyway.

golemiprague 6y ago

I have been working for years in a company that mixed WFH and office, it depends how you do it. In our case we meet at the office periodically to catch up but not every day not everybody and not in every location. The schedule is built according to teams, their specific work needs and time constraints. It require some level of trust but from my experience comparing to office only or wfh only places I worked for, the combined approach is the best. We are mostly people with families so a bit more responsible and appreciative of having time at home but also wanting to escape home from time to time if you know what i mean. So it works perfect.

DenisM 6y ago

> I never saw a single manager who likes WFH I do. But you've never seen me, so there is truth to your words. The employees are quite productive, I hate commuting, and Zoom works remarkably well to stay connected. Not as well as it could be, but it's finally "over the hill". Two things worry me: - The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so we might be on borrowed time right now. - Onboarding new employees might become more difficult absent ongoing visual contact.

SergeAx 6y ago
If you were working in a truly remote company, onboarding would be the first process polishied to diamond facet condition. I think your company is not "living on borrowed time", but burning through information capital saved during previous years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Booleans 6y ago
> The long-term isolation is detrimental to mental health, so we might be on borrowed time right now. With WFH I feel like my social life is better than ever, even with the "quarantine". Due to the flexibility of work days I can meet friends outside at parks and enjoy socializing at a safe distance. This may change in the winter.

BeetleB 6y ago

> WFH shifts most of the burden onto management. Managers should put 120-150% of effort in planning, communication, documentation and checking. I don't understand the connection between the first and second statements. Can you clarify? How does WFH put more burden on management?

Nursie 6y ago

Those people with kids would presumably have to make other arrangements if they were in an office?

nocman 6y ago

> 2. You can't mix WFH with work in office. It's either one or the other. If you have a single employee working remotely - you should transform all the processes to WFH-style. ^ This is not true. Where I work we have a mix of people who work exclusively from home, some who work some days at home and some in-office, and some who work exclusively from the office. This is including managers (some of whom like working from home, btw). Some people's jobs work better with one arrangement, some with another. It was like that before March, and now way more people work exclusively from home. Now I'm sure there are some jobs where having a mix complicates things too much, but it is definitely not universally true that having a mix never works. My workplace is no special case either, I know of others that work the same way. [ edited to remove unintentional indentation ]

ec109685 6y ago
Is it better now that everyone is working from home now?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Not in general of course but in the way you're asking, yes. My broader team was already pretty distributed around North America and Europe already. And other groups I work with were pretty distributed as well. But some were in offices and would do calls from conference rooms. It is better, to at least some degree, with everyone now on their own camera/microphone. (And in fact a couple sub-teams already had a rule that everyone did calls from their own computer/phone.)
- nocman 6y ago
  I like it better, and the other developers like it better. It is a very good fit for our jobs, and has advantages that all of us very much appreciate. I haven't done a company-wide survey :-D However, I have not seen complaints from anyone just dying to get back to the office.

dukeyukey 6y ago

> I never saw a single manager who likes WFH. You never saw them because they were WFH :D But seriously, I've had managers who were happy to WFH a few times a week, though that team was pretty much self-managing on a day-to-day basis with the manager mostly there to make organisational decisions and to provide cover from above.