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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

• 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.
  • me_me_me 6y ago
    hybrid model, let your workers decide how they work as long they deliver.
    • beforeolives 6y ago
      In a hybrid model the people who choose to be remote are damaging their own impact and career development. That's a tradeoff they're free to make if they want but it's the reason why I think hybrid models won't last for too long.
      • rjzzleep 6y ago
        The reality is that most people don't grow in the same company. They grow by changing employer. So what you just said here, doesn't apply to most people anyway. The ones that most like the current structure are the ones most rewarded by it as well. No wonder they don't want it to change. Most people get promoted by social acts, even in google.
      • varispeed 6y ago
        Longing for a career at a one company it seems like a concept from the 80s-90s or movies, where you start as a janitor and finish as a director. However, this indeed can impact your day to day life at a company, as managers will develop biases towards people who they socialise with. That's why I think any kind of socials are a bad idea as they may be potentially discarding people who are bad are socialising but are great workers otherwise and that comes as a negative to a whole organisation.
        • beforeolives 6y ago
          It's not just about socializing or climbing the ladder - you need to communicate with other people to get stuff done. Even if you only care about technical contribution and getting work done, if you aren't in the office and everyone else is, you'll have a difficult time.
          • varispeed 6y ago
  • varispeed 6y ago
    You can be friendly without having to socialise. Not sure why those things would have to go together? Doing socials after work is such a waste of time - sure it may be fun, but this way you are using up time that otherwise you could use to maintain friendships outside of work. Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
    • austinjp 6y ago
      Sure, a 100% remote company might be friendly, for example. I mentioned "friendly" since the previous comment mentioned "friends". Not my intention to suggest inclusivity/exclusivity.
      • austinjp 6y ago
        I genuinely don't understand why this was down voted. A comment would help. My intention was to be conciliatory and explanatory.
    • snakeboy 6y ago
      Isn't this also how a lot of friendships start? People finding themselves in a similar place/situation/habit/interests. So to me it seems a bit natural that workplace friendships would naturally develop. It's healthier to make an effort to have friendships outside of work as well, of course. Maybe I'm being naïve, but I don't see how "toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics" would result from these casual friendships. If anything, I'm more likely to hold myself accountable to my team members when I know them better personally.
      • varispeed 6y ago
        Within time cliques form and some people may be coming to those events out of fear they'll be missing out instead of to have fun and some people may just not be coming and will be viewed by other team members as weirdos. From there it is natural to side with something you know and feel affection to and you may be unconsciously treating people who don't socialise with you worse than the others. Other things that may happen, often when also alcohol is involved, people may say things from their private lives that then other people may use against them or when you start talking about politics and it turns out some people have completely opposite views to yours. This is not helpful in any way.
  • ilikedthatone 6y ago
    world has already been designed for __them__ for almost forever?
    • austinjp 6y ago
      Agreed. I wasn't saying exclusively. I just feel that swinging from one extreme to the other doesn't solve any problems.
  • austinjp 6y ago
    I wrote a long edit clarifying a few things, and lost it on submit thanks to timing out. Damn. I'm morbidly fascinated by the polarisation that drives some online conversations. Admittedly I have probably fuelled some of that with my question, I'll try to do better in future. However, it was intended to point out that there are shades of grey here (as evident in the comments) while the post I replied to seemed very black-and-white to me. I wonder if a better question might be something like: what does a healthy, productive future of work look like now that covid has demonstrated that some people will very much want to continue working entirely remote, while some people very much do not? For what it's worth, I completely agree and sympathise with all the issues people raise here. None of remote, in-office, or hybrid are perfect. They all have problems. It seems that covid has given us the opportunity to at least try to improve things, even though clearly the answers are difficult to find. Slight tangent: I was saddened to read recently that Basecap has permanently closed their Chicago HQ [0]. I've held up this place as a model for how I'd want to build an office space should my unicorn/cash-cow finally hatch. No, it's not perfect, but I loved the fact they explicitly tried, and they explicitly recognised it might be seen by some as a waste of company funds, particularly when they also did things like deliver fruit & veg to employee's homes rather than workplace as an incentive to go home rather than stay late in that expensive office space [1]. I think there are major underlying structural issues that discourage companies from solving issues relating to worker happiness. Extortionate rent and service charges have produced homogenous high-streets, and they're homogenising the business districts too. The labels over the door of each building might be different, but the attitude inside is the same. Worker happiness is grist to the mill, productivity and the bottom line reign. I think we could do better. [0] https://basecamp.com/about/office https://basecamp.com/about/office [1] https://basecamp.com/books/calm https://basecamp.com/books/calm
  • dimmke 6y ago
    Ultimately, remote is likely going to win out. Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs. The commute for a lot of them is 1+ hour each way. But what you're saying is legitimate, and it bothers me the amount of people acting like it doesn't matter. American society already isolates people. Work is a big (maybe the biggest) avenue to develop friendships as an adult, just like school is when you're a kid. Not everybody gets married and then their life becomes about their 2 kids and any social interaction outside of that is incidental.
    • KptMarchewa 6y ago
      >Most people in the white collar work force are older, have families and live in the burbs. Maybe in USA, but my experience in multiple (>5) workspaces in Poland as 28 years old spftware engineer, is that people over 40 are maybe 5% of devs/tech leads.
      • dimmke 6y ago
        Software Devs make up a pretty small percentage of the entire white collar workforce
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • caskstrength 6y ago
    > What about those who _do_ want a friendly workplace with some element of social interaction? What about them? I assume they will be welcome to go back to the office one the whole pandemic thing becomes less of an issue.
  • swat535 6y ago
    There is a difference between being friendly and becoming friends. The latter is dangerous and you will be fooled in thinking your coworkers actually care about you and you need to drink the corporate kool-aid, work overtime and be a true best friend to everyone. If you are going out binge drinking with your co-workers, you're doing it wrong because it blurries the lines between professional and personal life in my humble opinion. Very few deep friendships develop at work, at best they will be acquaintances you see once in a while. So by all means, be nice and cooperative but keep your distance.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Then by all means go into the office and get their element of social interaction together and let the introverts get their stuff done in their preferred environment.
    • austinjp 6y ago
      There are introverts who value a dose of in-person interactivity. Some find the structure of the work schedule useful in ensuring a degree of socialisation. My question was more around whether the workplace can function better for both introverts and extroverts. There are several comments in this thread that suggest entirely remote work has issues, and hybrid models might favour the extroverts (although one interesting comment suggests they'd experience an increase communications burden, repeating messages in-person and in chat). Personally I would not want a 100% in-person workplace. How do we resolve the issues that come with, let's say, hybrid working?
  • Asooka 6y ago
    Some of the best friends I have, I met online and haven't actually seen face to face. Still, you can have a workplace with a reduced (not eliminated) physical presence. I know of people who do flexible office visitation, so they have two days per week when everyone is in, and the rest of the time, people are free to either WFH or at the office. Seems to work out for them for now - those who really want to be there can be, while those who prefer to work from home can do so.
• mellosouls 6y ago
  You sound like a right bundle of fun to work with. You should consider that among the things less conducive to team productivity and mental health are "the guy in the room" types who exhibit the same lack of interest in normal social interaction with their colleagues you are claiming here under the incorrect label "professionalism".
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    > You sound like a right bundle of fun to work with. Good thing he's probably employed as an engineer rather than a clown then.
• em500 6y ago
  > Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid. I could also surmise that in a knowledge economy, high bandwith and low latency connections are very importance, and that in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote.
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
    I think we’ve got less than 3 years until that’s no longer true. A lightweight, wireless VR headset that you can easily put on when you want to talk to someone gets you all the presence you need for work related tasks. Transmitting points that track head and hand positions take far less bandwidth than video. Video calls have terrible lag compared to any of the VR social experiences I’ve had. The hardware is going to be key though, battery life, weight, hands tracking without controllers, and comfort. There’s good progress on all of those.
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    > in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote Do you have any data to back this up? Also, what about other factors like accuracy, ambiguity and efficiency? Sending one single email to the entire company can be more accurate, less ambiguous and much more efficient than communicating it to each person one to one or relying on Chinese whispers.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  Agreed. Some people really seem to think work looks like this: https://www.dreamstime.com/happy-diverse-office-workers-team-laughing-together-group-meeting-cheerful-funny-joke-work-corporate-business-excited-smiling-image141680673 https://www.dreamstime.com/happy-diverse-office-workers-team... If any serious work is being done in a company, it does not look like that. Why do people keep pedalling this lie? A big problem in engineering is a lot of the work is done by engineers in private and the supervisors don't get to see it or experience it. So they think it happens by magic and that maybe the laughing execs actually contributed to it. Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people employed in offices who literally do come in all day and don't do any work. Working from home means you actually have to have some work to do. What we're seeing is a load of people realising they have no work to do.
  • austinjp 6y ago
    I agree that execs who've never written code often have no idea what it's like, and I've worked with some who didn't want to know. I've also worked in teams of engineers that did occasionally burst into laughter while gathered in rooms doing productive work. I've seen engineers who did no work. I've seen managers who worked extremely hard. It's all shades of grey.
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
    I think you might be a bit jaded. I do work at a company where team meetings look a lot like this and yes we do get real work done. We don’t talk and joke around all day but there is space for it. Oddly, other, more somber places I’ve worked were much less productive. People were more guarded about asking for help or collaborating and there was little communication between management and everyone else which led to a very us vs them mentality. It turns out that liking the people you work with actually does make work fun and productive.
  • paulcole 6y ago
    > If any serious work is being done in a company You seem to be falling into the HN trap of “serious work = what I do” “not serious work = what I don’t do.” I can assure you that group of people can provide value to customers/clients while looking like the people in that photo.
• levosmetalo 6y ago
  > Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid. Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa. Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
  • dudul 6y ago
    The big wave of outsourcing in 2000s was a disaster. This is not just about knowledge. It is also about cultural differences that are sometimes more limiting than not having face to face time. It is about timezone differences that make it hard to have calls or meetings.
    • levosmetalo 6y ago
      The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.
      • eudajmonia 6y ago
        I am reminded of my experience working for a German medical equipment company. We have distributed shared service centres around the world. Policy, best-practices, etc are formulated in the head office. For some reason we have continual problems with colleagues from one South American region who never follow best-practices and cause a lot of additional work for other teams who have to clean-up after them. I believe this is exactly what we talk about when we discuss cultural issues. We also have problems with giving these colleagues additional training and mentorship because they prefer to start a lot later in the morning, so our working hour overlap is very minimal.