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There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don'

There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don't want to be around people - going back to the office feels like all downside from your perspective. If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much. Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.

hzay 5y ago
This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters. The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.
  - hzay 5y ago
    That's interesting because the person I spoke to also said that they've reduced the daily number of work hours. Not because productivity was high but because stress was high due to the pandemic & perhaps working conditions at homes.
xyzelement 5y ago
I'll add one more thing - the physical space makes it much clearer what you should be paying attention to. If there's a group of programmers standing behind someone's chair looking stressed, there's probably an outage I can be helpful with. If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later. If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them. All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.
b9a2cab5 5y ago
As an IC, the people who dislike talking to their coworkers are ignoring the effect that Zoom has on team cohesion. Personally, a single in-person meeting is more effective for getting to know my coworkers and bonding with them than any number of Zoom lunches and socials and happy hours. And even ICs have to talk to other people to exchange ideas, get buy-in, and solve cross-functional problems. It's _so_ much easier to do that when those people are also your friends rather than strangers. They don't need to be friends you go out with after work everyday for drinks, just friends you know well enough to have a conversation with that isn't awkward. This dynamic was very apparent to me having worked at a company that did have cohesion and one that didn't. I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  > Zoom I’m both a remote maximalist, and a Zoom hater. I reconciled this by eliminating meetings. Turns out, 99% of all software can be built, managed, scaled, and sold asynchronously.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Can you provide more details about how this works? I'm stuck with Zoom meetings that I feel are long and ineffective, but I'm not sure how to sell my manager on eliminating them.
    - ryanSrich 5y ago
      I started my own company. Not necessarily to get rid of meetings, but because I absolutely cannot stand the modern tech work environment. I’d think managers would see the elimination of meetings as a direct threat to their job. So I don’t have any good suggestions. You could just try skipping them? See if you get in trouble? Push it all the way to getting a pip. That’s what I’d do lol.
bertil 5y ago
> because I never see them "together" That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.
bww 5y ago
These are certainly valid concerns you raise, broadly speaking. However, as mentioned in numerous other comments, there is a compelling case to be made that remote work is more productive for a lot of people. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it also affected retention. Far from the suggestion that some people simply can’t be bothered to commute as you rather dismissively suggest. In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  You are assigning to me a much more extreme view than I hold. I neither dismiss the desire to do remote work (I express some of it for myself) nor oppose it "categorically". I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern. Ah, this probably illustrates a lot of the disconnect. Most tech workers have relatively short futures at their companies.
tomger 5y ago
Good points. The part that I have a different experience with is that you’d have spotted someone running over in the office to realize there’s communication between certain team members. To me that sounds either lucky or anxiety inducing. Should I as manager be keeping one eye on the group and one eye on my screen? I think these information gaps are much easier to catch by clearly communicating the process rather than keeping an eye on your surroundings.
codingdave 5y ago
ICs do have it simpler. Leadership comes with complexity and accountability. Sometimes yes, it is hard. I'm trying to avoid reading too much into your anecdotes, but it sounds like you are saying remote work is less desirable because it makes your life harder. I suppose that is a fair point, but I'd wonder what your goal is as a manager - to make your life easier, or to make the team perform better?
geodel 5y ago
> ...you have a different and much more complicated concern. That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.
eweise 5y ago
How would you deal with employees that were in a different office? What about offshore contractors? I find it hard to believe that managers need to see people together in a physical space to be effective.
- joejerryronnie 5y ago
  Every single pre-covid meeting I was in had at least 1/3 remote participants (either WFH or located in other offices around the world).
saurik 5y ago
> In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate. > But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial). As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building. I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail. Here's something to consider:
antpls 5y ago
> now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.

hzay 5y ago

This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters. The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?

spacedcowboy 5y ago
That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.
- hzay 5y ago
  That's interesting because the person I spoke to also said that they've reduced the daily number of work hours. Not because productivity was high but because stress was high due to the pandemic & perhaps working conditions at homes.

xyzelement 5y ago

I'll add one more thing - the physical space makes it much clearer what you should be paying attention to. If there's a group of programmers standing behind someone's chair looking stressed, there's probably an outage I can be helpful with. If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later. If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them. All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.

b9a2cab5 5y ago

As an IC, the people who dislike talking to their coworkers are ignoring the effect that Zoom has on team cohesion. Personally, a single in-person meeting is more effective for getting to know my coworkers and bonding with them than any number of Zoom lunches and socials and happy hours. And even ICs have to talk to other people to exchange ideas, get buy-in, and solve cross-functional problems. It's _so_ much easier to do that when those people are also your friends rather than strangers. They don't need to be friends you go out with after work everyday for drinks, just friends you know well enough to have a conversation with that isn't awkward. This dynamic was very apparent to me having worked at a company that did have cohesion and one that didn't. I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.

ryanSrich 5y ago
> Zoom I’m both a remote maximalist, and a Zoom hater. I reconciled this by eliminating meetings. Turns out, 99% of all software can be built, managed, scaled, and sold asynchronously.
- lolinder 5y ago
  Can you provide more details about how this works? I'm stuck with Zoom meetings that I feel are long and ineffective, but I'm not sure how to sell my manager on eliminating them.
  - ryanSrich 5y ago
    I started my own company. Not necessarily to get rid of meetings, but because I absolutely cannot stand the modern tech work environment. I’d think managers would see the elimination of meetings as a direct threat to their job. So I don’t have any good suggestions. You could just try skipping them? See if you get in trouble? Push it all the way to getting a pip. That’s what I’d do lol.

bertil 5y ago

> because I never see them "together" That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.

bww 5y ago

These are certainly valid concerns you raise, broadly speaking. However, as mentioned in numerous other comments, there is a compelling case to be made that remote work is more productive for a lot of people. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it also affected retention. Far from the suggestion that some people simply can’t be bothered to commute as you rather dismissively suggest. In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.

xyzelement 5y ago
You are assigning to me a much more extreme view than I hold. I neither dismiss the desire to do remote work (I express some of it for myself) nor oppose it "categorically". I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern. Ah, this probably illustrates a lot of the disconnect. Most tech workers have relatively short futures at their companies.

tomger 5y ago

Good points. The part that I have a different experience with is that you’d have spotted someone running over in the office to realize there’s communication between certain team members. To me that sounds either lucky or anxiety inducing. Should I as manager be keeping one eye on the group and one eye on my screen? I think these information gaps are much easier to catch by clearly communicating the process rather than keeping an eye on your surroundings.

codingdave 5y ago

ICs do have it simpler. Leadership comes with complexity and accountability. Sometimes yes, it is hard. I'm trying to avoid reading too much into your anecdotes, but it sounds like you are saying remote work is less desirable because it makes your life harder. I suppose that is a fair point, but I'd wonder what your goal is as a manager - to make your life easier, or to make the team perform better?

geodel 5y ago

> ...you have a different and much more complicated concern. That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.

eweise 5y ago

How would you deal with employees that were in a different office? What about offshore contractors? I find it hard to believe that managers need to see people together in a physical space to be effective.

joejerryronnie 5y ago
Every single pre-covid meeting I was in had at least 1/3 remote participants (either WFH or located in other offices around the world).

saurik 5y ago

> In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate. > But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial). As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building. I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail. Here's something to consider:

antpls 5y ago

> now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.