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No. Once the pandemic is over, startups that are in-office will be more productive and faster than bigger companies. The bigger companies will notice this, and

No. Once the pandemic is over, startups that are in-office will be more productive and faster than bigger companies. The bigger companies will notice this, and force in-person/in-office as well and remote will quickly devolve. Remote is survivable, mainly because of the pandemic, but it’s not preferable for business. In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced.

jstx1 5y ago
That's my personal experience too - that my team and I are more productive when we work from the same office. I don't know how realistic it is for everyone to return to the office though - many other people like remote and most people are kind of entrenched in their positions.
endisneigh 5y ago
You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would being in office be more efficient?
- trinovantes 5y ago
  I'd assume it'd be easier to build camaraderie between in-person coworkers than faceless Slack names. Coworkers that know each other well can probably collaborate better
  - drchopchop 5y ago
    You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Meeting people in person, at least once, is valuable. It improves communication, helps people feel assimilated to the company and team, and creates a mental image of a three-dimensional co-worker (instead of just a faceless Slack handle) Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. This is especially true for those who have significant commutes or families.
    - wreath 5y ago
      > You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Unfortunately this doesn't really cut it. There is a huge difference between the teams I worked in where we were all remote vs the ones where all of us were in the office. The camaraderie, the amount of slack we gave each other, how fast we delivered and the overall mood was much better despite having wildly different personalities. With remote, you are interfacing with only one dimension of someone's personality and they may rub you the wrong way in a PR comment or otherwise and you can easily right them off. It's different when you go for lunch with the same person and talk about work or other stuff. Another thing is that talking about work-related-but-not-current-project-related stuff is much easier when people in the same location and the conversation starts off spontaneously. Whereas in a remote setting it needs to be a bit more organized so there is an overhead. There are a lot of pros to remote though, like not having to be subjected to your colleague's poor hygiene.
    - RestlessMind 5y ago
      > You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Doesn't ring true to me after spending 2 years in a remote-first setup. Even post-vcxx setup where everyone could meet freely didn't facilitate as much in-person interaction as I was looking forward to. > Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. For junior engineers trying to onboard, sitting close to their mentors is big help. Same for senior TLs who are coordinating complex technical projects across a team of 10-12 engineers or even more. Having everyone around is a big time saver for the overall project. WFH/Remote setup is great only for the engineers who are self-sufficient and neither need mentoring from others nor have to coordinate and lead other engineers' work.
    - drstewart 5y ago
      >Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would meeting up a few times a year be as good as seeing someone every day?
  - it_does_follow 5y ago
    As someone who has worked remote long before the pandemic, this is a myth in my experience. I have had at least as many friendships formed with remote coworkers as I have in person office workers. Occasional get-togethers do help with this quite a lot, but it's not necessary. What I find strange about this reasoning is: doesn't every hacker have friends from around the world they've never met in person? From various software projects, open source contributions, online community connections etc I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person.
    - weatherlite 5y ago
      > I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person It happens for some but I can't say its the norm. Most people's meaningful relationships are based on real life, at least initially or some of the time.
  - weatherlite 5y ago
    Even still surely some hybrid solution would suffice - where's the gain in daily office commute? I really start disliking my fellow workers when I am forced to see them everyday. Once or twice a week makes everyone more tolerable.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > some hybrid solution would suffice Hybrid enables a move from San Francisco to e.g. Petaluma. It doesn't permit most workers to move to Idaho. That argues for an expansion of the Bay Area over its demise.
      - weatherlite 5y ago
        It's hard to tell what will happen; surely most American companies will leave a main headquarters in the U.S which will probably be hybrid. Than they will have lower cost centers (that will be either remote or hybrid as well). Overall probably this will push down wages in SV and move it up in places like Germany or Ukraine. But I don't think it will be that dramatic. Salaries will still be very generous in SV.
CubsFan1060 5y ago
I'm curious, do you have any data on that? Or is this just your gut feeling? My experience goes mostly the other way, that remote workers are more efficient, but of course, two sets of experiences doesn't make a large data set.
- jstx1 5y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network. Discussed on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920 It's not a perfect study but we don't really have that much actual research and evidence either way.
  - CubsFan1060 5y ago
    Interesting. That's a good start. It's interesting how it focuses on communication. I'd suggest that the gold standard is "business value", though I don't know how you'd measure it. My casual experience matches what this study says. But the flip side is that most people I know work a few more hours a week (replacing commuting time with work), and have replaced meetings and casual chatter with writing code. I also wonder how we will quantify "remote work" between different disciplines. HR vs Sales vs Engineering vs creative work, etc.. I'd guess the effects are different on different disciplines.
  - jacknews 5y ago
    "a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication." Lol, aka less meetings/broadcast missives, and more actual conversations? There are so many factors and variables at play that I'm not sure there will be a definitive "answer" whether remote is better or worse. I think it strongly depends on the team, the company the industry, etc. My experience is that remote done well, where everyone is enthusiastic, etc, is even better than in-office. But for some jobs/companies it seems the in-office bullying is an important part of "motivation".
it_does_follow 5y ago
> Once the pandemic is over Pandemic is not really going to be "over". The hope that it would just become endemic is fizzling out. We'll certainly continue living life, but it will never go back to the way it was. My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. People will realize wishful thinking doesn't do much to fight pandemics. Most people will think Omicron will make them immune forever, and we'll get new variants periodically, sometimes they'll be short and mild sometimes they'll be awful. People will start realizing that it's waiting for an end that's exhausting, and getting on with life, even if that means things are never quite the same, is preferable. "Back to office" will increasingly seem like a liability. Employees are already getting sick of the perpetually moving "back to office" dates. After 3 years of perpetually moving back these dates more and more companies will realize it's much healthier and more productive to just move forward as things are. > In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced. People may hate remote work during the pandemic, but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive. I've worked for successful remote teams for years prior to pandemic. The only issue in the past that remote startups really had was that VCs didn't like the look of not having an office in SF.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  > My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. I really hope you are wrong in this prediction. > but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive I've seen the same. You hear about isolated instances of teams being less productive but like you said, most folks I've talked to said their team has become more productive with remote work. IMO remote work is here to stay and is the future and I think it all boils down to not having to be co-located with your co-workers. Once management and HR figure out that this lets them have a 10x larger talent pool, they will get onboard (if they haven't already)
  - it_does_follow 5y ago
    > I really hope you are wrong in this prediction. For the record I also hope that I am wrong on this. I very much believe that we really don't know at this point (unfortunately rising hospitalization data, and uptick in deaths has me concerned). The trouble is the media chanting of "it's mild!" has meant people have basically ignored Omicron when we didn't have enough information to say "it's fine!" being mild and highly contagious can easily mean more deaths, and we haven't had enough data to say where the balance lies.
dasil003 5y ago
This is overly reductive. There are pros and cons to remote work. In-office is better for high bandwidth collaboration and social cohesion, but remote is better for IC focus, talent pool, and commute times. Which one is overall faster depends on cultural factors and work styles specific to the company. In aggregate we're only 2 years into the majority of companies giving full-remote serious consideration, so it hasn't really been fully tested yet. I don't think fully remote will be the default by any stretch, because at the end of the day many people are not cut out for remote work, but it's definitely going to be stickier than a lot type A management blowhards want to believe, and I predict we'll see some major all-remote success stories at scale over the next 5-10 years.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Im personally way more productive working from home as I can craft an environment that allows concentration on a task without constant interruptions. I get that teamwork will suffer etc. so the jury is out for me. That said if I ran a company it would be fully remote.

jstx1 5y ago

That's my personal experience too - that my team and I are more productive when we work from the same office. I don't know how realistic it is for everyone to return to the office though - many other people like remote and most people are kind of entrenched in their positions.

endisneigh 5y ago

You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would being in office be more efficient?

trinovantes 5y ago
I'd assume it'd be easier to build camaraderie between in-person coworkers than faceless Slack names. Coworkers that know each other well can probably collaborate better
- drchopchop 5y ago
  You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Meeting people in person, at least once, is valuable. It improves communication, helps people feel assimilated to the company and team, and creates a mental image of a three-dimensional co-worker (instead of just a faceless Slack handle) Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. This is especially true for those who have significant commutes or families.
  - wreath 5y ago
    > You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Unfortunately this doesn't really cut it. There is a huge difference between the teams I worked in where we were all remote vs the ones where all of us were in the office. The camaraderie, the amount of slack we gave each other, how fast we delivered and the overall mood was much better despite having wildly different personalities. With remote, you are interfacing with only one dimension of someone's personality and they may rub you the wrong way in a PR comment or otherwise and you can easily right them off. It's different when you go for lunch with the same person and talk about work or other stuff. Another thing is that talking about work-related-but-not-current-project-related stuff is much easier when people in the same location and the conversation starts off spontaneously. Whereas in a remote setting it needs to be a bit more organized so there is an overhead. There are a lot of pros to remote though, like not having to be subjected to your colleague's poor hygiene.
  - RestlessMind 5y ago
    > You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year). Doesn't ring true to me after spending 2 years in a remote-first setup. Even post-vcxx setup where everyone could meet freely didn't facilitate as much in-person interaction as I was looking forward to. > Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. For junior engineers trying to onboard, sitting close to their mentors is big help. Same for senior TLs who are coordinating complex technical projects across a team of 10-12 engineers or even more. Having everyone around is a big time saver for the overall project. WFH/Remote setup is great only for the engineers who are self-sufficient and neither need mentoring from others nor have to coordinate and lead other engineers' work.
  - drstewart 5y ago
    >Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would meeting up a few times a year be as good as seeing someone every day?
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  As someone who has worked remote long before the pandemic, this is a myth in my experience. I have had at least as many friendships formed with remote coworkers as I have in person office workers. Occasional get-togethers do help with this quite a lot, but it's not necessary. What I find strange about this reasoning is: doesn't every hacker have friends from around the world they've never met in person? From various software projects, open source contributions, online community connections etc I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person.
  - weatherlite 5y ago
    > I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person It happens for some but I can't say its the norm. Most people's meaningful relationships are based on real life, at least initially or some of the time.
- weatherlite 5y ago
  Even still surely some hybrid solution would suffice - where's the gain in daily office commute? I really start disliking my fellow workers when I am forced to see them everyday. Once or twice a week makes everyone more tolerable.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > some hybrid solution would suffice Hybrid enables a move from San Francisco to e.g. Petaluma. It doesn't permit most workers to move to Idaho. That argues for an expansion of the Bay Area over its demise.
    - weatherlite 5y ago
      It's hard to tell what will happen; surely most American companies will leave a main headquarters in the U.S which will probably be hybrid. Than they will have lower cost centers (that will be either remote or hybrid as well). Overall probably this will push down wages in SV and move it up in places like Germany or Ukraine. But I don't think it will be that dramatic. Salaries will still be very generous in SV.

CubsFan1060 5y ago

I'm curious, do you have any data on that? Or is this just your gut feeling? My experience goes mostly the other way, that remote workers are more efficient, but of course, two sets of experiences doesn't make a large data set.

jstx1 5y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network. Discussed on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920 It's not a perfect study but we don't really have that much actual research and evidence either way.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  Interesting. That's a good start. It's interesting how it focuses on communication. I'd suggest that the gold standard is "business value", though I don't know how you'd measure it. My casual experience matches what this study says. But the flip side is that most people I know work a few more hours a week (replacing commuting time with work), and have replaced meetings and casual chatter with writing code. I also wonder how we will quantify "remote work" between different disciplines. HR vs Sales vs Engineering vs creative work, etc.. I'd guess the effects are different on different disciplines.
- jacknews 5y ago
  "a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication." Lol, aka less meetings/broadcast missives, and more actual conversations? There are so many factors and variables at play that I'm not sure there will be a definitive "answer" whether remote is better or worse. I think it strongly depends on the team, the company the industry, etc. My experience is that remote done well, where everyone is enthusiastic, etc, is even better than in-office. But for some jobs/companies it seems the in-office bullying is an important part of "motivation".

it_does_follow 5y ago

> Once the pandemic is over Pandemic is not really going to be "over". The hope that it would just become endemic is fizzling out. We'll certainly continue living life, but it will never go back to the way it was. My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. People will realize wishful thinking doesn't do much to fight pandemics. Most people will think Omicron will make them immune forever, and we'll get new variants periodically, sometimes they'll be short and mild sometimes they'll be awful. People will start realizing that it's waiting for an end that's exhausting, and getting on with life, even if that means things are never quite the same, is preferable. "Back to office" will increasingly seem like a liability. Employees are already getting sick of the perpetually moving "back to office" dates. After 3 years of perpetually moving back these dates more and more companies will realize it's much healthier and more productive to just move forward as things are. > In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced. People may hate remote work during the pandemic, but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive. I've worked for successful remote teams for years prior to pandemic. The only issue in the past that remote startups really had was that VCs didn't like the look of not having an office in SF.

_fat_santa 5y ago
> My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. I really hope you are wrong in this prediction. > but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive I've seen the same. You hear about isolated instances of teams being less productive but like you said, most folks I've talked to said their team has become more productive with remote work. IMO remote work is here to stay and is the future and I think it all boils down to not having to be co-located with your co-workers. Once management and HR figure out that this lets them have a 10x larger talent pool, they will get onboard (if they haven't already)
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  > I really hope you are wrong in this prediction. For the record I also hope that I am wrong on this. I very much believe that we really don't know at this point (unfortunately rising hospitalization data, and uptick in deaths has me concerned). The trouble is the media chanting of "it's mild!" has meant people have basically ignored Omicron when we didn't have enough information to say "it's fine!" being mild and highly contagious can easily mean more deaths, and we haven't had enough data to say where the balance lies.

dasil003 5y ago

This is overly reductive. There are pros and cons to remote work. In-office is better for high bandwidth collaboration and social cohesion, but remote is better for IC focus, talent pool, and commute times. Which one is overall faster depends on cultural factors and work styles specific to the company. In aggregate we're only 2 years into the majority of companies giving full-remote serious consideration, so it hasn't really been fully tested yet. I don't think fully remote will be the default by any stretch, because at the end of the day many people are not cut out for remote work, but it's definitely going to be stickier than a lot type A management blowhards want to believe, and I predict we'll see some major all-remote success stories at scale over the next 5-10 years.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Im personally way more productive working from home as I can craft an environment that allows concentration on a task without constant interruptions. I get that teamwork will suffer etc. so the jury is out for me. That said if I ran a company it would be fully remote.