14 ms·

Just in case you were operating under the illusion that tech giants are run by forward thinking executives who are immune to the usual politics and problems of

Just in case you were operating under the illusion that tech giants are run by forward thinking executives who are immune to the usual politics and problems of corporate life. Nope, most of their exec layer is a bunch of people who cut their teeth the industry in the 90's, and are operating within a thick fog of local workplace politics. I guarantee that behind this move is an executive who believes that developers need to be physically colocated to be productive, because that's how it worked when he was coming up at WordPerfect or whatever. Backing it is also a group of people who have a lot to gain from it politically. At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
Anecdotally, I've been a remote engineer on and off for ten years. There have been plenty of companies where I thought we might have achieved more with an office. Yes, I understand you can always improve your processes but there does feel like there are fundamental limitations with remote work.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The thing is, remote working is still in its infancy and has a lot of potential for improvement. Office has maxed out and just bumps back and forth.
  - sharken 6y ago
    I don't think remote working is in its infancy, it's more a case of the scope has been changed the recent year or so. The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important. I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress. The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity. > I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams). The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs. -- [0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context. [1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
      - rightbyte 6y ago
        > E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, No cummute is saving me a workday of time a week. When I was home 1830ish the usual errand places are closed where I live. I don't even remember how I did errands while commuting. I guess I didn't.
- kypro 6y ago
  I agree. I've been remoting working for most of the last decade and it's great from a work-life balance perspective, but I wouldn't recommend fully remote to any company. In my experience part remote works much better, if not better than fully remote / fully office based. It's nice have a few days a week for in person meetings then some quiet time to get stuck into work at home.
- ljm 6y ago
  I'm fully remote and I don't mind it. Compared to being either fully remote or fully office-based, my ideal lies somewhere in between the two. Remote by default with the option to head in for co-working and stuff when I want to.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  There absolutely are limits, especially on the social side. You don't form as close of relationships with co-workers. You don't get those in-hallway "hey, can I show you this real quick?" moments. At my previous place, a couple employees eventually left to form their own successful company; they bonded because they always went out for smoke breaks together. Unless the company is fully remote, it's harder to get noticed in the company. May be harder to move up the ladder.
darawk 6y ago
Have you considered the possibility that executives in charge of tens of thousands of developers might have some data you don't regarding its impacts on productivity in aggregate?
- nullsense 6y ago
  Stunningly unlikely they have. Classic developer hubris.
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    Goes for your comment, too.
    - nullsense 6y ago
      Implying that it wouldn't? It's HN all the way down.
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  If they do then why don't they share it? I mean they must realise this is a pretty unpopular decision so why not share their justification. Otherwise it's just an appeal to authority - "Ours not to reason why.."
  - darawk 6y ago
    I don't know, but I think it's reasonable to assume that their primary concern is productivity, and that at a company like Google, that concern will be analyzed in a data driven way. Perhaps they don't want to insult their developers by implying their productivity dipped, or something.
    - eertami 6y ago
      Google doesn't make decisions based on data. Google makes decisions based on what gets someone a promotion.
gfxgirl 6y ago
Disagree completely. All metrics at my company, gamedev, show throughput is down ~66% since WFH Me, I want to go back to the office. Like hanging out with my work friends.
- wg0 6y ago
  What is the measure of productivity? Lines of codes added/removed? Functions written? Jira tickets etc? How do we exactly know that if they are tickets, they are exactly the same size before and after the pandemic? And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    You can look at the distributions of ticket sizes and make sure they are roughly the same as before. With enough data it is pretty easy to observe a change in productivity even if you are using measures that aren’t good absolute measures of productivity.
- irq 6y ago
  Down since WFH? Or down since the pandemic? Both have an impact on mental health and thus productivity metrics, and it’s important to differentiate, because the pandemic won’t be around forever, but it started around the same time as mass WFH.
- kmlx 6y ago
  same for my clients. the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go. and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so. i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Then address the issue instead of saying "ah this sucks" Is it their work conditions? IT limitations? Family? Just the fact that everything sucks?
wg0 6y ago
Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid. And I don't want to hang "with friends at work" I go to "work" that has to be specified clearly and that I expect to deliver with purely professional merit driven collaboration and not friendships and gangs. I have friends or would love to have friends out of the place where I work. I want strict compartmentalisation between work and personal life. As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  > As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours. Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.
  - wg0 6y ago
    That's great if so. Google however isn't representative of most companies by even a long stretch. In most companies, any stranger cannot go past a checkpoint without some RFID and what not that too with prior permission and purpose that's "reasonable" or at least your line manager is OK with it.
- austinjp 6y ago
  What about those who _do_ want a friendly workplace with some element of social interaction?
  - square_usual 6y ago
    What about those who don't?
    - austinjp 6y ago
      Well that was the point of the comment I was replying to, which I felt was somewhat one-sided.
lkramer 6y ago
One thing I have noticed is that while the old hats (those hired some time before the pandemic) are as productive, or maybe even more productive while working remote, it's a struggle to bring in new people, especially more junior people. Maybe these are problems that can be solved, but it seems that an already a challenging and stressful situation, joining a new company, is even more difficult when you are not able to spend time together in person to pick up on team dynamics and just general mentoring. I assume it's a bit easier if you are more senior and have a few company changes on your resume, but for someone for whom its their first or second job in the industry, it can be overwhelming. I think that's why often fully remote companies pre-pandemic seemed to be more focussed on hiring seniors. Likely some of these problems can be mitigated as we learn how to deal with them, but this is one reason why I think post-pandemic most software houses will have to adopt a policy of encouraging some on-site work.
- heisenbit 6y ago
  I have joined a company remotely and I don't feel I got slower productive than before. The ability to do pair work is almost enhanced and the fact that everyone is able and willing to be called in to help has accelerated learning and integration in some areas which I found harder in the past. Also keep in mind that it may be slower than with direct in person mentoring but there can also be the opposite of in person mentoring and then being locked in the same office can become extremely stressful. I also run a small team with new hires on one day and I'm seeing great productivity and teamwork. We are going back to the office eventually but I don't think the on-site requirements will be as strict as in the past. In the medium term I see us moving towards a more flexible model beyond just the flexible allocation of desks (which imho. is a horrible thing, pretending to be office workspace and serving neither then needs of people there nor the companies output).
  - pnt12 6y ago
    Off-topic, but how do you feel about pair programming?
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whobar 6y ago
Ever thought that these executives are not as dumb as you think they are, and maybe that they are aware that individual developer productivity may drop, but there are broader benefits to having everyone on site.
- stunt 6y ago
  But who said the only way to improve productivity is asking people to go back to the office? Maybe they're dumb if they can't find a different solution.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Talk to your coworkers outside work--organize. Be united and push back. You can bend management in any direction you want. You truly own the means of production, not them--never forget that. The cynic in me thinks that this back to office push is out of fear that it's far, far easier for remote workers to organize outside the view of the company. They are terrified and want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible.
- kmlx 6y ago
  neah, it's productivity related. when no one is working after WFH, then it's pretty clear the experiment failed and people need to be back in their offices. if productivity stayed the same, no-one would have said anything.
- chii 6y ago
  > You truly own the means of production depends on how replacible you really are.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> need to be physically colocated to be productive I suspect that my employer will have us back in the office before the end of the year after a year of remote working. Although I actually sort of prefer the office myself, the whole "physically colocated" thing is especially comical in my situation (which I think is common in most big corporations) - none of the people I actually work with are in the same office, or even the same time zone, as me. So I'll drive a half hour each way to essentially be a remote worker anyway, and I definitely won't be the only one.
kyrra 6y ago
Googler opinions are my own. I'd disagree at least a little here. Google has been surveying their staff about what they want to do after the pandemic is over, see this twitter thread where Google published some of it's data: https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531563520 https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531... People are split on what they want. Maybe people could be better trained to wfh, but some of us just prefer an office. While I am likely more productive at home (even with 3 kids there) I see that knowledge sharing with a large team is just harder (missing that hallway conversation, or seeing someone at a whiteboard and just learning random things).
- mattm 6y ago
  That doesn't seem split at all. The vast majority don't seem to want to be in the office everyday. They disregarded those survey results though for their decision. The vast majority prefer not to come to the office everyday. Google says you can only work from home slightly more than 1 day per month. If they took the survey into account, it would have been the opposite - you're only required to come into the office 14 days per year.
- DataJunkie 6y ago
  Oh no, please don't start with the magical hallway conversations. I've never had a worthwhile conversation in a hallway or microkitchen, ever. This argument needs to die.
  - browningstreet 6y ago
    Agreed -- I haven't worked on a project in the last ten years that didn't have some significant portion of relevant staff remotely located. I'm not a developer, but I don't work with a group of people located in the same building, so all projects are de facto pretty remote heavy.
  - kyrra 6y ago
    My previous 2 companies it rarely happened, if ever. But it has happened a lot with me at Google. But I also think it's a property of the teams I am on. Other teams it doesn't seem to happen as often. Having whiteboards around, I will see people talking about certain things or explaining some new system, and it's easy to jump in. Maybe these could be considered impromptu meetings, but they still have been great for me.
stunt 6y ago
The big exec that was behind building office space needs to show how successful their initiatives are. And they have enough leverage and influence to move you back on site.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
unethical_ban 6y ago
I'm late to the party, but put me down as someone who genuinely believes there is a positive social and professional benefit to in person interaction that is absolutely lost for many people in remote work. Does it require 5 days a week? Maybe not. Is every person who believes remote work has long term negative impacts some middle manager from the 90s? No.

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago

Anecdotally, I've been a remote engineer on and off for ten years. There have been plenty of companies where I thought we might have achieved more with an office. Yes, I understand you can always improve your processes but there does feel like there are fundamental limitations with remote work.

cblconfederate 6y ago
The thing is, remote working is still in its infancy and has a lot of potential for improvement. Office has maxed out and just bumps back and forth.
- sharken 6y ago
  I don't think remote working is in its infancy, it's more a case of the scope has been changed the recent year or so. The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important. I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress. The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity. > I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams). The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs. -- [0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context. [1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      > E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, No cummute is saving me a workday of time a week. When I was home 1830ish the usual errand places are closed where I live. I don't even remember how I did errands while commuting. I guess I didn't.
kypro 6y ago
I agree. I've been remoting working for most of the last decade and it's great from a work-life balance perspective, but I wouldn't recommend fully remote to any company. In my experience part remote works much better, if not better than fully remote / fully office based. It's nice have a few days a week for in person meetings then some quiet time to get stuck into work at home.
ljm 6y ago
I'm fully remote and I don't mind it. Compared to being either fully remote or fully office-based, my ideal lies somewhere in between the two. Remote by default with the option to head in for co-working and stuff when I want to.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
There absolutely are limits, especially on the social side. You don't form as close of relationships with co-workers. You don't get those in-hallway "hey, can I show you this real quick?" moments. At my previous place, a couple employees eventually left to form their own successful company; they bonded because they always went out for smoke breaks together. Unless the company is fully remote, it's harder to get noticed in the company. May be harder to move up the ladder.

darawk 6y ago

Have you considered the possibility that executives in charge of tens of thousands of developers might have some data you don't regarding its impacts on productivity in aggregate?

nullsense 6y ago
Stunningly unlikely they have. Classic developer hubris.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  Goes for your comment, too.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    Implying that it wouldn't? It's HN all the way down.
alexgmcm 6y ago
If they do then why don't they share it? I mean they must realise this is a pretty unpopular decision so why not share their justification. Otherwise it's just an appeal to authority - "Ours not to reason why.."
- darawk 6y ago
  I don't know, but I think it's reasonable to assume that their primary concern is productivity, and that at a company like Google, that concern will be analyzed in a data driven way. Perhaps they don't want to insult their developers by implying their productivity dipped, or something.
  - eertami 6y ago
    Google doesn't make decisions based on data. Google makes decisions based on what gets someone a promotion.

gfxgirl 6y ago

Disagree completely. All metrics at my company, gamedev, show throughput is down ~66% since WFH Me, I want to go back to the office. Like hanging out with my work friends.

wg0 6y ago
What is the measure of productivity? Lines of codes added/removed? Functions written? Jira tickets etc? How do we exactly know that if they are tickets, they are exactly the same size before and after the pandemic? And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  You can look at the distributions of ticket sizes and make sure they are roughly the same as before. With enough data it is pretty easy to observe a change in productivity even if you are using measures that aren’t good absolute measures of productivity.
irq 6y ago
Down since WFH? Or down since the pandemic? Both have an impact on mental health and thus productivity metrics, and it’s important to differentiate, because the pandemic won’t be around forever, but it started around the same time as mass WFH.
kmlx 6y ago
same for my clients. the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go. and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so. i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Then address the issue instead of saying "ah this sucks" Is it their work conditions? IT limitations? Family? Just the fact that everything sucks?

wg0 6y ago

Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid. And I don't want to hang "with friends at work" I go to "work" that has to be specified clearly and that I expect to deliver with purely professional merit driven collaboration and not friendships and gangs. I have friends or would love to have friends out of the place where I work. I want strict compartmentalisation between work and personal life. As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.

throwaway3699 6y ago
> As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours. Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.
- wg0 6y ago
  That's great if so. Google however isn't representative of most companies by even a long stretch. In most companies, any stranger cannot go past a checkpoint without some RFID and what not that too with prior permission and purpose that's "reasonable" or at least your line manager is OK with it.
austinjp 6y ago
What about those who _do_ want a friendly workplace with some element of social interaction?
- square_usual 6y ago
  What about those who don't?
  - austinjp 6y ago
    Well that was the point of the comment I was replying to, which I felt was somewhat one-sided.

lkramer 6y ago

One thing I have noticed is that while the old hats (those hired some time before the pandemic) are as productive, or maybe even more productive while working remote, it's a struggle to bring in new people, especially more junior people. Maybe these are problems that can be solved, but it seems that an already a challenging and stressful situation, joining a new company, is even more difficult when you are not able to spend time together in person to pick up on team dynamics and just general mentoring. I assume it's a bit easier if you are more senior and have a few company changes on your resume, but for someone for whom its their first or second job in the industry, it can be overwhelming. I think that's why often fully remote companies pre-pandemic seemed to be more focussed on hiring seniors. Likely some of these problems can be mitigated as we learn how to deal with them, but this is one reason why I think post-pandemic most software houses will have to adopt a policy of encouraging some on-site work.

heisenbit 6y ago
I have joined a company remotely and I don't feel I got slower productive than before. The ability to do pair work is almost enhanced and the fact that everyone is able and willing to be called in to help has accelerated learning and integration in some areas which I found harder in the past. Also keep in mind that it may be slower than with direct in person mentoring but there can also be the opposite of in person mentoring and then being locked in the same office can become extremely stressful. I also run a small team with new hires on one day and I'm seeing great productivity and teamwork. We are going back to the office eventually but I don't think the on-site requirements will be as strict as in the past. In the medium term I see us moving towards a more flexible model beyond just the flexible allocation of desks (which imho. is a horrible thing, pretending to be office workspace and serving neither then needs of people there nor the companies output).
- pnt12 6y ago
  Off-topic, but how do you feel about pair programming?
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

whobar 6y ago

Ever thought that these executives are not as dumb as you think they are, and maybe that they are aware that individual developer productivity may drop, but there are broader benefits to having everyone on site.

stunt 6y ago
But who said the only way to improve productivity is asking people to go back to the office? Maybe they're dumb if they can't find a different solution.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Talk to your coworkers outside work--organize. Be united and push back. You can bend management in any direction you want. You truly own the means of production, not them--never forget that. The cynic in me thinks that this back to office push is out of fear that it's far, far easier for remote workers to organize outside the view of the company. They are terrified and want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible.

kmlx 6y ago
neah, it's productivity related. when no one is working after WFH, then it's pretty clear the experiment failed and people need to be back in their offices. if productivity stayed the same, no-one would have said anything.
chii 6y ago
> You truly own the means of production depends on how replacible you really are.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> need to be physically colocated to be productive I suspect that my employer will have us back in the office before the end of the year after a year of remote working. Although I actually sort of prefer the office myself, the whole "physically colocated" thing is especially comical in my situation (which I think is common in most big corporations) - none of the people I actually work with are in the same office, or even the same time zone, as me. So I'll drive a half hour each way to essentially be a remote worker anyway, and I definitely won't be the only one.

kyrra 6y ago

Googler opinions are my own. I'd disagree at least a little here. Google has been surveying their staff about what they want to do after the pandemic is over, see this twitter thread where Google published some of it's data: https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531563520 https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531... People are split on what they want. Maybe people could be better trained to wfh, but some of us just prefer an office. While I am likely more productive at home (even with 3 kids there) I see that knowledge sharing with a large team is just harder (missing that hallway conversation, or seeing someone at a whiteboard and just learning random things).

mattm 6y ago
That doesn't seem split at all. The vast majority don't seem to want to be in the office everyday. They disregarded those survey results though for their decision. The vast majority prefer not to come to the office everyday. Google says you can only work from home slightly more than 1 day per month. If they took the survey into account, it would have been the opposite - you're only required to come into the office 14 days per year.
DataJunkie 6y ago
Oh no, please don't start with the magical hallway conversations. I've never had a worthwhile conversation in a hallway or microkitchen, ever. This argument needs to die.
- browningstreet 6y ago
  Agreed -- I haven't worked on a project in the last ten years that didn't have some significant portion of relevant staff remotely located. I'm not a developer, but I don't work with a group of people located in the same building, so all projects are de facto pretty remote heavy.
- kyrra 6y ago
  My previous 2 companies it rarely happened, if ever. But it has happened a lot with me at Google. But I also think it's a property of the teams I am on. Other teams it doesn't seem to happen as often. Having whiteboards around, I will see people talking about certain things or explaining some new system, and it's easy to jump in. Maybe these could be considered impromptu meetings, but they still have been great for me.

stunt 6y ago

The big exec that was behind building office space needs to show how successful their initiatives are. And they have enough leverage and influence to move you back on site.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

unethical_ban 6y ago

I'm late to the party, but put me down as someone who genuinely believes there is a positive social and professional benefit to in person interaction that is absolutely lost for many people in remote work. Does it require 5 days a week? Maybe not. Is every person who believes remote work has long term negative impacts some middle manager from the 90s? No.