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Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for of

Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. People going into remote should acknowledge this.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arrakis2021 5y ago
This. As someone who works remotely and loves it, I’ve observed this on HN for years. It’s like engineers can’t (or won’t?) acknowledge that other roles in an organization go beyond staring at lines of code on a computer screen. Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  You can drag the other roles in if you wish. The entire company does not need to be remote. Just the engineering team.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  And even within the engineering roles, the more senior you are the less your job is about staring at a screen, and the more it benefits from face-to-face collaboration. I've actually considered taking a pay cut just so I can go back to slinging code and not worrying about much else.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  Just to offer a different perspective, I worked in a "normal" blue chip company, and people in most roles (finance, marketing, sales, logistics,legal) preferred by far to work away from the office the days it was allowed. Only R&D (for obvious reasons) didnt have that chance and even then it was not unheard of. Going to an open plan office destroys your soul.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  There's a bunch of things about 'being in an office' that aren't so much about 'being in an office' as they are 'not being in your house'. Cynically, you could point out some power dynamic - symbols of you being part of something 'larger' than yourself are often parts of offices (big or small), and you're submitting yourself to some rituals shared by your colleagues and (many?) others in society. BUT... there's also less responsibility for maintenance - offices often will have cleaning/maintenance, decent hvac, etc. They can provide a standardized work environment that helps legitimately separate 'work' from 'home', which many people need help in doing (even pre covid). Yes, you get the big whiteboards and maybe other equipment that just doesn't make sense for a home (big copiers from decades ago, etc) as well.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
cardosof 5y ago
While I agree with your comments and find them very true, it must be said that widening the talent pool means hiring high skilled professionals for the same or less money. The remote penalty can be offset by a stronger team in a cost effective way.
tikhonj 5y ago
People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. > People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.) It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  >We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? This is an excellent point that I'd never thought of. It demonstrates that a lot of companies resist change at their own peril, and not because it's the shrewd thing to do.
  - notpachet 5y ago
    Now take that axiom and blow it up to encompass all human groups, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of the state of the species.
- moises_silva 5y ago
  > People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Companies do all manner of things because "that's how they have always been done."
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist. Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
There’s also the mechanical money aspect behind it, if you pay bay area money to someone who lives in Idaho Falls, at some point they’ll be like “well my house is paid off my retirement money is full and life costs nothing here and I already live here, why would I work here 60 hours a week when I could enjoy life?”. Doesn’t happen the same with your bay area employees.
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  For starters, consider creating work environments where people aren't working 60 hours a week.
- mulmen 5y ago
  I plan on working well past retirement age if I can continue to be remote. I actually enjoy a lot of what I do at work, especially now that the most painful parts are mitigated or eliminated. My career path now is just to work fewer hours and be picky about where I do work to keep doing what I enjoy. I can't see myself going into the office in my 60s but I could definitely imagine doing part time remote work.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Good thing housing prices in Idaho are up 32% this year alone!
mavelikara 5y ago
> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote. > Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering. Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.
cm2012 5y ago
Marketing works better remote, and most agencies will be remote moving forward forever. Source: I know many agency owners, also am one. Also, most marketers I've been trying to recruit have said their agency's are remote indefinitely now.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  This is very interesting, as marketing is usually cited as one of the ones that is "impossible" to do remotely due to the high level of collaboration on very visual elements.
  - cm2012 5y ago
    It's pretty straightforward, even on the design part, just use screenshares and tools like Figma.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  What are the advantages of remote work, for marketing?
  - cm2012 5y ago
    1) More access to talent and happier talent. 2) As an agency, everyone being remote means we are more embedded with clients than before. All on the same Slack etc instead of in a separate office. 3) People use better collaboration tools 4) More things are written down
    - AlexCoventry 5y ago
      Thanks.
officeq 5y ago
runevault 5y ago
My employer believed as you are claiming, and so we had office space. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my work from home part time schedule pre-pandemic because they were so obsessed with people being in the office. Then the pandemic hit and they saw no discernable loss in productivity. They no longer require people to come in and in fact we expanded our hiring to allow remote workers because there was 0 reason not to.
zebraflask 5y ago
This doesn't pass the sniff test. For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus? To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  I have done B2B sales since the shift to remote work. The nature of the work actually highly lends itself to being in person. Even remote workers will be on some physical location the majority of the time. COVID changed this, and not for the better. It is much harder to do remote.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    There's no reason for the sales staff to be in the same room as eachother. Plenty of B2B deals happen remotely, even pre-covid. I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. Remote workers are equally or better suited to occasional visits to customer locations anyway.
    - KaiserPro 5y ago
      > there's no way sales had a travel budget. All the places where we had B2B sales, we've had a travel budget. Ironically the sales "offices" were usually one person in a territory. But they were very much out wining and dining big customers. We also had a telesales team, who were centrally based, and they totally could be remote workers.
    - rkk3 5y ago
      > I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. That sounds odd. Maybe the company was so big you weren't aware of these things or the company wasn't mature and only had low value contracts. But eventually all b2b software goes to enterprise and that means face to face time with clients, expense accounts for thousand dollar dinners & travel budgets large enough to get global services status.
mbesto 5y ago
> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses You're right, so let's follow the money... I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?). > knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. - I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance". - I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this. - "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument. I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  > I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance". Because you can’t. The decision to go remote is a one way door. > People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. Open offices are a management trend and hardly universal among successful companies. Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm. I have been at three companies since the pandemic started, all of whom you would know. All of them struggle with performance management and output of remote teams, regardless of if they are public about it.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    > Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm. No it’s not, it’s just new to you so it seems scary. Companies have been dealing with this for decades with branch offices, contractors, etc.
    - KaiserPro 5y ago
      > branch offices, contractors, etc. Branch offices isnt remote, and contractors are mercenaries. Look, I think there is not "one" answer to this. I personally can't think of anything worse than complete remote. Its isolating, difficult to understand the entire company and everything requires explicit communication. Some companies do this well, Most do not. However I have worked with fully remote workers, and they love being remote. I don't know how we sensible accommodate both modes of working.
indymike 5y ago
> The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Meanwhile in Palo Alto, I was spending hours every workday trying to get a Terraform apply to complete without crashing out thanks to my apartment's crappy, crappy internet connection. Hell yeah, remote work!
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I do go to offices occasionally, as we have an on site data centres and I have to do things to it, also meet up every month or two with teammates to go for beer. I can't get any of my normal day-to-day work done in the office because of the crappy internet. I don't have 4 monitors there either unlike at home.
  - sysadmindotfail 5y ago
    I did terraform apply from some rather remote places in 2021...I'd highly recommend leaving your apartment for some better locales.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      The only thing I was able to find at the time was working from my car in the Starbucks parking lot. I have since left the Terraform job.
- scaryclam 5y ago
  Please try and remember, as many people won't take a fully remote job as will not take an office bound or hybrid job. Lots of the best people are not interested in remote, so you're not going to get them by enforcing remote.
tata71 5y ago
> every other function functions better in person. Every other "function" is a person who hasn't bothered to learn to use a damn computer.....
AdamJMarsh 5y ago
This is becoming a very outdated view. If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par? Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for. Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.
mulmen 5y ago
There is a precisely zero percent chance that customer service works better in person. I have done it personally. My mom did it for over a decade from home. Engineering is not the only task that can be done remotely.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I actually work in customer service for a tech company right now. We do some days in the office and most days remote. Being remote is worse for productivity. For instance, when I need to ask a team mate a question, they respond in slack at their convenience. At the office it takes 20 seconds. Communication and collaboration seem orders of magnitude more difficult remotely. Yes, client services can be done remotely. Yes I like not having to commute every day. Yes, I can see the number of tickets we close and remote is just more unproductive.
  - culturestate 5y ago
    > For instance, when I need to ask a team mate a question, they respond in slack at their convenience. At the office it takes 20 seconds. This seems like something that can be pretty easily solved with a process change, no?
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      You can ask people "please respond to your slack messages faster", but that doesn't really work.
      - culturestate 5y ago
        I mean, why couldn’t you have some version of pager duty for people who are (apparently) on the clock and in the critical path of support calls? Remember years ago MSN Messenger had that buzz feature that would let you shake the conversation window for your contact? You could recreate something similar by eg force-enabling Slack alerts for specific keywords.
  - 5y ago
midrus 5y ago
Not my experience at all. The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done. Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable. For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job. What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context. If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, where and how things were documented? And where were important conversations posted?
  - midrus 5y ago
    In my opinion, any tool that allows teams/individuals to publish/post updates and subscribe to other teams/individuals' posts or updates can work. Bonus points if you can have threaded conversations (like HN), examples: - https://friday.app/ https://friday.app/ - https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ - https://www.yammer.com/ https://www.yammer.com/ (is this still a thing? used it like 10 years ago) - etc... We also used slack (or equivalent... also used hipchat, and even jabber before that) for ephemeral, one off, non important stuff. And then a lot happens also in READMEs, Merge/Pull Requests, Gitlab issues, helpdesk tickets, etc. Not much use of emails other than for notifications. At the end of the day everything has a link and things can reference each other. I think what most companies are missing is a way for employees to "post" and "subscribe" to updates that are interesting for them.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  > Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable. That's one of the key factors for remote work success. Tribal knowledge stops working when team goes remote. Especially onboarding sucks because there's nobody who could just drop by and help you with first steps. It's harder to do when remoting. Last two places I've worked had nothing written down and it was colossal waste of time trying to get started because knowledge was scattered among people, some of whom had already left the company. I mean, you know that you're hiring for a particular position, then ensure that everything needed is either taken care of or written down and accessible. But no, I needed to waste first weeks just piecing needed information together. 1/10, would not do again.
it_does_follow 5y ago
Even if all of this were true (which I don't think anyone seriously believes anymore), there is still no way startups can compete right now without remote offerings. The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile). There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.
yob22 5y ago
onion2k 5y ago
everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair). I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.
- chii 5y ago
  it's possible that remote meetings are effective for those investors because they have a narrow band of requirements from such meetings (gathering information and analysis etc), but effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example).
  - onion2k 5y ago
    effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example) You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote. FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.
    - 5y ago
j4yav 5y ago
Does everybody really know this? How do they explain all-remote unicorns where all the departments seem to be able to be effective remotely? My experience having worked at a couple of them now is that people are more productive once async working really takes hold.
heurisko 5y ago
> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems. However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  People being asked to handler cost reduction haven't got an issue with that. The company is an abstract entity, and if it could think, it would certainly have an issue with handicapping productive employees. I would rather point out the dishonest personnel, paid to reduce costs by x, who won't hesitate to sell some brillant ideas that will ultimately cost the company 2x to 10x. Elsewhere. Making sure it isn't clearly noticeable in the short term.
wayoutthere 5y ago
My company (management consulting) has smashed profitability records the last two years. A large part of that was not having office expenses and not doing in-person events. It’s completely apparent that many people used the office as their social outlet, with little work of value happening during those interactions. We are more productive in fewer hours. Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done. I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound. Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.
lawn 5y ago
Just like how open-plan offices boost productivity right? I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

arrakis2021 5y ago

This. As someone who works remotely and loves it, I’ve observed this on HN for years. It’s like engineers can’t (or won’t?) acknowledge that other roles in an organization go beyond staring at lines of code on a computer screen. Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.

MattGaiser 5y ago
You can drag the other roles in if you wish. The entire company does not need to be remote. Just the engineering team.
rootusrootus 5y ago
And even within the engineering roles, the more senior you are the less your job is about staring at a screen, and the more it benefits from face-to-face collaboration. I've actually considered taking a pay cut just so I can go back to slinging code and not worrying about much else.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
Just to offer a different perspective, I worked in a "normal" blue chip company, and people in most roles (finance, marketing, sales, logistics,legal) preferred by far to work away from the office the days it was allowed. Only R&D (for obvious reasons) didnt have that chance and even then it was not unheard of. Going to an open plan office destroys your soul.
mgkimsal 5y ago
There's a bunch of things about 'being in an office' that aren't so much about 'being in an office' as they are 'not being in your house'. Cynically, you could point out some power dynamic - symbols of you being part of something 'larger' than yourself are often parts of offices (big or small), and you're submitting yourself to some rituals shared by your colleagues and (many?) others in society. BUT... there's also less responsibility for maintenance - offices often will have cleaning/maintenance, decent hvac, etc. They can provide a standardized work environment that helps legitimately separate 'work' from 'home', which many people need help in doing (even pre covid). Yes, you get the big whiteboards and maybe other equipment that just doesn't make sense for a home (big copiers from decades ago, etc) as well.
TheGigaChad 5y ago

cardosof 5y ago

While I agree with your comments and find them very true, it must be said that widening the talent pool means hiring high skilled professionals for the same or less money. The remote penalty can be offset by a stronger team in a cost effective way.

tikhonj 5y ago

People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. > People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.) It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.

SantalBlush 5y ago
>We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? This is an excellent point that I'd never thought of. It demonstrates that a lot of companies resist change at their own peril, and not because it's the shrewd thing to do.
- notpachet 5y ago
  Now take that axiom and blow it up to encompass all human groups, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of the state of the species.
moises_silva 5y ago
> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Companies do all manner of things because "that's how they have always been done."

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist. Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

There’s also the mechanical money aspect behind it, if you pay bay area money to someone who lives in Idaho Falls, at some point they’ll be like “well my house is paid off my retirement money is full and life costs nothing here and I already live here, why would I work here 60 hours a week when I could enjoy life?”. Doesn’t happen the same with your bay area employees.

jdauriemma 5y ago
For starters, consider creating work environments where people aren't working 60 hours a week.
mulmen 5y ago
I plan on working well past retirement age if I can continue to be remote. I actually enjoy a lot of what I do at work, especially now that the most painful parts are mitigated or eliminated. My career path now is just to work fewer hours and be picky about where I do work to keep doing what I enjoy. I can't see myself going into the office in my 60s but I could definitely imagine doing part time remote work.
bluedino 5y ago
Good thing housing prices in Idaho are up 32% this year alone!

mavelikara 5y ago

> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote. > Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person. Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering. Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.

cm2012 5y ago

Marketing works better remote, and most agencies will be remote moving forward forever. Source: I know many agency owners, also am one. Also, most marketers I've been trying to recruit have said their agency's are remote indefinitely now.

MattGaiser 5y ago
This is very interesting, as marketing is usually cited as one of the ones that is "impossible" to do remotely due to the high level of collaboration on very visual elements.
- cm2012 5y ago
  It's pretty straightforward, even on the design part, just use screenshares and tools like Figma.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
What are the advantages of remote work, for marketing?
- cm2012 5y ago
  1) More access to talent and happier talent. 2) As an agency, everyone being remote means we are more embedded with clients than before. All on the same Slack etc instead of in a separate office. 3) People use better collaboration tools 4) More things are written down
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    Thanks.

officeq 5y ago

runevault 5y ago

My employer believed as you are claiming, and so we had office space. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my work from home part time schedule pre-pandemic because they were so obsessed with people being in the office. Then the pandemic hit and they saw no discernable loss in productivity. They no longer require people to come in and in fact we expanded our hiring to allow remote workers because there was 0 reason not to.

zebraflask 5y ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test. For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus? To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.

nostrebored 5y ago
I have done B2B sales since the shift to remote work. The nature of the work actually highly lends itself to being in person. Even remote workers will be on some physical location the majority of the time. COVID changed this, and not for the better. It is much harder to do remote.
- mulmen 5y ago
  There's no reason for the sales staff to be in the same room as eachother. Plenty of B2B deals happen remotely, even pre-covid. I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. Remote workers are equally or better suited to occasional visits to customer locations anyway.
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    > there's no way sales had a travel budget. All the places where we had B2B sales, we've had a travel budget. Ironically the sales "offices" were usually one person in a territory. But they were very much out wining and dining big customers. We also had a telesales team, who were centrally based, and they totally could be remote workers.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    > I don't recall any customers coming on site at my last B2B company and there's no way sales had a travel budget. That sounds odd. Maybe the company was so big you weren't aware of these things or the company wasn't mature and only had low value contracts. But eventually all b2b software goes to enterprise and that means face to face time with clients, expense accounts for thousand dollar dinners & travel budgets large enough to get global services status.

mbesto 5y ago

> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses You're right, so let's follow the money... I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?). > knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company. - I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance". - I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this. - "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument. I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.

nostrebored 5y ago
> I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance". Because you can’t. The decision to go remote is a one way door. > People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. Open offices are a management trend and hardly universal among successful companies. Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm. I have been at three companies since the pandemic started, all of whom you would know. All of them struggle with performance management and output of remote teams, regardless of if they are public about it.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > Whereas remote work is an extreme aberration from the norm. No it’s not, it’s just new to you so it seems scary. Companies have been dealing with this for decades with branch offices, contractors, etc.
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    > branch offices, contractors, etc. Branch offices isnt remote, and contractors are mercenaries. Look, I think there is not "one" answer to this. I personally can't think of anything worse than complete remote. Its isolating, difficult to understand the entire company and everything requires explicit communication. Some companies do this well, Most do not. However I have worked with fully remote workers, and they love being remote. I don't know how we sensible accommodate both modes of working.

indymike 5y ago

> The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.

legerdemain 5y ago
Meanwhile in Palo Alto, I was spending hours every workday trying to get a Terraform apply to complete without crashing out thanks to my apartment's crappy, crappy internet connection. Hell yeah, remote work!
- iso1631 5y ago
  I do go to offices occasionally, as we have an on site data centres and I have to do things to it, also meet up every month or two with teammates to go for beer. I can't get any of my normal day-to-day work done in the office because of the crappy internet. I don't have 4 monitors there either unlike at home.
- sysadmindotfail 5y ago
  I did terraform apply from some rather remote places in 2021...I'd highly recommend leaving your apartment for some better locales.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    The only thing I was able to find at the time was working from my car in the Starbucks parking lot. I have since left the Terraform job.
scaryclam 5y ago
Please try and remember, as many people won't take a fully remote job as will not take an office bound or hybrid job. Lots of the best people are not interested in remote, so you're not going to get them by enforcing remote.

tata71 5y ago

> every other function functions better in person. Every other "function" is a person who hasn't bothered to learn to use a damn computer.....

AdamJMarsh 5y ago

This is becoming a very outdated view. If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par? Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for. Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.

mulmen 5y ago

There is a precisely zero percent chance that customer service works better in person. I have done it personally. My mom did it for over a decade from home. Engineering is not the only task that can be done remotely.

missedthecue 5y ago
I actually work in customer service for a tech company right now. We do some days in the office and most days remote. Being remote is worse for productivity. For instance, when I need to ask a team mate a question, they respond in slack at their convenience. At the office it takes 20 seconds. Communication and collaboration seem orders of magnitude more difficult remotely. Yes, client services can be done remotely. Yes I like not having to commute every day. Yes, I can see the number of tickets we close and remote is just more unproductive.
- culturestate 5y ago
  > For instance, when I need to ask a team mate a question, they respond in slack at their convenience. At the office it takes 20 seconds. This seems like something that can be pretty easily solved with a process change, no?
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    You can ask people "please respond to your slack messages faster", but that doesn't really work.
    - culturestate 5y ago
      I mean, why couldn’t you have some version of pager duty for people who are (apparently) on the clock and in the critical path of support calls? Remember years ago MSN Messenger had that buzz feature that would let you shake the conversation window for your contact? You could recreate something similar by eg force-enabling Slack alerts for specific keywords.
- 5y ago

midrus 5y ago

Not my experience at all. The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done. Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable. For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job. What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context. If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.

HatchedLake721 5y ago
Out of curiosity, where and how things were documented? And where were important conversations posted?
- midrus 5y ago
  In my opinion, any tool that allows teams/individuals to publish/post updates and subscribe to other teams/individuals' posts or updates can work. Bonus points if you can have threaded conversations (like HN), examples: - https://friday.app/ https://friday.app/ - https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ - https://www.yammer.com/ https://www.yammer.com/ (is this still a thing? used it like 10 years ago) - etc... We also used slack (or equivalent... also used hipchat, and even jabber before that) for ephemeral, one off, non important stuff. And then a lot happens also in READMEs, Merge/Pull Requests, Gitlab issues, helpdesk tickets, etc. Not much use of emails other than for notifications. At the end of the day everything has a link and things can reference each other. I think what most companies are missing is a way for employees to "post" and "subscribe" to updates that are interesting for them.
ihateolives 5y ago
> Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable. That's one of the key factors for remote work success. Tribal knowledge stops working when team goes remote. Especially onboarding sucks because there's nobody who could just drop by and help you with first steps. It's harder to do when remoting. Last two places I've worked had nothing written down and it was colossal waste of time trying to get started because knowledge was scattered among people, some of whom had already left the company. I mean, you know that you're hiring for a particular position, then ensure that everything needed is either taken care of or written down and accessible. But no, I needed to waste first weeks just piecing needed information together. 1/10, would not do again.

it_does_follow 5y ago

Even if all of this were true (which I don't think anyone seriously believes anymore), there is still no way startups can compete right now without remote offerings. The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile). There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.

yob22 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair). I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.

chii 5y ago
it's possible that remote meetings are effective for those investors because they have a narrow band of requirements from such meetings (gathering information and analysis etc), but effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example).
- onion2k 5y ago
  effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example) You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote. FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.
  - 5y ago

j4yav 5y ago

Does everybody really know this? How do they explain all-remote unicorns where all the departments seem to be able to be effective remotely? My experience having worked at a couple of them now is that people are more productive once async working really takes hold.

heurisko 5y ago

> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems. However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.

hirako2000 5y ago
People being asked to handler cost reduction haven't got an issue with that. The company is an abstract entity, and if it could think, it would certainly have an issue with handicapping productive employees. I would rather point out the dishonest personnel, paid to reduce costs by x, who won't hesitate to sell some brillant ideas that will ultimately cost the company 2x to 10x. Elsewhere. Making sure it isn't clearly noticeable in the short term.

wayoutthere 5y ago

My company (management consulting) has smashed profitability records the last two years. A large part of that was not having office expenses and not doing in-person events. It’s completely apparent that many people used the office as their social outlet, with little work of value happening during those interactions. We are more productive in fewer hours. Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done. I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound. Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.

lawn 5y ago

Just like how open-plan offices boost productivity right? I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.