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I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, ca

• deleted 5y ago
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• enos_feedler 5y ago
  Not crashing and burning has a lot to do with development momentum from before the pandemic. It will take all of 22 and ‘23 to be able to compare the output of pre pandemic versions of big tech. This is especially true for hardware companies and products that have annual release cadence.
• Zanneth 5y ago
  Most of the studies I've seen that evaluate productivity are based on surveys given directly to the employees. I imagine workers have a lot of bias when asked to evaluate their own productivity, especially when there are significant personal benefits from working at home.
• lnxg33k1 5y ago
  >>> I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. And that's what is wrong about being in office, especially as a software developer I hate having my focus interrupted because someone can't send an email
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. You stated your preferences. There are many (probably most in programming roles) who don't, so they'll go elsewhere.
• swiftcoder 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack. Have you only ever worked for companies small enough to be co-located in a single office? This wasn't true at big corps even when we were all in the office. Hey, the team that owns this is in Boston, 3 time zones from the West Cost. Oh, wait, that piece of software was transferred to the Zurich team, 9 time zones away, so they'll respond tomorrow at the earliest because there's no workday overlap. Bob might know about it, though, he's on the other side of campus - you can get there in 30 minutes on the campus shuttle.
• Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  > We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote suddenly and unexpectedly, without specific preparations, planning or training for that scenario, with employees in an especially stressing and taxing situation (pandemic uncertainty, childcare issues that wouldn't exist outside of a pandemic, with some people needing to work and care for children at the same time) and still be productive. I'd say that's a rather strong result for remote work. Not proof that it's universally "better", because obviously things are complicated and the answer is always "it depends", but at least I'd take it as proof that it should probably be taken as the (or a) default option rather than an exotic alternative.
• ChrisRR 5y ago
  It's like every study that "proves" that 4 day weeks are better. They never seem to extend any further than the initial honeymoon period before the novelty wears off
  • Forgeties79 5y ago
    My company implemented 36hr weeks (done at noon Friday) about 6mo ago and it continues to be super popular/effective. It’s consistently the benefit we discuss/list as a favorite and our company is onboarding more users than ever (important for our growth). Obviously it’d be ridiculous to say it helped our business grow outright, but it’s clearly not a hindrance and 6mo in there’s been no discussion of ending it. Hell our CEO has discussed canceling Friday entirely.
• DrBazza 5y ago
  My experience of returning to the office a few times already? The same old thing. People eating at their desks - we have a kitchen. People having meetings and "quick chats" around their desk - we have many, many, meeting rooms. People with other annoying habits (which I almost certainly have too) that make me sound OCD but... sniffing, throat clearing, drowning themselves in aftershave or perfume and so on. Same awful 60min+ commute on a train. Versus my home office with just me, quiet background music, and exactly zero distractions. I'm glad all the multi-million salaried bosses that live a few minutes walk and have their own private offices want every one back...
• ulzeraj 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. This comment right here made me angry and for reasons totally different from the discussion. Its about people who thinks they they are entitled to interrupt my workflow to solve their issues.
• taurath 5y ago
  If they’ve got Google amenities I can see it but have you seen the side by side desks in open spaces sharing floors with salespeople that reflects most programmers work environments? Some places won’t even provide an ergonomic setup, and they have to compete against a setup developed at home over 2 years that works out much much better.
• linspace 5y ago
  I agree on a lot of the things you said but I wonder if they are worth the cost, not just at an individual level but even as a society
• krautsourced 5y ago
  For me the mixed model works best, some days at the office, some at home. I am infinitely more productive when it comes to coding working from home. The constant office interruptions made it impossible to concentrate for any length of time. On the other hand, any in person meeting felt equally more productive than the zoom ones. Same goes for discussing issues, explaining them out loud to other people etc. without having to set a meeting. So, for me, the _preparation_ for work is best done in an on site environment, the actual work I do better from home (where I actually also have the much better setup and equipment than at the office)
• peakaboo 5y ago
  Completely disagree. We have proven that a lot of developers are both happier and more productive when working remotely. The open office is the absolute worst possible environment for being productive. I could probably be more productive in the middle of a highway.
• motbus3 5y ago
  so you are the kind the interrupt people train of thought to get your stuff done and let them to work til late :P
• Xelbair 5y ago
  >I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. I found that actually opposite was true in my case. Less distractions ,less interruptions and we cleared A LOT of our backlog. It turns out a lot of those "urgent taps" turned to be not so urgent, or other person being just lazy(it was faster to walk 1min than to do a 5min read on our internal docs, or just google it)
• _8j50 5y ago
  > I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily That's bonkers. When people message you on slack you can prioritize and respond without breaking pace and train of productive thought. In person, if someome is talking to you and I also prefer to chat up, I will delay the conversation indefinetly or book a time wasting meeting that clutters your schedule. If you need someone else to comment and they're on a meeting you might schedule another meeting instead of asking them questions they can answer while listening in on the current meeting. I could put in a good effort to be lazy and unproductive at home and I would still be more productive overall than in the office. I disliked wfh after covid for a while because I was so busy all the time. No more chatting with extroverts and walking to/from meeting rooms half of the work day (at best!) and I use to leave my pc off or at the office before, now I constantly work before and after shifts, on weekends,etc... It makes me feel like my job is at risk because I don't have enough time to show desired output/kpi at the office. At least now I overwork and have better assurances of stability. They pay me well enough to where I don't worry about taken advantage of.
• lm28469 5y ago
  Some people also don't consider their day job to be their life mission and don't care if an issue is resolved in 5 minutes or 30 minutes if it means saving 1 hour of commute and spending more time with their family / hobbies / life in general. This productivity fetishisation is so weird
• deleted 5y ago
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• oxfordmale 5y ago
  In software Engineering there is no evidence that working from home is less productive. Personally it is quite the opposite with open offices still being the norm in most companies. However, it is important to adapt your company to a remote working culture. You can't simply replace your physical meetings with Zoom meetings. In order to ensure a good team spirit, it is also important to organise regular meet ups between all your remote staff at least once a quarter. And regarding your approach to "quickly" resolve things, I shall refrain from repeating the words that software engineers use for people like you. You are assuming that your issue is the highest priority issue that needs to be resolved immediately. This can be highly disruptive for Software Engineers, especially when multiple business stakeholders tend to do the same.
• 988747 5y ago
  I can tell you that remote work sucks. Not for me, personally, because I like it, but: managing team remotely is very difficult. Over the course of 2 years I had at least two people who were clearly fraud - their work performance was abysmal, probably because they were working two jobs at once. It's hard do motivate, and to control people if you never even met them.
• qzx_pierri 5y ago
  Are you a manager? I swear it’s ONLY managers who say these things.
• nemacol 5y ago
  Hasn't basically every bit of the industry seen massive growth and profits since the start of COVID? I think the situation has proven quite a bit more than "the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn". Can't say the degree to which it has impacted business without studying it. It could have been great, not great, or a drag but to say "crash and burn" or nothing seems a bit touched.
• aminerman 5y ago
  Spends 3 hours commuting so that someone can tap him on his back.
• josephd79 5y ago
  I am the complete opposite. My work productivity has went way up because I do not have people tapping me on the shoulder. I agree that working remotely isn't for everyone.
• hbn 5y ago
  I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work, but if I'm being honest with myself, the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run. And maybe I'm just crazy but it seems like software even from the big companies has gotten worse through the pandemic. Which wouldn't surprise me that it's hard to keep everyone working together and on the same page through online calls and chats. I personally feel like I'm not quite as engaged being at home, surrounded by distractions compared to being in an office where my brain goes into work mode.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > the idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run. I find the idea that all your regular human interaction comes from people you work with infinitely more dreadful.
    • hardolaf 5y ago
      People spend over 1/3 of their day working. It's the only regular social interaction a lot of people get outside of their household. They get a lot more irregular social interaction from other things, but nothing quite as regular.
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    > I certainly like being able to roll out of bed and put on a coffee 10 minutes before starting work I did this, but now its just slipped into actually just checking slack at 10am then going back to sleep till 11:30.
  • Clubber 5y ago
    >idea of receiving all my regular human interaction through a badly made Electron app from Microsoft for the rest of my life is just not a good idea in the long run. Have you considered bars?
• thor_molecules 5y ago
  Genuinely curious - why do you value "overall productivity" so much?
• eweise 5y ago
  Personally I'll never go back to the office except for the occasional meeting. The benefit I get to my health and well being from not commuting, is far too great. I also think that offices are just a power trip by the company leaders. They get off by walking through an office full of people. Its just another crappy part of being an employee, suffering through the command and control structure of business.
• Havelock 5y ago
  In my experience productivity is up and people get their work done. What I do see is a lot of extrovert getting depressed because they no longer have access to the smorgasbord of interactions at the office. Certain managers also seem worried by this move to remote, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics. My own opinion is let the people decide what to do. Once a week, everyday, once a month, only when needed... Let people and teams decide.
  • craigie 5y ago
    >, since it has become harder for them to "play the game" of office politics I suspect this is the real reason for a push to return to the office.
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  It's not that common IME for there to actually be a real debate but rather simply some sort of power play/expression of desire for personal benefit. If you expect that literally every business going forward is going to be happy with WFH then you're taking an unreasonable stance. The same is true in the opposite direction - as much as I'd like it to be the case, not everyone is going back to the office, structural changes have taken place that would make that difficult even if it were desired. It follows then that some people will have to switch companies. This really isn't a big deal, the entire point of having a job market is that people should be continuously doing this otherwise the market isn't efficient. You can see it in the rhetoric here - "forced to go in". There is no force involved.
• avs733 5y ago
  as a board member or shareholder I think I would ask the inverse question. Okay, we have two years of data. PROVE to me that you need to spend $Xm per year on office space for this company to work. Prove to me that you have to pay top of market SV salaries I think the time is now to reframe what needs to be proven...its a business not a social experiment. Coming in costs more money, prove to me its money worth spending on a case by case basis. If you don't run a handson manufacturing line what evidence supports paying for a building where everyone has a space? We've already ditched offices for cubicles and cubicles for open plan offices just to save space (i.e., cost). At this point the burden of proof isn't on 'work from home is okay' just from a financial perspective.
• throwaway5486nv 5y ago
  do you code for living?
• msoad 5y ago
  Have you ever walked between buildings to catch a meeting? I remember this from my Google days and I hated it. Ironically at some point they were cool with video calling in from another building!!
  • librish 5y ago
    Yes, if I'm not colocated with my team then most of the advantages go away.
  • quest88 5y ago
    Haha, or video calling from the same building but between floors because rooms are not big enough!
    • dionian 5y ago
      my favorite excuse to stay at my desk and work
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    It sucks in the Norcal office but if you're in any of the other offices the max distance is not too bad.
    • googler519524 5y ago
      laughs in New York City at getting lost in stairwells of the original 111 8th Ave building or Chelsea market building, and soon (not) going between Chelsea and Hudson Square.
      • ikiris 5y ago
        Lol maze building was real
        • saalweachter 5y ago
          All Google offices have a bit of a collegiate feeling; the NYC office just channels The Big U.
• civilized 5y ago
  Do you literally want to be tapped on the shoulder? Because this seems to be an extremely common figure of speech, but literally, I would not enjoy that.
  • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    Right? Like...one time I was deep in the mental flow, headphones on playing some nice orchestrated video game music. Totally entranced. Someone came up and tapped me on my shoulder and I damn near shit myself.
  • IanCal 5y ago
    Yes if me helping on several different tasks is more beneficial than isolating and working on one.
  • tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    I mean people normally wave in your line of sight then actually touch you but yes.... It's a super quick way to resolve an issue and get everyone back on track. Especially as I've gotten more and more senior over my career and a lot of your work output is making sure the rest of the team can function effectively. Only when I was really junior did heads down code all day happen.
    • civilized 5y ago
      I just don't understand why it's physical rather than verbal. You have to talk to solve the problem anyways right? Isn't that the point of being colocated?
      • LightG 5y ago
        Well, in my circumstances, headphones are on during focused work because I don't want to listen to small talk or a sales phone call or ... etc
        • civilized 5y ago
• dsl 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack That works for companies with less than 100 engineers. Everyone seems to have forgotten the good ol days where you had in person meetings and had to dial in half the team from Europe or include Fred who is working from home.
  • thebean11 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how many engineers there are as long as the teams are colocated. Yes you will need to have zoom meetings with other teams but interaction within the team can be almost fully in person.
    • mulmen 5y ago
      This was almost never my experience. The actual time to get feedback in an office is between four hours and two days. Managers are almost never at their desks because they are attending meetings all day. Same for senior engineers. If you need a quick response IM is your best option. Your whole team of engineers will almost never be in the same place. Someone will be in a meeting, somewhere. Or hiding trying to get work done. You might get lucky and the person you need to talk to is at their desk, but they will be busy trying to catch up before or after a meeting. In office communication is already asynchronous. Every day you will run into these problems. The idea of (especially open) offices fostering communication is a complete fantasy. Email and chat are the way actual communication is done in corporate America. Synchronous communication isn’t feasible.
    • dsl 5y ago
      Sure, as long as $impossible is true, it works well. You can have a front end Javascript team all stuck in Portland, but that falls apart for any advanced skill set. Try convincing the worlds 20 leading experts in X to live in one city.
      • thebean11 5y ago
        I've never been on a team of 20 leading experts in any field, sounds interesting..
• kcb 5y ago
  > We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.
  • post-it 5y ago
    Record earnings and stock prices are not necessarily due to remote work. They could be despite it.
  • cortesoft 5y ago
    Hard to draw that conclusion when everyone was forced to go remote… they weren’t competing with non-remote companies.
  • alecbz 5y ago
    A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
    • zip1234 5y ago
      Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone. The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
      • throwaway1777 5y ago
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Last I checked just about every major tech company has been doing just fine this past year. A lot of us won't be returning if required.
• babypuncher 5y ago
  My company is going hybrid in the spring (2 days in office, 3 days WFH), which I think is a good approach. There is definitely something to be gained from face to face time with co-workers. There is also something to be said of the improved productivity of working at home and not dealing with a long commute or random distractions.
• munificent 5y ago
  > We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Agreed. We've proven that big tech companies can continue to be productive for up to two years going remote. I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. But I think it's probably quite a bit harder for people to be productive when they are new to the company, less experienced, and don't have that existing foundation to build on. I think it's a solvable problem for companies that want to prioritize remote work, but I definitely don't think "managed to get through the past two years" means "it's a piece of cake".
  • pdimitar 5y ago
    > I suspect that that doesn't generalize very well to being completely remote over the long term. And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right? Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion. Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.
  • craigie 5y ago
    >works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person. And it works well for experienced people that have ramped up. I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships. There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.
  • adenozine 5y ago
    Luckily, there will be plenty of remote firms to scoop up all the engineers Google is about to hemorrhage. What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this. Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)
• tester756 5y ago
  >I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. wut? 2 years on remote and in majority of the cases I've been able to talk to somebody within 1min.
  • edmcnulty101 5y ago
    Same. I've never had a problem. I typically talk to my team numerous times per day via Zoom, Slack, Phone, etc. I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry.
    • ceras 5y ago
      OP said they prefer to resolve in person rather than Slack/Zoom/etc. They weren't projecting, just expressing a different preference for what they find productive.
    • passivate 5y ago
      >I think the poster has an issue with their company that they are projected onto the industry. Couldn't the same be said of you? I don't think anyone is asserting that one system is the best. If an entire team/company is able to be happy and productive in a remote-work situation, then more power to them. Its often the case that some people prefer remote, some don't. The ratio varies between companies. Personally, as a manager, I would prioritize overall team happiness and efficiency over placating a few individuals.
      • engineeringwoke 5y ago
        It sounds like the OP we're replying to wants a daycare, not a company. There's plenty of them out there (including the original subject of conversation), but I wouldn't call it a preference. People like this don't want a structured workplace because they prefer it; they want a structured workplace because they need it, because they never figured out how to live by themselves after university.
• jahewson 5y ago
  I think such an office environment leads to lower productivity. I too present no evidence for this claim. Personally I think I’m right! We should do it my way.
  • erosenbe0 5y ago
    There are no firm answers. Consider health effects. Some of my colleagues struggled to maintain their health without their daily walks to the train, or just overworked themselves adapting to remote meetings and tools. Others are physically and mentally much healthier after substituting extra sleep, exercise, or preparation of healthy meals for the commute time.
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      There's absolutely nothing stopping those people from choosing to go on daily walks.
      • ceras 5y ago
        Something is stopping them, otherwise they'd do it. Even if that's purely psychological, that's no less real to them, and the outcomes are clear. A close analogy might be weight loss: "nothing" is stopping anyone from eating less, yet most Americans eat more than they should.
        • andrewingram 5y ago
          Right. Going to the office meant a baseline of 7,000 steps a day, plus quite a few flights of stairs. Plus it was easy to go to salsa and gym after work (because I was already out of the house, so it was easier to to talk myself into going). I struggle to do any of those things when i'm remote. I know perfectly well that I physically can, but that psychological inertia is extremely powerful.
      • oblio 5y ago
        Personal discipline, or the lack of, is a thing. Plenty of people benefit from imposed structure in their lives. Yes, it's bad, yes, it's sad, but that's life. It's not all idealism and dreams.
• Consultant32452 5y ago
  The thing that I find bothersome is wanting to force others to comply with our individual preferences. And it's all sides of everything these days.
  • alecbz 5y ago
    Remote and in-office are both pretty inherently social decisions. If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person. If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.
    • Consultant32452 5y ago
      I'll be frank. I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. They need to make friends outside of work if they need socialization time. I may socialize with people from work, but will do it on my own terms. The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, it's just the polite way of saying they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.
      • alecbz 5y ago
        > I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. Okay, sounds like you prefer remote work then? I don't see what's wrong with someone else preferring in-person work. > The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, Disagree, there's definitely conversations that are much easier to have in-person. Both just "locally" for individual conversations, but also in terms team bonding and trust that allow other kinds of conversations to happen at all. That said, I think it is _also_ about socializing. > they want to force others to fulfill their social needs. You cannot get around needing others to fulfill social needs, that's what social means. In what way is this "forcing" in a way that's different than how other social interactions work?
      • craigie 5y ago
        I don't get why in person types camt just use a co-working facility. Obviously not an option during the pandemic and that was rough gor them but so was going to the office for years for everyone else.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on. Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion. Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company. One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.
  • buscoquadnary 5y ago
    I know from my perspective preferring all remote all the time, I often feel like I have to advocate and sell remote work at every opportunity, not because I feel that it is best for everyone but because I feel it is not the default, and that the group that is more in favor of it is the executive and management cast which have more influence over these decisions. So I oversell remote work sometimes because I feel that it is constantly at risk of being taken away from me if I don't advocate for it to the best of my ability. In contrast those that want back in office seem like the deck is stacked in their favor.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    > Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company. I think a lot of the difference is that the people who prefer remote are just asking that they be given the choice to go remote. However, many of the people who prefer in-person are also expecting everyone else to go in-person. I recognize pros and cons to both remote and in-person, and believe what is right for me might not be right for others. If you give a team of 10 the option, and 9 of them choose remote, should the 1 person who likes in-person be able to make everyone else go in-person, so he has that "in-person experience"?
• tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person What company did you work for in-person where any issue could be resolved quickly?
• manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. Seriously, what’s the difference between this and instant messaging? I would argue that the ability to defer interruptions is enough to rely on IM, instead of physical interaction.
  • erosenbe0 5y ago
    I found some colleagues and subordinates are actually way easier to help with screen sharing than over the shoulder sharing or pairing. The situation is much more symmetric. And I'm one of those managers who kept extra mouthwash and altoids at my desk too...
  • librish 5y ago
    At all the companies I've been at it's be kosher to ignore IMs for several hours if you're working on something.
• jbigelow76 5y ago
  Note: just an typical enterprise dev take, not in the Bay Area/part of the FAAMNG environment A big part of the equation (for some) will be what kind of office they are being asked to return to? At the office my company used to have before it was acquired in 2019 everyone had a cube, not big by any means and not with full walls, but enough space to have a few pics of family, maybe a plant, personal nick-nacks, whatever, a sense of some sort of boundary to it. I could have easily been persuaded to return to that environment 3 days a week, because I did enjoy being around my peers. The acquiring company however, had plans underway to bring us into long elbow-to-elbow tables before work from home happened in March 2020. What would you call a food trough to work at instead of eat at, a "productivity trough"? I am open to tolerating that one day a week for cross team meetings (some have started trickling in already), anymore than that and I am out.
  • darrylb42 5y ago
    Our office is 100% hoteling now no fixed seats. No personal stuff unless you want to carry it in everyday you go in. Been a few months since I went in.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      That's one of the issues with the idea of flexibility/choice/etc. If most people have different preferences, your's are not necessarily really an option.
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        I don't see how cutting down on space too much is an issue with the idea of flexibility/choice? If anything they're reducing choices.
    • nick__m 5y ago
      At work, it's hybrid, (remote up to 3 days/weeks) and each teams (we are 15 in my team) must vote on a common on-prem day and I get to keep my private office full of legos! But this arrangement is only available to peoples who don't interact with the students, so it create some resentment. The workers who don't have that privilege have started to call us: la gagne de laptops, a derisive way to says the laptops class/cast.
• jupp0r 5y ago
  >I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. Not everybody at Google is in one location to begin with.
• runako 5y ago
  I read these and wonder what folks think about all the distributed teams in companies. Is the view that they are just generally less effective? > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person I think this was more true for me when I was earlier in my career and remote tech really sucked. But now I see it as generally negative to have to sync with someone else to resolve an issue they (or I) am working on. In my experience, in-person bias is a symptom of a team that does not communicate well in writing (emails, Slacks, Jira, etc.). > where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity There is literally decades of published research that refutes this for knowledge work. IIRC the first studies were done in the 1950s or thereabouts, and I am not aware of any big studies that have come since that concluded differently. (IIRC Microsoft's campus was originally designed to give every engineer a solo office because Gates read _Peopleware.) I will admit that working in interrupt-driven style does produce the feeling of getting more work done, whether or not that is actually true.
  • librish 5y ago
    Yes, I _personally_ believe distributed teams are less effective. As for your other point, that research is similar to the research on working from home. It measures a controlled thing, but certainly nothing I would use to extrapolate that software engineering teams work less efficiently when people can interrupt each other with questions easily. If you have any studies that you think are good feel free to link them, I'm open to being wrong.
    • runako 5y ago
      As I indicated, there has been a lot of published research on this specific topic as applied to software engineering teams. I would suggest you start with _Peopleware_ by DeMarco & Lister as a survey. This research is categorically different from the research on working from home in that: - it measures a facet of the workplace that is commonplace and standard - it has been studied for several decades, and the results have held up. (IIRC the first such studies were done in the 1950s or 1960s.) IMHO those arguing that people have changed enough that now they can better recover from interruptions than their predecessors could 20 or 30 years ago have the burden of proof, not the other way around.
• nhumrich 5y ago
  Yes! You are hinting at something fairly important which is, the whole != sum(parts). Most of these studies show individual productivity is higher when remote. That doesn't mean overall productivity is. Individual productivity only matters in the big picture, if everyone is 100% aligned and focused. Which, will never happen.
• Asooka 5y ago
  For me, I'm just not comfortable sitting in an office. It's cold, the air is dry, the windows are tinted a horrible deep blue and don't let in any natural light. Everybody else is fine with these conditions, but I'm not. There is just no way to have the exact same conditions fit everyone, which is one of the problems with offices - everyone stuck together in the same room with little to no power over their surroundings. Additionally, I can't push myself to be productive for 8 hours straight. My productivity has gone way up now that I can have a good long break in the middle of the day. You can't really go and have a 3 hour break in the office and even if you did, what would you do? - at most you can sit in the cold kitchenette and stare at the wall, at which point I'm literally wasting my life.
  • weq 5y ago
    The only people really comfortable in offices are the ones who are in it for the politics. Ditto everything you have said here including the taking a break. I learnt to code in bedroom 20yrs ago, and now im an architect at a global company working fully remote. our company has fully committed with Work Life Balance and now that means fully flexible - if u want to be an office, be in it, if u want to WFH, WFH. We are remote first, so there is always a video call for any meeting. I actually think offices/the rat is a large part of our sickness we have as humanity. People are "forced" todo what they dont want, and therefor, they are less empathetic to others plights. If "i have to, they should". "i need to goto work, slug it out, they should do. they shouldnt leech of the state. they shouldnt take our jobs. they shouldnt.". It feels like the root cause of so much conflict. Atleast thats how it played out in my immigrant family. They came to this country, dedicated there lives to work, made money, and died before they could appreciate it. Ive now had an education, and realised that their way of life, back on an island, is more satisfying for the soul. So im trying to bring both of those concepts together and live the dream they had for me. Instead of how their parents slugged it out 12hrs a day, and never spent quality time with them... Which resulted in little growth of grow social/parental skills, talked to everyone like they were a client, and were easily manipulated by conservative media because they never had any time to understand world events for themselves. No longer does remote mean isolation. I have better relationships with my neighbours and community. I have internet access at the level of any city folk. I have less worries, i can take breaks in my workday that are meaningful for me, and therefor i give more of myself to my job. Thats how being FLEXIBLE to your employees brings about efficencies. Much more complex then a simple commute.
• electriclizard 5y ago
  Survival is enough. I think living is more important than working. Working exists so that you don't die. We should do the work necessary that everyone thrives, otherwise our choices should maximize living.
• Copernicron 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. This has been one of my main complaints about the full time WFH during covid. If we were all in the office I could turn around in my chair and ask whoever I needed to a question. With WFH I have had to sometimes wait 24 hours or more for a response. So I was stuck spinning my wheels for hours because I was blocked without knowing which esoterically name database table to query.
• scotuswroteus 5y ago
  "semi"
• onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person Many things at a big company like Google require working with people in different timezones. I would say more often than not, if requires working with someone in a building far enough away that you have to do a video conference anyway.
• Forgeties79 5y ago
  Like most work related policies, I think this falls squarely under “it depends.” I’m an in-house video producer for a tech start up. I absolutely do not need to be in the office most days, let alone every day.
  • passivate 5y ago
    But is a job just an exchange of labor for payment? I view it as so much more. Even if we look at it from a job perspective, its also an opportunity to build personal connections between team members; "I owe you one" - goes a long way. Yes you can absolutely build these personal connections online, and it may be easier for introverted people, but I would say for most people a handshake or a smile passing down the hallway or a 'cool jacket', or someone fixing a bug and rushing to tell their co-workers, and other organic interactions are very hard to replicate online.
    • Forgeties79 5y ago
      My friend, 95% of my coworkers have very little understanding what I do to the point where I could ghost for a week and there’d be probably 80% chance no one would be the wiser. Lots of jobs are like that. Deadline are generally floating, a project can take 30min or 30 days, and micromanaging doesn’t help much if at all. I keep track of what I’m doing on GitHub, make sure my backups are good, and do my thing. They don’t need me there and when I am in the office, very few people need to talk to me lol I say this as a very social person. I like having colleagues. But the fact is I just don’t need to be in there most days, and they don’t understand what I do beyond “video,” so they don’t offer a lot of opportunity beyond that if we are being very utilitarian about it (which I generally don’t).
      • craigie 5y ago
      • passivate 5y ago
        Like you, I can only say based on my experience and from what I've seen or heard from other people. I accept that every workplace is different.
• rob_c 5y ago
  Yes and other things haven't been proven either... Its been shown by example, this distinction doesn't change the fact that money and productivity go hand in hand. Counter examples are counter examples and certainly they exist, but several large scale examples of it not being sustainable prove the risks are indeed real if it's mismanaged...
• LightG 5y ago
  All of your concerns die away in a hybrid enviroment. And I disagree with your "tap on the shoulder" problem. That is easily resolved with a one line email/message which can be answered equally quickly with a one line answer without all the social BS ... if it needs more than that then it is interfering with productivity at that moment and a short or appropriate meeting can be scheduled to elaborate. Anything else and ... sorry, you don't value good work.
• samstave 5y ago
  >>tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily -- Bless your heart.
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. What you're describing sounds like a low performance interrupt driven nightmare.
  • icelancer 5y ago
    >> Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. It's "proven" better for me and I'm, never going back and that's all that matters to me. I feel like this is a trend.
• asdff 5y ago
  I get paired programming is cool, but honestly you can do it perfectly on zoom thanks to screen sharing with multiple participants. Its easier to have their screen on your screen right next to your screen thats on their screen than to huddle together clumsily with two laptops. Sometimes I'll have "office hours" on zoom, where I will just sit in my zoom room and work on my stuff and if people want to hop in and 'tap me on the shoulder' so to speak they can do it, or I could go and hop to someone elses or send a message and see if they are free.
  • bckr 5y ago
    > you can do it perfectly on zoom Do you experience Zoom fatigue? The sensation that, while this technology is convenient and useful, you're missing something important? I think this whole debate is really about whether people have this sensation or not.
    • watwut 5y ago
      No. I honestly experience relief, because I don't have to care about how my face looks like while being on meeting. I can sit comfortably. I walk around the room. Sometimes I do few push ups or squats. I make myself a coffee. Zoom meetings are less tiring, because I dont have to care about how I look like. I can focus on content ... or not. I can make myself comfortable.
      • bckr 5y ago
        I'm jealous that you have this experience, honestly. I do the same things, but feel like a caged animal. Maybe I just need a comfier seat.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    It's better on zoom because no neck strain trying to look at someone else's screen. And you get your own keyboard.
  • compilerone 5y ago
    In my experience I find pair programming with collaborative tools like VSCode's "Liveshare" [], paired with audio-only call (Slack huddle, Google meet, what have you), far superior than in person pair programming. [] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/
• namelosw 5y ago
  It's not proven but we'll get there. There's virtually impossible to refactor big corporations into real remote organizations - they're "remote bolt-on". For them, to remote is only to cope with COVID, other than that it's mostly a liability. We probably need to wait for another half-decade to see it unfold - to see if there could be any "remote native" company that can disrupt the market and challenge big corporations.
  • craigie 5y ago
    I suspect what the VCs say will have an impact too.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Fezzik 5y ago
  I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works. To what degree it fits/supports peoples’ subjective state of mind is up for argument, but most professions got by just as they did prior to the pandemic. Heck, I’m a trial attorney and I never thought remote work would be feasible. After doing multiple 3+ day trials entirely by WebEx I never want to go back to a courtroom. I can skip security, use multiple monitors, seldom drive, cook my own lunches, pet my dogs on breaks… everything for my job is easier remotely. It’s a dream come true.
  • InitialLastName 5y ago
    > I think the one thing that has unequivocally been proven though is that it works. It certainly works in the short term, in an emergency situation where everybody in a sector is operating under the same conditions out of necessity. Whether it has long-term detrimental effects remains to be determined. My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past.
    • bitcharmer 5y ago
      > My team at a small-medium company that a roughly 1-day-per-week work from home policy before 2020 certainly feels less cohesive, efficient, and innovative than it did in the past. Have you maybe considered that it's actually not your team's fault but rather how the organisation transitioned into and approached remote working? That or you're an MBA :)
• tootie 5y ago
  Companies have been operating remotely and/or distributed for much longer than 2 years. Pretty much every company I worked for from 2010 onwards had at least half the team separate from the "sales office" that owned the relationship. Most often this was having dev teams in South America or Eastern Europe, but pretty frequently we just had multiple offices in the US working together. And frequently with clients that were in a third location. Slack, Zoom, JIRA. That's all you need.
• nu11ptr 5y ago
  "I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily" Disagree, I think this leads to poor productivity, generally speaking. When I'm in the office, I'm honestly amazed anything gets done at all. There are so many disruptions, side conversations, etc. that I treat it as a "week off" on my schedule any time I have to go into the office. Once back in my home office, I can get back to writing code. That said, it likely depends greatly on the job, but this is tech, and coders and engineers need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. It doesn't mean there can't be collaborative time, and in fact it can be helpful when scheduled appropriately, but I think productivity is better when you have a way to turn off interruptions when needed.
• seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. On the flip side, there are people that prefer a company where everyone is remote. They want to be able to resolve any issues quickly over voice calls or slack, and do not want to feel at a disadvantage because they are isolated from in person discussions that could have just as easily happened over VC.
• tibiahurried 5y ago
  I have worked at a couple of FAANG. When I wanted to get things done, I would hide in a meeting room, or I would work from home. The office is the most unproductive environment (at least for me). People will interrupt you all the time, for random things, chit chat, coffee and what not. Having head phones all the time did not make any difference. I wish companies would understand this.
• ryan_lane 5y ago
  If you work at Google, even if everyone is "on-site", they're not at your site, and you still need to treat them as if they're remote. Once a company reaches a certain size, and has offices in multiple locations (and timezones, and potentially multiple countries), it's necessary to treat most people as if they're remote, because effectively, they are. Yes, your team may be fully in one office, but it's pretty rare to work in a team where 100% of your work in handled in-team. If your meetings include other teams, they're probably going to involve video conferencing, at which point, it's actually worse to use a meeting room, because it means that some people are going to have audio/video problems. I also like working in an office, but I also understand that real life means that being remote-first is the best approach.
  • jvolkman 5y ago
    I know that corporate meeting room A/V is often an issue, but Google has pretty much solved that in their own offices. Their internal deployment of Meet works very well.
• JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. It's better for me. That's the part that I care about.
• black_13 5y ago
• VikingCoder 5y ago
  I would make the claim: "Allowing remote work has been proven to be better." Because it increases the supply of candidates. I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things. I get that I'm leaving as an exercise for the reader "how to implement hybrid teams" and "how to fairly evaluate employees who are remote and not." I've spent roughly a thousand hours of time with my family since quarantine began, that I otherwise would have spent commuting to work. I can hardly tell you how valuable that is. Let me just glance real quick at how profitable my company has been over the last two years... oh, hmm, yeah, it seems like it can take the theoretic productivity hit from being forced to use IM to solve problems.
  • matwood 5y ago
    > I also have a bias to believing it increases Diversity and Inclusion, which I think are also good things. 100%. Email and Slack are great for DEIA. In person meetings end up dominated by whoever is loudest/most aggressive. I know a woman who just left and in-person company for a fully remote position because of issues in person. She would tell me stories about a taller man who would purposely stand over people to intimidate them.
  • sologoub 5y ago
    If companies are truly serious about inclusion and diversity, then embracing remote is a must! In just a few weeks of the initial pandemic lockdowns, I was really taken aback by how meeting dynamics changed - people less comfortable speaking up in crowded rooms or taking on challenging discussion suddenly found their voice. They were speaking up on video conferencing, in the meeting chats, raising hands and sending emoji reactions. In person interactions literally stifled some of our team members. It’s going to be a challenge to keep this going, but we must - we owe all of our coworkers a voice. These interactions also drove meaningful productivity. I bet we more than offset losses from other lack of in person collaboration.
• deepGem 5y ago
  Reminds me of feature flags. They seem sub optimal at a code level but highly beneficial at the System level. But why force people one way or the other ? Let them make their choices. Why not give optionality and then optimize. I don’t know much about SV traffic but in Bangalore people were routinely spending 4-5 hours in traffic everyday pre covid. I don’t see how this can be beneficial for anyone at an individual level and for the company as a whole.
• AdamJMarsh 5y ago
  Except you're also affecting the individual productivity of others. The tap on the shoulder is the most annoying thing working on site. There's no respect for the urgent & critical tasks. You would want others to spend 2 hours commuting, wasting time on parking, food & fuel just to be able to physically speak to them. What a waste of our current technological advantages. Why bother working in tech, when you don't use it to better yourself and others?
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    I had a collegue who would literary tap me on the shoulder. It was a loud open office so I had noise cancelling headphones. It was insanely annoying. And when I told him to please stop, he started to wave his hand in my peripheral vision. I pretty much gave up trying to make him behave. I mean those headphones are not that good you can just speak ... Just the risk of such things makes it hard for me to concentrate. They need not have to happen, just that they could is enough. I think it is the walking up behind me on row desks that is the problem. I have a private office now with my side to the door and in no way I feel the same.
    • hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      A useful tactic in this situation is to not reward the colleague for interrupting you like that. e.g. you could answer, but state you are in the middle of something, can't focus now, and please send you an email. If you are politely obstinate enough they will soon learn they are wasting their time with the interruptions and will be trained to send an email straight away instead.
• scarface74 5y ago
  And I prefer never going into a loud open office again where I am constantly interrupted. I traveled to my departments headquarters for an internal conference and I stayed two days after. The first half day I went into the office before the meeting, I could get nothing done because of all of the noise. The second day I just worked from the hotel. Switching cost from constant interruptions is a real phenomenon.
• namecheap435 5y ago
• mangodrunk 5y ago
  How can you say they're wrong when that is their experience. I certainly do think working remote has been better for me and for my teams. It is proven in the productivity and happiness of those that I work with. We've proven that companies/organizations can go fully remote and thrive. If you like working on site, good for you. Many don't like it, and are less productive working on site. You made a bunch of baseless claims.
• sailfast 5y ago
  The past two years has not been real remote work. When you work remote for real you get together in the office every month or so and your relationships stay high bandwidth. The past two years has been forced separation. Forced virtual, and NOT remote work. Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
• freeflight 5y ago
  > We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Google's stock looks the exact opposite of crash and burn, it doubled during these last 2 years of pandemic and remote work.
• exodust 5y ago
  > "I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity" First of all, not everyone is in same building or on same floor, or in same country of a large organization. Google account managers, for example, don't tap tech support people on the shoulder. Secondly, a related anecdote: An overly friendly project manager in a previous job used to physically tap/slap me on shoulder on a regular basis. I politely asked him to stop doing it. He kept doing it, and my polite request became an awkwardly agitated request in front of colleagues. I am male, and his unwanted physical contact had nothing to do with harassment or intent to irritate me. He was "just that kinda guy". I want to be tolerant of people's different ways as much as anyone, but please keep your hands to yourself. I am happier and more productive working from home, away from the awkward grey areas of personal interactions and distractions at work.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  I think these generally framed studies don't prove anything, there are so many variables that may vary between projects and individuals; However they like to come up with some number and claim that it is the gospel truth. What I know: the industry likes to emulate google, for example they like to emulate the google job interview process and google coding style guidelines. Now my question: does this decision imply that most places will start to work strictly from the office?
• bb88 5y ago
  Having worked in large buildings in fortune 500 companies, I love the ability to be able to find a bathroom stall that is unoccupied without having to walk around for 40 minutes.
• smsm42 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. You do understand that "I personally prefer" and "actually works better" and "better for everybody involved" are three different things, do you? We were told for years that it's an established fact that remote work is inefficient and untenable. We have proven - with an experiment that we wouldn't rather go through, but we had no choice - that this is false. That doesn't mean it is for everybody - but it doesn't also mean that the thing you prefer is for everybody. So why it's ok to force one of these things onto everybody? That's what the managers should be able to answer.
• emrah 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers. I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
• neycoda 5y ago
  You're living in the past. The places where people tapped shoulders were the disruptive inefficient places I've worked at. Slack and Zoom have worked great remotely. The only thing I miss is in-room whiteboards, but I'm in the minority. Maybe you haven't worked for well-managed remote companies, and maybe Alphabet isn't one.
• bbu 5y ago
  >I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site. me too. however, the reality is that I haven't worked in a company where everybody is in the same location in over 15 years. under that circumstances, fully remote is the better choice and I will not be forced back into an office.
• 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons. This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave. Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation. Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.
  • blub 5y ago
    Software developers are not completely subservient slaves. But some of them are certainly obnoxious prima donnas and like throwing tantrums about their oh so terrible working conditions.
    • omniscient_oce 5y ago
      Ironic that some of the highest paying jobs out there are also the jobs that are most easily performed at home. Software dev really seems to be one of those win/win/win scenarios when it comes to jobs. Of course, there will always be a litany of complaints online because there's always something to complain about, but still.
  • 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
    it seem that "completely subservient slave" caused some controversy. it wasn't my intention to demean real slavery, like the factory workers sub-contracted by google and apple. perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)
  • bradleyjg 5y ago
    What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks. In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment. You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.
• msh 5y ago
  But that would only apply to a small company where everyone is working on the same site.
• com2kid 5y ago
  > Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on. My team has been able to hire people from all across the country, gaining access to talent that we normally would not have been able to reach. Because my entire company has gone fully remote, if someone on the team has to take a trip overseas, they can choose to continue working if so desired. If someone wants to bail to a seaside town during the worst of winter, no problem. People aren't forced to live in overpriced urban areas, they can live where they choose to! > I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. I agree, but I am getting 1/8th of my waking hours back from commuting. Since the pandemic began I have been putting under 3000 miles a year on my car. I am eating home cooked meals every day. Mid day I can walk down to the local grocery store and pick up food to cook later for dinner. My QoL is insanely improved. If I need maintenance work done (Late last year I bought a house that was built in the 1950s, so, yes, lots of that happening) I am here all day long if need be. I don't have to worry about when expensive packages are delivered, I am always here to pick them up. I can have someone come by and cut my cat's claws whenever need be. I can schedule doctors and dentists appointments at any time of the day and not have to take a day off of work to make them. And so on and so forth. WfH rocks.
  • teekert 5y ago
    I very much agree and I’m looking for another job because my company is forcing me back for 3/5 days because of this. I’m not going back to that.
    • ihateolives 5y ago
      Onsite/online split is the worse, unless you work with just a laptop and nothing else then you'd have to have duplicate setups at work/home and at least I'm always leaving things eithere here or there and then missing them.
      • rgallagher27 5y ago
• baby 5y ago
  > I personally prefer a company where everyone's on site Pretty obvious from the rest of your comment.
• ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
  I’ve onboarded around a couple of companies remotely and it can be done really well, if people put thought and a process into remote onboarding it works really well. Some things: - make sure your laptop setup is documented (install x, y, z: setup like this) - document where all resources are, confluence, repos, dashboards, everything and how to access - setup virtual meetings with peers, in team and across company - one place suggested you reach out to 5 random people for a 10 minute chat - you could reach out to the lowest or highest person and the people being reached out to expected that random people would do it and it was fine - this really helped - setup virtual calls with managers, their managers, their managers - just ten minutes to introduce yourself to each other I’ve had better remote onboarding that starting onsite and twiddling my thumbs for over a week not knowing anyone or doing anything - I’ve suggested I leave places if there isn’t anything for me to do or any way for me to work before.
• winternett 5y ago
  Remote is neither better nor worse. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt if it is timed wrong. We need to have better productivity tools. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses. The Pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 is the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well... We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire IT industry) driven of course by the constant need to drive investment hype... And we're putting everything behind paywalls now so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites. We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas now more than ever. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as true innovation, but somehow most companies are even stuck on even rehashing those old ideas and calling them "winning". If we could just fix all that s*it and get back to true innovation and listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers again.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  Your last paragraph sounds a lot like "any problem I may have now or in the future by definition is always more important than whatever the other person is doing at that particular point in time." That may be unintentional, so it's just an observation.
• richardfey 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity, even if individual productivity suffers temporarily. It's too easy to make such statements without measuring anything. Are issues really resolved quicker, or they /feel/ like that? Is overall productivity higher? Let's measure that?
• bjarneh 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack.. Isn't this the main problem? I hate everyone who comes barging in and wants to "resolve issues" quickly. Not saying I love remote work, but I cannot stand working a place where people are "allowed" to disturb me. I don't even log into Slack/Teams/Skype or any of that nonsense; I don't even want to be disturbed in my virtual wold. Onsite is ideal for management; endless meetings about progress/status, we can all "align". Issues can be resolved quickly. But for those who need to concentrate for long periods at a time; this is hell. And during the pandemic, many people got used to not being interrupted all the time, and I don't think any of them want to go back to that hellhole.
  • refurb 5y ago
    I get the need to have uninterrupted time, but if others are depending on you to get their job done, it's kinda dickish to complain about people being "allowed to disturb you".
    • iLoveOncall 5y ago
      When people don't havr access to you they quickly realize that never actually depended on you to get the job done.
      • LilBytes 5y ago
        Username... Doesn't check out.
      • ubercow13 5y ago
        I’m not sure most juniors starting their first job during the pandemic would feel that way. Imagine being in that situation and all your colleagues are never logged in to Slack, don’t reply to your emails until the end of the day, expect to never be disturbed, don’t attend any meetings..
        • gbear605 5y ago
• ZaoLahma 5y ago
  This has been the reality for many of us for many years already. I used to commute 1 hour every single day to an office building downtown, and my nearest colleague was in another office some 200km away in an entirely different city. Half of the team isn't even in the same time zone as I. Sure I did have other people hired by the same company sitting at desks around me, but we worked with entirely different projects so we never interacted beyond the daily "Morning!" and "Aight I'mma leave, see y'all tomorrow!" Even my manager was located in the other office some 200km away, so I had no one to report to (be observed by!). My work was and is entirely measured by my contribution to the team, and not by where I happen to be located. Remote working isn't a new thing that has never been tested before. It's just that you do remote working from home instead of from an office.
• eru 5y ago
  Everyone on-site works. Everyone remotely also works to some extent. What is really hard, is being a remote newcomer to an otherwise mostly on-site company.
• Valakas_ 5y ago
  Yeah well, i don't want to be interrupted by a guy who thinks he can just come over tap me on the shoulder and I have to give him the attention he wants because he's too self-absorbed to understand other people might have a different way of working and have to accommodate to that guy's needs before their own. "We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it." No, that's not about it. We've also proven they're able to have record profits. Whether they would have even higher profits if it was fully office, it's another story, but saying all that is proven is that they won't crash is false and just shows you're emotionally invested in having people back in the office because you want them to.
• phplovesong 5y ago
  I have found working remotely 98% of the time during covid has MASSIVELY improved my output. 1) I can start work 2 hours before i normally do. I can skip all the "getting up from bed and get ready". I literally work until noon in my underwear. Then i usually go for a 30min run and get a shower and lunch. I also save 2 hours per day commuting. I save a shitton of money on expensive lunches too. 2) The "can you check this, or could i have a list of that" annoyances have all but vanished. People (usually manager kinds) have actually had to dig up their own stuff and do some work themselves. 3) As i work MORE effective hours from home i sometimes take fridays off and just do my thing. I'm always way ahead of schedule. I firmly believe the "in office nine-to-five" kind of work is in the past. It's a legacy way of working and it has proven to be very unproductive compared to remote work. (PS. As most of you guys i'm in the software industry, so i cant speak of other fields of work. My points are purely my own discoveries and strictly related to software development)
• raverbashing 5y ago
  Well, you're certainly free to work the "old way" Just don't be surprised when your colleagues leave for more flexible companies that don't feel the need to control their employees like they're in kindergarden
• GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  When someone tapped my shoulder in the office, they often started to whine about their problem without providing any actionable information, wasted a lot of my time this way, then I tell them to send me an email with a description of the problem - that ends up actionable.
• animesh 5y ago
  I was in the camp of remote is always better even after being aware of 'never say never' and 'no silver bullet'. Within the first six months, I realized there is no single answer that works for everyone. It really depends on the ability to institute async communication, self-regulate and whole lot of other factors IMHO.
• null_object 5y ago
  > I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack, and I think that an environment where someone can tap me on the shoulder when they need help leads to overall higher productivity Aside from all the other advantages of WfH that have already been mentioned in this thread (like no commute, healthier eating, more fresh air and exercise, better work/life balance etc), I really don't think this description of office-life fits my recollection of reality, at all. In the office it was much more often that wanting to discuss something in person with a couple of colleagues would involve: 1. locating colleague 1 2. going in search of colleague 2 who isn't at their desk 3. disturbing people in the open-office environment asking where colleague 2 is 4. deciding to check again later 5. noticing that colleague 2 is back at their desk 6. looking around and seeing that colleague 1 is not at their desk 7. going over to colleague 2 and asking if they have 5 minutes 8. colleague 2 is deploying, and will be done in 15 minutes 9. ask around and discover that colleague 1 has gone to early lunch repeat again after lunch Now with WfH: 1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2 2. problem solved after 5 minutes
  • aequitas 5y ago
    > 1. share screen with colleague 1 and colleague 2 Even better imho, anytime working together with more than 1 person you don't have to awkwardly huddle around the single 22" screen on your desk squinting at the code. Everyone has the shared screen in full view and can even draw on the screen (yay, no more finger smudge marks) to point at what they mean.
    • matwood 5y ago
      > (yay, no more finger smudge marks) OMG, I've been remote so long I had forgotten about this that literally drove me nuts.
  • darkwater 5y ago
    > Now with WfH: Let me correct it for you: 1. Ask in Slack/chat if colleague 1 and 2 are avail 2. Colleague 1 is avail, colleague 2 no answer 3. Start call with C1, share the screen... something crash or C1 has network issues 4. C2 is still MIA 5. C2 joins, we work together for 5 minutes, than C1 doorbell rings, they have to leave 6. C1 is back, we work for 10 minutes but now C2 has to go to a meeting 7. you get it.. So, every rose has its thorns...
• teekert 5y ago
  My teams are spread around the world and I’ve seen much better collaboration since Teams and the camera-on-culture became standard. I guess in-person is nice but it geo-restricts your network.
• UltraViolence 5y ago
  It's not about the tech-companies, it's about their employees: many of them simply don't want to come back to the office! What if many of them switch to companies that allow fully remote working? Google will lose out on a lot of talent and will eventually suffer in the quality of its products. I personally believe there's no difference in the volume of work produced by people working remotely, providing they don't have small children at home. All these drawbacks are made-up by managers fearing to lose their jobs if workers keep working remotely.
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I do wonder what the critical percentage of people refusing to return to the office is for companies to offer remote as standard? I quit my old job over a return to the office policy and fully intend to never return because I deeply despise commuting, open offices, the interruption-driven culture of in-person work, and urban existence in general. I realise I'm probably a bit of an extremist in this respect though, I'd love to see a breakdown of what employees attitudes are globally.
    • UltraViolence 5y ago
      I don't think it needs to be a percentage. Every company has earmarked certain employees as "critical" to their day-to-day functioning. If these start leaving in droves, even if it's only a few, management might turn around pretty quickly.