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To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into

To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).

wtvanhest 6y ago
I'm sure you have talked to your exec team at length about the pluses and minuses of that type of structure. That structure feels like a great trade-off that gives employees enough flexibility to reduce their housing costs, while also keeping the culture in place. Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts your team had while you explored the options available? It feels like such a good move IMHO, I'm very interested in learning how you got there.
boulos 6y ago
Thanks for highlighting the set of challenges (and also right near the top of the blog post). Do you or the EIU intend to make the study results more broadly available? (There was a good discussion of Nick Bloom’s recent surveys yesterday, and this would be a nice addition to that body of work) Edit: it was in the blog post... https://lostfocus.eiu.com/ https://lostfocus.eiu.com/ Edit 2: the survey writeup is great (and I’ve submitted it separately if people want to discuss that; Dropbox itself moving to remote allowed w/ studios is its own discussion)
sharkweek 6y ago
I love the idea. REI I believe is moving to a model, after having just sold their massive new HQ to Facebook, where they will establish a handful of micro-offices around the country where their now distributed team can meet. Plenty of kinks to work out I’m sure, but feels like the future of work to me.
- allthecybers 6y ago
  I love this idea and think this could be great for many distributed work forces. Maybe even stimulating to smaller regional economies in the US.
swalsh 6y ago
This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better)
- harikb 6y ago
  I will take 4K video and audio that doesn't drop off and a world where there is universal fiber/good connectivity. Then after that, we can talk about VR.
  - rgbrenner 6y ago
    Have you seen what Nvidia is doing with Maxine? The compression is so good we might not need fiber to do 4k or VR conferencing.
- NationalPark 6y ago
  Let's start with fixing the barely perceptible delay in regular video conferencing that causes the, "No, you talk" thing we all enjoy.
  - gomox 6y ago
    This is more likely caused by people videoconferencing with computer speakers, than by network delay.
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- occz 6y ago
  >This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better) Give 'screen control sharing' (for lack of better name?) software a try, two variants I've used are USE Together and Tuple. Being able to have two sets of input devices for the same screen is actually fantastic for collaboration - the pair-programming experience is arguably better than being there in person.
johnward 6y ago
> which is problematic for building teams and culture; Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".
- toolz 6y ago
  The best friends I've made in my career were from remote only teams. I guess you could say full remote is problematic in the sense that so is in-office for building relationships/teams. It's a trade off and I suspect the winning strategy is the one that is invested into the most, rather than one being inherently better than the other.
- zikzak 6y ago
  We've been doing a couple of things now that everyone is wfh. We have these mixer meetings on Friday where you meet with people you never work with normally, in small groups, and talk about what you're working on. We also have online trivia contests and other games sometimes it just shoot the breeze (as sanctioned, boss scheduled meetings). As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out. I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
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- stagger87 6y ago
  If you are genuinely asking, there are people, myself included, who don't think virtual interactions are a substitute for building relationships. It's the same reason I want to transition to meeting someone in person after talking to them on a dating app. I can totally understand that everyone is different and may not think the same. For instance, if the only advantage of in-person interactions at work you can think of is goofing around, I suspect you are better suited for remote work.
bob33212 6y ago
I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons. 1. They prefer a predictable schedule. 2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues) 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. 4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it. The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building. We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
    - patmorgan23 6y ago
derefr 6y ago
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces. In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something. At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have. It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)
- keiferski 6y ago
  Isn't this basically the same thing as Regus?
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  Isn't that exactly what WeWork's business model was?
  - danielhlockard 6y ago
    Yes, except this is private to IBM employees. Helpful when you're in an industry with a lot of regulatory / compliance oversight.
  - silentsea90 6y ago
    All of us naysayers failed to appreciate the foresight that Mr Neumann and Softbank displayed. Joke's on us :D
    - 6y ago
headmelted 6y ago
"Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture" This is stated as fact everywhere but I've not seen supporting evidence anywhere. I spend about as much time in my day speaking to other people as I would have done productively and by choice before. The only difference now is that I'm more able to avoid extraneous meetings and other drags on my time that don't benefit from my participation (because they're largely irrelevant to my work and vice versa). In any case kudos for taking this step which I'm sure is not an easy decision to make given that it's a fairly seismic shift to how most companies approach work and employment.
- karmasimida 6y ago
  What evidence do you seek? It is obvious to me that the way you interact with people face-to-face is different from the way you would do with online chat.
  - gedy 6y ago
    That can be a good thing for non-charismatic types. I know that I've hurt my career at times in past due to in-person failures like being visibly angry or raising voice over dumb statements/power-positioning by leader-types. Being remote has helped me throttle those reactions and not be so public about my feelings.
    - ticmasta 6y ago
      Well if you've hurt your career with in-person failures, wait until you experience the context-free over-reaction that come from a faux pas made in a faceless medium that keeps record of your transgression forever. Getting mad at someone in-person also provides an opportunity to build a relationship that allows for a more intimate sharing of emotions; try getting that with email and slack.
      - zaarn 6y ago
        If you're used to communicating online, this is no issue. As an anti-social type myself, I'm more comfortable with communicating online and I'm confident in my ability to not commit a faux-pas that easily compared to in-person. I think you underestimate how much WFH helps people with social issues.
mmm_grayons 6y ago
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. Doesn't this also have the problem with neither flexibility nor community, especially for once a quarter? More importantly, this means that people now have to maintain their own home offices but still have to live close to a big city and pay the stupidly high costs associated with that.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Most big cities, if you drive 1-2 hours, you can get to much cheaper housing and that's a pretty doable commute if you only do it every week or two. And for once a quarter, you get on a plane--which is pretty much what my broader team did pre-pandemic.
greymalik 6y ago
> ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office Can you explain what you mean by WFH when you feel like it reducing flexibility?
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ryanSrich 6y ago
> Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios" Yeah this is 100% not remote work.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Like you, I am genuinely baffled by "WFH 4 days a week" arrangements (as compared to "WFH when you have errands that make it necessary", which is pretty common). If I have to come into the office 1 day a week, then I still have to foot the bill for a home office within driving range of the office, which sucks. I think at once a quarter you're starting to look at the ability to live on the other side of the country and fly in when necessary, which I think is much more price efficient.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  If your office is in SF, WFH 4 days a week doesn't let you live in ultra-low-cost rural Iowa but it could let you at least work in slightly-lower-cost Modesto or even Redding. Not ideal but better than a $4K/mo SF apartment. I think I'd be willing to live with a 4 hour commute once a week (or get your private pilot's license and you're about 1.5 hours away). Not convenient but do-able.
  - h327 6y ago
    The idea of flying to work is fun, and I have seen it pop up in a lot of these WFH discussions. But even if you have your GA license, you'll need to rent or own the plane, pay directly or indirectly for hangar space and fuel, and deal with the air traffic congestion that would arise from more than just a handful of people trying this trick. In my opinion these barriers make private flying too dissimilar to driving a car to make it a feasible commute comparison.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      Totally agree. I've got my ticket and I wouldn't do it unless I actually lived on an airpark with a hangar at my house, and I'd have to get my instrument rating to be able to rely on it for commuting.
    - jermaustin1 6y ago
      I was looking into it for commuting from Pueblo, CO to Denver. The place I was interviewing was a short walk and bus ride from an air field, and Pueblo is about 20-40% the cost of a similar commutable home in Denver, the flight (which I have done a dozen times in MSFS) is only 55 minutes. So round trip with commuting to and from the airports/fields, doing preflight, and parking, was only 3 hours which is about the time it takes one way by car assuming normal traffic.
ghaff 6y ago
>Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely Not necessarily. I work in a group that's very distributed and we get together (normally) a couple of times a year plus another once or twice with a larger group. Of course, that doesn't work if it's more like getting together in person every week or two. In any case, I agree it makes sense to collaborate. If you wander into the office and no one you know and work with is there, it doesn't make much sense to come in.
- xur17 6y ago
  I work at a 100% remote company, and we do this as well (before covid). We're a smaller company, so I'd be curious to hear how it scales, but at least for us I've found it to work pretty well.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I think it scales because, at a larger company, everyone isn't realistically going to get together anyway. So you get together in groups of various sizes. (And there are usually opportunities to get together with an even larger cross-section at things like user conferences.)
trimbo 6y ago
Not too long ago, Dropbox signed the largest office lease in SF history[1]. What changes are you making to Dropbox's RE plan in light of this? [1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/10/dropbox-kilroy-sf-largest-office-lease-krc.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/10/dro...
- syspec 6y ago
  I know the Pinterest cancelled their lease, I forget how much but they had to pay 90M to do it, but they got out of it
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    I wonder why a landlord would even entertain such an offer. It's not uncommon for leases to be ~15 years. That is a hell of a risky move to think that you'll be ahead by offering a buyout with the hope of finding new tenants.
    - notherthrowaway 6y ago
      You could use the $90 million to diversify your real estate assets or pay down your debt.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      It's entirely possible it was in a contract.
    - ponker 6y ago
      For a large commerical real estate deal, the termination fee is always negotiated as part of the lease contract.
    - varenc 6y ago
      The early cancellation payout was probably part of the original lease agreement. Big commercial contracts are dense and cover a lot of contingencies. You can usually find a public company's leases in SEC fillings. I couldn't find one for Pinterest, but I found Dropbox's 200+ page lease agreement here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001467623/000119312518055809/d451946dex1019.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001467623/000119312... (it's a 15 year lease, with the cost increasing from $45 million/year to $68 million/years over the 15 years. Hope there's some option to re-negotiate in there)
m0zg 6y ago
That's the way it should be IMO. It's idiotic to have to drag oneself to the office to do work which can be done just as well, if not better, without getting out of bed. It's also bad to not be able to get teams together from time to time, to brainstorm, discuss things, and just plain get to know each other. I hope companies find a happy middle ground at some point, and I also hope managers can figure out how to manage people effectively in such circumstances. Currently nobody at the previously "butts in chairs" companies knows how to do that, and my manager friends at places like Google, FB and MS are unsure if they're "holding it right".
choppaface 6y ago
Am curious what sort of metrics and studies that Dropbox HR plans to do to assess this change. The current COVID-mandated WFH atmosphere is a lot different than how things were pre-COVID. In particular, there's the impact of children at home, and for ICs there's a special stigma (due to COVID) to support isolation. However, Dropbox's culture has always been uniquely supportive of IC independence during pre-COVID times despite the fancy office, "Michelin Star" cafeteria, etc. Curious to see how the change is assessed, even if the detailed hypotheses supporting it are never fully explained.
- rocqua 6y ago
  What are "IC"s?
  - traek 6y ago
    Individual Contributors (i.e. non-managers).
taxcoder 6y ago
Definitely agree with the idea of a scheduled in office time. I work ~400 miles from my company's office and get there several times a year. I enjoy WFH, but would prefer being close enough to go to the office more often.
jordache 6y ago
predominant WFH w/ ability to get together at the office seems like an excellent mixture of flexibility and adequate face time. Strict mode on either ends of the spectrum is non-ideal for most people I would assume.
nimchimpsky 6y ago
I mean that is your interpretation/experience of it. Mine is entirely different, which would be entirely different to others. If your workspace can't handle wfh you have other issues imo
wsc981 6y ago
> ... which is problematic for building teams and culture; Maybe I am alone in this, but I care very little for culture. Perhaps it's because I am a freelancer. I work for a company to bring results and I just try to communicate clearly. When there's doubts we have a chat over Skype, since sometimes direct communication is just more efficient than using chat. I believe people can work well as teams while WFH and some kind of company culture (whatever that means) isn't really necessary for people to be effective. For the past 1.5 years I've been working for an Australian company. I do mobile dev from Thailand. There's an Indian team doing some BLE-related mobile dev from India. There's a guy in Vietnam also doing mobile dev. We have a guy in Taiwan doing low-level hardware programming. A guy in Japan doing hardware design. A Russian guy in Georgia who's doing we web-related stuff. And the leadership is in Australia. Everyone seems to be able to get along pretty well and without much misunderstanding. Perhaps it's also the nature of our work, the product we work on. Why do people feel it's important to build some company culture? What does a company culture even mean?
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Yeah so not really a new concept; in NL we've had this for a while with names like "het nieuwe werken" (the new working) or "flexwerken" (flexible working), which in practice means open spaces, no fixed desk, clean desk policy, etc. I personally prefer having my own fixed workspace, tyvm. I'm just glad I was able to make it work in the various assignments I've had over the year (e.g. a fixed workspace).

wtvanhest 6y ago

I'm sure you have talked to your exec team at length about the pluses and minuses of that type of structure. That structure feels like a great trade-off that gives employees enough flexibility to reduce their housing costs, while also keeping the culture in place. Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts your team had while you explored the options available? It feels like such a good move IMHO, I'm very interested in learning how you got there.

boulos 6y ago

Thanks for highlighting the set of challenges (and also right near the top of the blog post). Do you or the EIU intend to make the study results more broadly available? (There was a good discussion of Nick Bloom’s recent surveys yesterday, and this would be a nice addition to that body of work) Edit: it was in the blog post... https://lostfocus.eiu.com/ https://lostfocus.eiu.com/ Edit 2: the survey writeup is great (and I’ve submitted it separately if people want to discuss that; Dropbox itself moving to remote allowed w/ studios is its own discussion)

sharkweek 6y ago

I love the idea. REI I believe is moving to a model, after having just sold their massive new HQ to Facebook, where they will establish a handful of micro-offices around the country where their now distributed team can meet. Plenty of kinks to work out I’m sure, but feels like the future of work to me.

allthecybers 6y ago
I love this idea and think this could be great for many distributed work forces. Maybe even stimulating to smaller regional economies in the US.

swalsh 6y ago

This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better)

harikb 6y ago
I will take 4K video and audio that doesn't drop off and a world where there is universal fiber/good connectivity. Then after that, we can talk about VR.
- rgbrenner 6y ago
  Have you seen what Nvidia is doing with Maxine? The compression is so good we might not need fiber to do 4k or VR conferencing.
NationalPark 6y ago
Let's start with fixing the barely perceptible delay in regular video conferencing that causes the, "No, you talk" thing we all enjoy.
- gomox 6y ago
  This is more likely caused by people videoconferencing with computer speakers, than by network delay.
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occz 6y ago
>This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better) Give 'screen control sharing' (for lack of better name?) software a try, two variants I've used are USE Together and Tuple. Being able to have two sets of input devices for the same screen is actually fantastic for collaboration - the pair-programming experience is arguably better than being there in person.

johnward 6y ago

> which is problematic for building teams and culture; Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".

toolz 6y ago
The best friends I've made in my career were from remote only teams. I guess you could say full remote is problematic in the sense that so is in-office for building relationships/teams. It's a trade off and I suspect the winning strategy is the one that is invested into the most, rather than one being inherently better than the other.
zikzak 6y ago
We've been doing a couple of things now that everyone is wfh. We have these mixer meetings on Friday where you meet with people you never work with normally, in small groups, and talk about what you're working on. We also have online trivia contests and other games sometimes it just shoot the breeze (as sanctioned, boss scheduled meetings). As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out. I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
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stagger87 6y ago
If you are genuinely asking, there are people, myself included, who don't think virtual interactions are a substitute for building relationships. It's the same reason I want to transition to meeting someone in person after talking to them on a dating app. I can totally understand that everyone is different and may not think the same. For instance, if the only advantage of in-person interactions at work you can think of is goofing around, I suspect you are better suited for remote work.

bob33212 6y ago

I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons. 1. They prefer a predictable schedule. 2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues) 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. 4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> 3. They are good at or enjoy office politics. As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it. The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building. We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
  - patmorgan23 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces. In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something. At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have. It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)

keiferski 6y ago
Isn't this basically the same thing as Regus?
whoisburbansky 6y ago
Isn't that exactly what WeWork's business model was?
- danielhlockard 6y ago
  Yes, except this is private to IBM employees. Helpful when you're in an industry with a lot of regulatory / compliance oversight.
- silentsea90 6y ago
  All of us naysayers failed to appreciate the foresight that Mr Neumann and Softbank displayed. Joke's on us :D
  - 6y ago

headmelted 6y ago

"Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture" This is stated as fact everywhere but I've not seen supporting evidence anywhere. I spend about as much time in my day speaking to other people as I would have done productively and by choice before. The only difference now is that I'm more able to avoid extraneous meetings and other drags on my time that don't benefit from my participation (because they're largely irrelevant to my work and vice versa). In any case kudos for taking this step which I'm sure is not an easy decision to make given that it's a fairly seismic shift to how most companies approach work and employment.

karmasimida 6y ago
What evidence do you seek? It is obvious to me that the way you interact with people face-to-face is different from the way you would do with online chat.
- gedy 6y ago
  That can be a good thing for non-charismatic types. I know that I've hurt my career at times in past due to in-person failures like being visibly angry or raising voice over dumb statements/power-positioning by leader-types. Being remote has helped me throttle those reactions and not be so public about my feelings.
  - ticmasta 6y ago
    Well if you've hurt your career with in-person failures, wait until you experience the context-free over-reaction that come from a faux pas made in a faceless medium that keeps record of your transgression forever. Getting mad at someone in-person also provides an opportunity to build a relationship that allows for a more intimate sharing of emotions; try getting that with email and slack.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      If you're used to communicating online, this is no issue. As an anti-social type myself, I'm more comfortable with communicating online and I'm confident in my ability to not commit a faux-pas that easily compared to in-person. I think you underestimate how much WFH helps people with social issues.

mmm_grayons 6y ago

> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role. Doesn't this also have the problem with neither flexibility nor community, especially for once a quarter? More importantly, this means that people now have to maintain their own home offices but still have to live close to a big city and pay the stupidly high costs associated with that.

ghaff 6y ago
Most big cities, if you drive 1-2 hours, you can get to much cheaper housing and that's a pretty doable commute if you only do it every week or two. And for once a quarter, you get on a plane--which is pretty much what my broader team did pre-pandemic.

greymalik 6y ago

> ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office Can you explain what you mean by WFH when you feel like it reducing flexibility?

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ryanSrich 6y ago

> Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios" Yeah this is 100% not remote work.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Like you, I am genuinely baffled by "WFH 4 days a week" arrangements (as compared to "WFH when you have errands that make it necessary", which is pretty common). If I have to come into the office 1 day a week, then I still have to foot the bill for a home office within driving range of the office, which sucks. I think at once a quarter you're starting to look at the ability to live on the other side of the country and fly in when necessary, which I think is much more price efficient.

ryandrake 6y ago
If your office is in SF, WFH 4 days a week doesn't let you live in ultra-low-cost rural Iowa but it could let you at least work in slightly-lower-cost Modesto or even Redding. Not ideal but better than a $4K/mo SF apartment. I think I'd be willing to live with a 4 hour commute once a week (or get your private pilot's license and you're about 1.5 hours away). Not convenient but do-able.
- h327 6y ago
  The idea of flying to work is fun, and I have seen it pop up in a lot of these WFH discussions. But even if you have your GA license, you'll need to rent or own the plane, pay directly or indirectly for hangar space and fuel, and deal with the air traffic congestion that would arise from more than just a handful of people trying this trick. In my opinion these barriers make private flying too dissimilar to driving a car to make it a feasible commute comparison.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Totally agree. I've got my ticket and I wouldn't do it unless I actually lived on an airpark with a hangar at my house, and I'd have to get my instrument rating to be able to rely on it for commuting.
  - jermaustin1 6y ago
    I was looking into it for commuting from Pueblo, CO to Denver. The place I was interviewing was a short walk and bus ride from an air field, and Pueblo is about 20-40% the cost of a similar commutable home in Denver, the flight (which I have done a dozen times in MSFS) is only 55 minutes. So round trip with commuting to and from the airports/fields, doing preflight, and parking, was only 3 hours which is about the time it takes one way by car assuming normal traffic.

ghaff 6y ago

>Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely Not necessarily. I work in a group that's very distributed and we get together (normally) a couple of times a year plus another once or twice with a larger group. Of course, that doesn't work if it's more like getting together in person every week or two. In any case, I agree it makes sense to collaborate. If you wander into the office and no one you know and work with is there, it doesn't make much sense to come in.

xur17 6y ago
I work at a 100% remote company, and we do this as well (before covid). We're a smaller company, so I'd be curious to hear how it scales, but at least for us I've found it to work pretty well.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think it scales because, at a larger company, everyone isn't realistically going to get together anyway. So you get together in groups of various sizes. (And there are usually opportunities to get together with an even larger cross-section at things like user conferences.)

trimbo 6y ago

Not too long ago, Dropbox signed the largest office lease in SF history[1]. What changes are you making to Dropbox's RE plan in light of this? [1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/10/dropbox-kilroy-sf-largest-office-lease-krc.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/10/dro...

syspec 6y ago
I know the Pinterest cancelled their lease, I forget how much but they had to pay 90M to do it, but they got out of it
- schoolornot 6y ago
  I wonder why a landlord would even entertain such an offer. It's not uncommon for leases to be ~15 years. That is a hell of a risky move to think that you'll be ahead by offering a buyout with the hope of finding new tenants.
  - notherthrowaway 6y ago
    You could use the $90 million to diversify your real estate assets or pay down your debt.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It's entirely possible it was in a contract.
  - ponker 6y ago
    For a large commerical real estate deal, the termination fee is always negotiated as part of the lease contract.
  - varenc 6y ago
    The early cancellation payout was probably part of the original lease agreement. Big commercial contracts are dense and cover a lot of contingencies. You can usually find a public company's leases in SEC fillings. I couldn't find one for Pinterest, but I found Dropbox's 200+ page lease agreement here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001467623/000119312518055809/d451946dex1019.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001467623/000119312... (it's a 15 year lease, with the cost increasing from $45 million/year to $68 million/years over the 15 years. Hope there's some option to re-negotiate in there)

m0zg 6y ago

That's the way it should be IMO. It's idiotic to have to drag oneself to the office to do work which can be done just as well, if not better, without getting out of bed. It's also bad to not be able to get teams together from time to time, to brainstorm, discuss things, and just plain get to know each other. I hope companies find a happy middle ground at some point, and I also hope managers can figure out how to manage people effectively in such circumstances. Currently nobody at the previously "butts in chairs" companies knows how to do that, and my manager friends at places like Google, FB and MS are unsure if they're "holding it right".

choppaface 6y ago

Am curious what sort of metrics and studies that Dropbox HR plans to do to assess this change. The current COVID-mandated WFH atmosphere is a lot different than how things were pre-COVID. In particular, there's the impact of children at home, and for ICs there's a special stigma (due to COVID) to support isolation. However, Dropbox's culture has always been uniquely supportive of IC independence during pre-COVID times despite the fancy office, "Michelin Star" cafeteria, etc. Curious to see how the change is assessed, even if the detailed hypotheses supporting it are never fully explained.

rocqua 6y ago
What are "IC"s?
- traek 6y ago
  Individual Contributors (i.e. non-managers).

taxcoder 6y ago

Definitely agree with the idea of a scheduled in office time. I work ~400 miles from my company's office and get there several times a year. I enjoy WFH, but would prefer being close enough to go to the office more often.

jordache 6y ago

predominant WFH w/ ability to get together at the office seems like an excellent mixture of flexibility and adequate face time. Strict mode on either ends of the spectrum is non-ideal for most people I would assume.

nimchimpsky 6y ago

I mean that is your interpretation/experience of it. Mine is entirely different, which would be entirely different to others. If your workspace can't handle wfh you have other issues imo

wsc981 6y ago

> ... which is problematic for building teams and culture; Maybe I am alone in this, but I care very little for culture. Perhaps it's because I am a freelancer. I work for a company to bring results and I just try to communicate clearly. When there's doubts we have a chat over Skype, since sometimes direct communication is just more efficient than using chat. I believe people can work well as teams while WFH and some kind of company culture (whatever that means) isn't really necessary for people to be effective. For the past 1.5 years I've been working for an Australian company. I do mobile dev from Thailand. There's an Indian team doing some BLE-related mobile dev from India. There's a guy in Vietnam also doing mobile dev. We have a guy in Taiwan doing low-level hardware programming. A guy in Japan doing hardware design. A Russian guy in Georgia who's doing we web-related stuff. And the leadership is in Australia. Everyone seems to be able to get along pretty well and without much misunderstanding. Perhaps it's also the nature of our work, the product we work on. Why do people feel it's important to build some company culture? What does a company culture even mean?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Yeah so not really a new concept; in NL we've had this for a while with names like "het nieuwe werken" (the new working) or "flexwerken" (flexible working), which in practice means open spaces, no fixed desk, clean desk policy, etc. I personally prefer having my own fixed workspace, tyvm. I'm just glad I was able to make it work in the various assignments I've had over the year (e.g. a fixed workspace).