19 ms·

I hope distributed is not the new default

148 points by goranmoomin 5y ago

cudgy 5y ago
“Zapier, a great distributed company, famously has quarterly offsites for its teams where everyone meets in person to replicate this effect. However, I highly suspect that most big companies won’t make any such effort to do this. Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted.” This seems to contradict the argument for offices. Companies save money by having fewer offices, so their budgets should be improved. Also, if companies do not see the value of employees periodically meeting each other then why do management largely prefer face time in offices? “Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization” Much of this article focuses on the workplace fulfilling out of work needs or out of work meetings fulfilling at work relationships. Why do people want and expect so much from their jobs? Why is that the place to fulfill ones social needs? Pursue hobbies and interests outside of work and meet people not tethered to your employer. These relationships are stronger and transcend work ties. Avoiding terrible commutes provides some of the time to pursue such ventures too.
- cabraca 5y ago
  I think its the google centric view of the article. All the perks google offer in their offices are tools to keep you in the office longer. Stay for the Gym, stay for Dinner or come in early for lunch. Considering that its naturally that they expect your social circle to be mostly other google employees.
benreesman 5y ago
The company I work for is still tiny, so we don’t know how it’s going to scale, but we’ve been spending the money we would spend on an office just traveling to work together either collectively or in small groups on an as-needed, voluntary basis. Some have more flexibility around travel, some less, but we all like and care about each other so someone is always willing to go the extra mile when someone else can’t travel. This only works because the enterprise is a COVID baby, and so the “base load” workflow is totally remote, we’ve never known anything different. This makes being in person pleasant and useful but almost never strictly necessary. I hope it scales because I love it.
sfg 5y ago
"working from home certainly increases the amount of control that people have over their day" Yep. This outweighs all the benefits of being in the office that are mentioned in the article.
ekianjo 5y ago
> While working from home certainly increases the amount of control that people have over their day, it does so at the cost of essentially all of these chance encounters. How much value do you actually get from those chance encounters? My experience, after years in everyday in the office, is very, very little. It's like playing lottery everyday, there's not much you earn under all probabilities.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  And it's not like it's a potential Oasis while talking a long cool hike. Office can be a minefield.. maybe you get lucky, but the life distortion effect of a bad building are too strong to ignore.
ekianjo 5y ago
> Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization into your day than sitting at home in your office. While it’s certainly possible that some people working from home will choose to socialize more, I predict that the majority of people will socialize less as they have fewer opportunities to meet and talk with people built into their days. When you are in control, you are in control of everything. Means that if you need to get exercise everyday, you need to make it a habit to go and walk outside during your remote working day. As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.
- teh_klev 5y ago
  > As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with. I agree. I'm happy to "socialise" to the extent that it facilitates getting work done. But I'm not looking for new pals, I'm just here to do the work and get paid, I have a separate life outside of the workplace. Maybe it's just an age thing but I don't want to do company pizza night, or company skiing or company drinks, for me work is a means to an end. Don't get me wrong, I really like the company I presently work for, get on well with my colleagues, even push the boat out and do a few extra hours to get a project over the line or to help others, but it is just work and that's it.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    I suppose it's a different mindset. I'm not friends with anyone at work in the sense that we hang out after hours, or that I'd call them if I needed help with a personal problem. But it's still hard for me to think of it as "just work and that's it". I'm glad to be "work pals" with these people and want the best for them personally as well as professionally. I agree that work is a means to an end, but the people I work with aren't similarly means.
dudul 5y ago
Always the same "arguments". Spend time with your real friends instead of your coworkers, get out of the house on your own, nobody is forcing you to stay inside just because you don't have to go to an office. Work from a coworking space, distributed/remote doesn't mean everybody at home. It's crazy to see how unhealthy people's life can be when work is the only thing they have.
jdrc 5y ago
instead of obsessing over what will be the "new default", it's sometimes better to sit back, relax and watch the pieces fall where they may , as some of the forces here are irreversible. There is always a capacity and will for people to produce work, and it will find its way to productive use regardless of whether they job is distributed or not. we are still at the beginning of this Incidentally , academics have been used to this distributed mode for decades, with conferences purposely organized to provide opportunities for meshing mixing and friction.
michaelsalim 5y ago
KronisLV 5y ago
I actually wrote about the remote vs in-office culture a while ago, in my blog article "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... In short, i do not believe that having an office-centric culture is a bad thing, nor that a remote culture is a bad thing either. It's just that there are people who will always lean towards one or the other and that's where the incompatibilities begin. Personally, i'd want a 100% remote position and doubt that i'll be going back to spending my time commuting just to sit in an office. For others, the opposite applies - they might not be able to wait for being able to properly return to offices soon enough. Each of us might have our own valid (at least subjectively) arguments for pursuing these approaches. Hell, with slightly different life circumstances i might change my opinions (e.g. having kids around the house) or vice versa (wanting to travel more or move and not be bogged down). It is when the guilt tripping and peer pressuring as well as brainwashing starts, with every team/company/culture advocating for their own "normal" as the only proper way to work that the problems start appearing. Everything from virtuous articles in favor of a particular approach or against another, to trying to gaslight or convince those easily swayed to conform to whatever they want. That, in my eyes, is disingenuous and there will definitely be a lot of people looking for different jobs in the coming years, the so called "Great Resignation" (albeit there are also other factors to this, especially in other industries), after it became apparent that people can switch jobs without always relocating, something that's taken advantage of by many. But what's the end result of this? Plenty of people quitting and taking the domain knowledge with themselves, which will make things worse for others in the short term and long term - but that's usually just a case of documentation/knowledge transfer/bus factor being bad. I do hope that the current circumstances allow more people to find jobs that are suitable for them, whatever those jobs may be.
nowherebeen 5y ago
> I found that having experiences with coworkers from outside of a work settings would significantly strengthen the relationship with those coworkers. Why can’t work just be work? Do you really want to spent time with your coworkers outside of work? Some of us have families to care for. And some of us have actual friends that we like to hangout with. Coworkers aren’t my buddies or family. We are a team to get things done for a price.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  I think it's a generational thing. As a young person, work is basically the default way to meet people after moving to a large city. I have real friends outside work now but they all started as colleagues or friends of colleagues. I'd also prefer to work with people I can trust over anonymous colleagues any day. I'm not saying it's the only way (it's probably not good or healthy) but this sentiment is super common among my peers. When we're older I suspect that will change.
- imiric 5y ago
  I agree. For me it's not required to know someone personally to be professional, establish trust, and have a great working relationship. If a friendship arises naturally, then great, but I also dislike the forced team building events (or after hour hangouts) companies think are essential for a team to work well together. And yet I've learned that not everyone is like this, especially nowadays with remote work growing in popularity. Some people do feel that a personal connection helps in a professional setting. So I tend to begrudgingly accept this and make an effort to do this for the team.
- ryathal 5y ago
  you spend about 50% of waking hours with co-workers, it doesn't make sense to me that you would want to ignore them. The majority of my friends are former/current co-workers.
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higeorge13 5y ago
I hope distributed is the new norm in order to get similar salaries despite the fact we were born or chose to live in different continents.
- deleted 5y ago
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newshorts 5y ago
My biggest gripe with returning to the office is the inability to determine and enforce priority. At home, if you slack me and you’re not my top priority right now, I can ignore you or politely reply that I’ll be with you shortly. In the office folks can simply walk over and tap me on the shoulder. Due to social norms, I cannot simply ignore you and most like will need to devote my full attention to your questions. Essentially, my actions throughout the day make a subtle shift from proactive activities to reactive. If I’m not the only person to experience this, I wonder what the macro effect is on an organization?
mr90210 5y ago
I think the author doesn’t take in account that some companies are being forced to hire remotely due to the shortage of professionals in the Software industry.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  I think the biggest problem is that these companies all seem to establish themselves in the most expensive metro areas. Even with the good salaries of being a software engineer, a lot of people would hate to feel like most of their money is going towards taxes, rent, etc... and forget about being able to buy a decent house in the bay area, the housing prices seem to continually increase upward while the majority of the population is left renting. Most of my well paid coworkers in the bay area hate commuting to work because they live like an hour away.
throwaway787544 5y ago
Don't worry. Managers will never let distributed or remote be the default. People would eventually realize that we don't really need managers except a couple times a year. They need to be in-person so they can be seen around the office, so people will assume they're necessary.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  This is only true for bad managers. I'm very used to having managers as friends and weekly 1x1s talking strategy. Well, I was used to it until I retired. An important aspect of retiring was understanding management's role and be allied in the company's direction.
  - stonecharioteer 5y ago
    I have yet to see anyone who said their manager is their friend and continue to be so. I've been burnt far too many times. I'm never befriending my manager.
imglorp 5y ago
There's another aspect to meatspace, which is asymmetric loyalty. Most corporations are single-minded AI's with strictly zero loyalty to any worker without title =~ /^C..$/. The instant some spreadsheet cell turns yellow upstairs, you're out. Due to the human firmware drive of expected reciprocity, people often forget this and make enormous sacrifices for $work, uprooting their families, working long hours, missing family events, etc. When making this sacrifice of loyalty, they expect the AI to reciprocate in kind with loyalty but THE AI DOES NOT HAVE THAT FEELING. I recently joined a hot fintech only to have several offices closed and people sacked 5 months later, in order to keep an IPO route looking shiny (it wasn't). My advice to juniors is do not sacrifice for that machine.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Incidentally, this is also Hobbes' view of the state, namely that it's an automaton.
asciimov 5y ago
Dude, your privileged is showing... I have yet to work for a company that buys me lunch, much less annual ski trips. Hell, coffee hasn't been provided at any of my jobs, I've always had to pitch into a coffee pool just to have it. That's not to even mention getting to go to conferences. If I wanted to attend a conference, it would be coming out of my wallet and vacation time. If you want me to collaborate, put it in on my schedule and pay me to do it. I'd say that most of these "spontaneous collision of people and ideas" happen during lunch. Guess what, that lunch which I am already paying for, is also unpaid time. Ever since I've been working from home, my lunch hour is mine. I get to unwind, read or watch tv, all while eating a healthy meal. Finally let's talk about things that would get me back in the office. Shorter days, I have to commute a total of 2 hours a day, so I want my day to be 2-3 hours shorter. An actual office, with a window, door, temperature control, and some kind of noise isolation. I don't like working in those open office bullpens where I get to listen to salesmen screaming on the phone or secretaries sharing the latest gossip. Start screening people for personal hygiene. I get so tired of having to work with a heavy smoker or someone who can't be bothered to shower before showing up to work.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Indeed. "My gold-coated bon-bons are empty, the bottle of 20y scotch is half-full, and Im ONLY in a 5 star ski resort with my colleagues." Whereas I'm making 150k/yr in the midwest as 100% remote engineer, and livin every day to its fullest. I'm certainly getting no ski trips or otherwise. Most companies don't do that. I also don't look forward to working at a FAANG either. Way too much churn. And I frankly value stability as well. And the FAANGs aren't that at all. As much as the admins here want us to think in the most gracious way, I really think these are commissioned hit pieces against remote-work. Ive been tracking them, and its long-form articles like this that advocate in-person work where it doesn't need it.
  - olliej 5y ago
    What? FAANGs are among the most stable in tech, Apple especially is notorious for lifers.
gedy 5y ago
> Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences I guess I've missed out, but in 20 years in the industry I've literally never had any critically important break-outs from office or off-sites or hallway conversations. Important work is intentional, and rarely accidental.
agentultra 5y ago
I'm happy as a bug with being fully remote. I'm glad there are more companies considering fully distributed teams and I hope the trend continues. If there's some future where we can mix things up and work in person some times that would be fine. I used to have an office in a co-working space I used just to get out of the house. It was nice seeing the regular, every-day familiar strangers along the way, get a coffee from the usual place, etc. ... but my team was still located all around the world and the office was within walking distance of my house. I don't particularly enjoy commuting, the dour glow of fluorescent lights, the desks lined up in rows, or working in a concrete coffin. I like being able to go for a walk in my neighbourhood in the afternoon or spend a bit of time in my garden. I enjoy being surrounded by my books. I like it when my cat snuggles in my lap. I like having no commute. Some people like after-work happy hours and "team building." Not me. I like to get my job done and go home to my family, friends, and neighbours. I also think productivity-wise it brings a lot of benefits. The best collaboration happens with people write things down and share them widely. That is often hindered in an office setting where hallway chats and random encounters ensure that the people engaged in those activities control what gets shared and with whom; great for politics but useless for work. I get the creativity side of it: ideas aren't born in a vacuum. For media work like music it's way harder to work remotely. But I don't think ideas are born solely in offices either. Great ideas come from people collaborating and sharing. This happens more in a distributed team because fewer people are left out of the process. It's way easier in a software engineering team. There's literally no evidence that offices contribute to anything other than needless CO2 emissions and traffic.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Add to your list "I don't enjoy the guy in the cube next to me that must be hard of hearing and yells into his headset at 85 decibels" What's worse is sometimes I'm that guy.
  - agentultra 5y ago
    I do prefer the hum of case fans and the sound of my Model M. Having a choice over ones environment is a huge win for someone like me though that has sensory sensitivities most folks don't seem to have problems with.
pyjarrett 5y ago
I'm a super introvert who works remote. I don't want the company to spend a bunch of money on a ski trip for the company, I want to see my portion of that money in my pocket so I can do what I enjoy. Working from home means my employer gets more productivity, since I can handle "life" things easier without having to run home. They save money on office space, in-office meals, chairs, desks, and such, and I get more autonomy on my personal setup and how I want to work. It also means that people can move due to life reasons such as to be closer to an elderly family member, and still stay working for the same employer. I could get steps from walking around town, or, I can walk my dog while I'm waiting on a build or at lunchtime. My kid is home a couple days this week because of break for the upcoming holiday, so she gets to go with me and the dog on our morning walk, and I don't need to worry about child care. I like the people I work with, and have built rapport with them over years of working together on difficult problems. We connect based on our professional mutual work, but we each have our own interests and families. Remote work emphasizes this professional connection and broadens your ability to work with more varying people due to the limited and directed nature of the communications and interactions. You don't need to worry about the person in the next cubicle loudly talking on the phone or eating potato chips or burning popcorn in the microwave. It makes it easier to focus on positive interactions and tune out the bad ones. If I don't want to hear all the sports talk, I'm not in the #sports slack channel. Yes, I could operate in an office environment, a lot will probably return to it. However, I've been fully remote for years, and it'd be a hard sell for me to go back.
- cma 5y ago
  > I don't want the company to spend a bunch of money on a ski trip for the company, I want to see my portion of that money in my pocket so I can do what I enjoy. Your portion would be taxed, they can offer this avoiding 40% taxes on it or whatever it would work out to at your marginal rate. You may still not want it, but the alternative isn't getting the same money.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    I'd rather have this as taxed bonus income than as a ski trip. Bei g crowded in with all my coworkers (whom I actually like by the way) still doesn't sound like a perk to me. And I like skiing. Or at least snowboarding. I still wouldn't see it as a perk to spend a few days together with the people with whom I work. I like working with them. I really do. But I also really like to do what I want when I am not on the clock. And that would be so worth the tax cut. At least in my personal opinion.
kkfx 5y ago
It's a bit more complex: being a team means being a community and since we are not (sigh [1]) Borg but still being social animals we need a certain physical interaction BUT we do need that for certain aspects, while we can avoid that for certain others. For instance a remote university is horrific, students and teachers need to be physically together at least for the majority of the time, a research team need to be together equally BUT a company that do not do much research once formed a team with a bit of punctual and casual physical interaction like few events per year do not need much the social part, individuals do have their local sociability separated from the work and while it's a change of culture and model can work well if well done and tested a bit. Actual issues came mostly IMO because of: - lack of real distributed org and practice - bad policies and tools - the sense of being in a short transitory phase so no one really need to invest in such work form In the end transports are and was for the entire human history the most expensive thing we need, if we can have many advantages of being together without the transport and physical presence need that's so good we need to work around issues as much as possible. [1] before the horrendous idea of a Borg's queen of course, because the Borg represent a PERFECT society despite the light S.T. draw on them, a fully integrated and egalitarian society where individual are really peers, all decisions are made in a pure Democracy and they can even makes memories of any individual survive in the community
apple4ever 5y ago
I do like having an in office job, but with the flexibility of working from home as needed. I don't even mind the commute as much. What I absolutely hate is open offices. I want my own office where I can have some privacy to think and have space.
jdauriemma 5y ago
RE: traveling to socialize with distributed coworkers: As a person with three children and a working spouse who's busier than I am, and as a person managing a distributed team, the notion of convening my colleagues in one area for a team-building event is stressful. I recently have been given budget to do so and have been volun-told to organize such an event. Many of my direct reports are eager to meet up in-person. I value their happiness so I will to oblige them. And I'm not going to lie, it sounds like fun - I really do like the people I work with. However, being away from my family for days is a hardship for my children and my spouse, who already has enough stress and is unaccustomed to being the day-to-day caregiver. Since those are the people I value most highly, it's hard for me to justify the time, expense, and effort involved with traveling for the sole purpose of socializing with my coworkers.
- thex10 5y ago
  I can relate to this. Honestly it's just one of many ways our society is not structured to adequately support caregivers. Disclosure: I am a working remote parent who misses meeting with her team greatly.
cvhashim 5y ago
I’d be in the office and would be more willing to accept a hybrid model if I worked at Google and got free perks like team vacations.
jlbbellefeuille 5y ago
There is a disinformation campaign against remote work. The likely culprit behind it are commercial real estate interests and good old fashioned corporate leaders with their head buried in the sand. Ed Zitron’s Substack has been following and reporting on the remote work propaganda machine for over a year. https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top
angarg12 5y ago
Everyone's different and unless you account for that we will keep talking past each other. Yesterday I went to the office for the first time in a month. I hated it. First I spent over 1 hour commuting each way, which felt like a massive waste of time. We moved to a town out of the city because here we could afford a better living space for us without having to spend half of our income in rent. Since I left in a hurry I forgot to take my lunch with me (that I cook at home daily), so instead I had to go to a takeaway around the corner and spend 25$ for a dubious sandwich and a snack. Coffee from the big tub in the lobby is so bad that makes me wonder how someone can botch coffee so badly. After lunch I got sleepy as sometimes happens, but instead of a powernap like I have at home, I had to bumble through my code until I sobered up. I ended up getting back home late and exhausted. Some of the arguments from OP are quite curious, such as the number of steps. In my case, rather than spending 2 hours sitting in busses, I could spend 1 hour in the gym and 1 hour walking my dog, and come up ahead. By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? I had to leave my family and lifelong friends behind due to moving to another city. What if WFH had been the norm when I started my career? Doesn't hanging out with your family and friends count for anything? Again I recognise each person's circumstances are different, but after having a taste of remote work (after 12 years of in-the-office career) I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.
- porcoda 5y ago
  > By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? One of the most consistent themes in the “please go back to offices” articles is that there is a cohort of people who appear to have designed their lives around their job. Their social life solely revolves around work. They don’t appear to actually have social lives that don’t involve coworkers. They also appear to believe all that matters is optimizing work performance. Not exactly what I’d think would lead to a generally good level of well being, but I guess it works for some people.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  > By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? I had to leave my family and lifelong friends behind due to moving to another city. What if WFH had been the norm when I started my career? Doesn't hanging out with your family and friends count for anything? I think this is for the company? If you have a good rapport with your co-workers, I suspect it will be easier to work together on problems. It is of course also possible to do things more formally. I dunno. I like to keep coworkers at an arms length and not get too buddy-buddy, and I prefer to socialize with my non-work friends. So I'm not suggesting that people should replace their social friends with work friends or something ridiculous like that. But the there's plenty of room between best buds and total icy formality that for coworkers to exist in, which might make it easier to bounce ideas back and forth.
jeffwask 5y ago
There are a lot of alternative methods for bonding in an online space. I've been a gamer and run guilds where we never saw each other yet people built such strong connections they traveled cross country to meet up by choice not force years after. (and multiple people got married) The idea that this is only possible in meat space is such an antiquated mindset. Think outside the box. There are a number of companies offering tools, one we use is Donut. https://www.donut.com/blog/ https://www.donut.com/blog/ Once a week, I am randomly peered with someone for a half hour coffee. It's been great and I meet people not just in engineering.
TxProgrammer 5y ago
COVID caused a revolution guys -lets not lose sight of that just because we miss the ritual of the office. in his post, looks like OP wants the team to have occasional meetings and more in-person meetups.. sure I'm fine with that, covid permitting. BUT if a Remote lifestyle allows me to check in code, manage teams and be productive while at the same time caring for my family, extended family, save commute time, or if I have the means, to sit on a beach or in a forest and do my work, why shouldn't we prefer that flexible way of working, at the expense of some added communication overhead ... why do we need to enforce the ritual of the office at all -ie, lets DOWNSIZE the office. make it less relevant, sure we cant give it up completely for many organizations or projects.. And especially for those of us who work in shitty companies (and there are many of us) we know that some workplaces can be like this: https://youtu.be/jg047oJf1B4?t=58 https://youtu.be/jg047oJf1B4?t=58 -anything that lets people work remotely or gets away from the hell of being a wage slave should be an option..
chaostheory 5y ago
”While it’s certainly possible to boot up Among Us during work or schedule Zoom lunches between random teammates, the set of remote bonding activities is significantly more limited than the set of in-person bonding activities.” I’d like to see this revisited once VR / AR is more mature. Apple’s and Meta’s new headsets are just around the corner.
taeric 5y ago
I expected this to be about system design, not team design. I question really only the last claim. Integrated doesn't beat distributed every time. Rather, spending money/effort beats hoping for the best. Every time. To that end, if we will see this work, we will see ways of increasing effort in the area. My gut is that this will be by getting more ways of encouraging inefficient encounters. Think of it in terms of hits. You can try and ensure your one effort is a hit. Or you can do what you can to maximize the effectiveness of an effort, while also increasing the number of efforts you make.
- stonecharioteer 5y ago
  Seriously. I opened the comments section (I don't read the article unless the comments seem excited about it. Life is too short), and I expected people to be talking about how K8s and cloud is so complicated. I'd have been super interested in a story about how to achieve vertical scalability. My company expects us back at work 3 days a week. I go 2 days. I'm partially deaf and I do badly with social cues. I don't want to socialize with my colleagues. I'd rather work from home and cuddle my cats and dog when I'm taking a break. I love them more than I like people I work with, irrespective of which company I'm at. I'm waiting to shift to a completely remote company one day. My employer doesn't have to give me a social life they deem fit. Pay me and I'll make friends outside of work.
manuelabeledo 5y ago
I may be a bit of a cynic here, but it surely sounds like this guy doesn't have any sort of life outside work. "It gets you out of the house", "it helps you socialise"? And all that after having worked in the Chrome codebase, whose devs are from all over the world.
- waynesonfire 5y ago
  it gets _YOU_ out of the house, it helps _YOU_ socialize.. don't worry him. In all honesty it sounds like he'd benefit if _YOU_ returned back to the office.
lupire 5y ago
Is this post a year old, or does OP not use calendar correctly?
bee_rider 5y ago
Personally I was mostly just happy to be getting back into the office occasionally because I'm tired of working 3 feet away from my bed. I can see work-from-home working really well if you are lucky enough to have a big place with an extra office, but for me it totally and completely sucked.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  I think this is where most of the divide is coming from. Single engineers with studio apartments have no interest in working from home (at least I don't) because I'm just working alone from my box all day, save for the time when I go to the coffee shop every day. My most productive hours are away from home, at the coffee shop, even without my relatively nice wfh setup. Some claim that people who don't like wfh wrap too much of their social life around work, but I'd just like to be around people while I work rather than sitting in my bedroom alone for 8 hours a day. This might change when I find a partner etc but I'd really prefer a hybrid environment for now.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I love my partner dearly but * They get up earlier than me and, by default, would end up taking the living room when also working from home. I'm sure they would have been receptive to trading off who used which room, but trading workspaces is kind of a hassle. * I don't need to spend every single minute with them.
paxys 5y ago
Always comes down to the same argument – I need social interaction therefore everyone must come to work.
betwixthewires 5y ago
The premise of this article, and in some way a major point to all "return to the office" arguments, is nothing more than an artifact of the system devised around the inability to work remotely. It is a secondary effect. It's not a deliberate benefit to working on location, it is just how things are when you have to spend all day in a room or building with other people who also have to do so. And there are also many non-beneficial secondary effects to having to commute to a location. A technological revolution that changes how we need to do things is going to take away some of these secondary effects. But it will have it's own. Some of them will be positive and some will be negative. But overall we don't do things how we do them because we get to lay in beanbag chairs (at the office) or on the couch (at home) while working, we do them how we do them because they're the most efficient and reasonable way to do them. Commuting was once the most efficient way to do information work. With worldwide high bandwidth networking this is no longer the case, therefore we will stop commuting. Inertia slows this but it doesn't stop it.
russellendicott 5y ago
For me, I agree that remote work doesn't work as well as collocation. Remote work is great for workers but terrible for managers and company efficiency. The type of work I do doesn't translate well to JIRA tickets. It takes 3 whiteboard sessions, 5 meetings, and a water cooler conversation to come up with something resembling a work item that isn't a complete waste of someone's time. Remote work is great for workers who can pull work from a queue. It's terrible for the people trying to fill the queue with quality work items. So I guess it all depends on what you want to do with your career.
mdoms 5y ago
I agree completely with this article. And I understand fully if you don't. But for me, nothing I have done in remote work compares to my in-person work at really well-functioning companies. I struggle to recall a single memory of my remote working career older than 4 months old. But my head is full of memories of my in-person work because, while sometimes grueling, was often full of fun, surprises, bonding experiences, challenging conversations, war rooms etc. Most of all I worry that our younger employees don't know what they've missed out on. I hope they can find a way to develop great memories of their own in this brave new world.
simoneau 5y ago
It makes me sad if future generations of programmers never have the experience of working with a team in-person. I know it doesn't suit everyone's work style or life style. I'm not even arguing it's more productive. But it can be a lot more fun!
mbrodersen 5y ago
Companies that are not flexible when it comes to WFH will be less competitive in the jobs market. It’s that simple.
mbrodersen 5y ago
If you need your employer to satisfy your social needs then you have a serious problem.
wodenokoto 5y ago
> However, even the fiercest distributed team advocates agree that an office provides some benefits that are difficult to replicate on a distributed team. I want to dig into some of those benefits. Or, how to say you don’t read hacker news without saying you don’t read hacker news. I don’t disagree that offices have their benefit, but I do know where to find internet pundits who do!
gregdoesit 5y ago
I know two startups started both in 2020. They started out with roughly on the same idea, having raised similar funding. Startup #1 decided to do full-remote from day one. After a year, the founder of the full-remote startup had little progress: they ended up figuring out how to work, had to fire people "not cut out" for remote work, and then realized they really make meaningful progress after week-long retreats as a team which they now do on an adhoc basis. Startup #2 stayed in-office even during the pandemic in the same location - following local guidelines on COVID rules as with all businesses. They did this because this was the way the founders knew how to work, and they knew that full-remote would be a steep learning curve and slow down their iteration speed as they are rushing to find product-market-fit. They only hired for onsite 2-3 days a week, and paid very well in return. Startup #2 found PMF in year 1, and now are at ~30 people, ~100 paying businesses, growing strong, ready for their Series A. They have engineering, product, sales and customer support in the same office. As this startup grows, they are putting remote-friendly policies in place as they realize they'll have a hard time hiring and retaining without. But their core culture is collaborating frequently as in-person. Startup #1 is looking for PMF and are still learning how to work efficiently as a full-remote team. In this sense, they are well ahead of Startup #2. In product progress, they are behind. For runway, they are about the same, as Startup #1 runs with a smaller team than #2. In my social media feed, almost everyone advocates for full-remote work, as from a personal point of view this is the preference of most people. No commute, more flexible work hours and choosing where to live and where to work from are all undoubtedly huge benefits for any individual. Still, my observation is that working full-remote or full-distributed has a learning path that takes time and effort. There are people, managers and teams are not there just yet. And we might learn that certain team phases, team dynamics and business environments are better fitted for full-remote or fully distributed versus one that has more "in-office" contact.
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  If we've learned anything from reading HN, a sample of two isn't statistically significant, especially when talking about startups. I've known people in several startups and very few cashed out - and they were all in office. It's interesting that you state that Startup #2 paid very well in return for coming into the office. I get paid very well for doing my job, regardless of whether it is remote or in office. If Startup #1 has decided that remote means they don't need to pay very well, then that is probably your root cause.
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thinkharderdev 5y ago
> At Google Chicago, we had a yearly two day team ski trip So get the remote team together for a two day team ski trip. With all the money you save on office rent, get the while team together for a whole week of skiing. > Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences are near impossible to replicate over any remote tool I’ve used True, but again, remote teams can also go to conferences and have off sites. > Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted Maybe so, but team ski trips, conferences and offsite will also be on the chopping block. And the budget is much more likely to get stressed when you have the huge fixed cost of downtown office space in it. This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.
- lumost 5y ago
  Anecdotally it seems much more difficult to get an offsite together in the modern remote office than it was in the old offices. With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. While this surely results in fewer time wasting pep talks, it also means that the worthwhile activities are also getting side lined.
  - pc86 5y ago
    What about it is more difficult? The (admittedly few) off-sites I've been to have been scheduled 6+ months in advance and the general expectation is that everyone is going unless there's a wedding or a kid is sick or something, in the sense that it's not really culturally acceptable to take PTO during that time unless it's for something very important. When the VP or CTO comes around in February and says "we're going to $CITY for a week, all expenses paid, in September" it's pretty easy for all the teams to get around that.
  - bfung 5y ago
    > With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. I’d say that is more of a sign of poor management chain management, communication, and people management. Senior mgmt can stay in touch by, surprise, staying in touch. Remote makes it harder for those poor at written skills and tech skills, but a good manager should’ve been writing things down to begin with. Opinions from someone doing mgmt for quite some time now.
noduerme 5y ago
>> it gets you out of the house Well, it does. Just not for the right reasons.
- richardfey 5y ago
  This. I am always in a hurry and anxious, even if I leave the house with large advance, just because I am on the "mission" to get to work and have to counteract public transport that can be delayed etc. Instead when I am out in a park I do truly enjoy my green surroundings and relax.
meghaditya 5y ago
Distributed was always an alternative. The pandemic just made it popular among people who never tried it before. These kinds of arguments in favor of office culture seem like a reflex action resisting any change.
- tazjin 5y ago
  Some people also just like interacting with other people, no "reflex action" about it.
  - mvanbaak 5y ago
    things like starbucks or wework or whatever shared office space rentable by the hour are a better solution for this then big office spaces that stay empty most of the time.
dannyw 5y ago
I like remote work, I like meeting my colleagues in the meatspace (irregularly). Don't force me into the office for a majority of the time, and give everyone a travel budget to meet once a quarter. IMHO this is a great balance, moreso that the "hybrid" of 3 days a week.
yu-carm-kror 5y ago
The points are essentially: * ski trips and the like build good rapport * chance encounters with colleagues are valuable * steps make you healthier The world is realizing that these are so much easier to solve for in remote-first work than it is to solve the problems associated to office-first.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I will say this about the world, though. (As someone who hasn't gone to an office job in 20 years). * No one builds rapport through zoom meetings. * People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them. * People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home. The world is realizing what offroad warrior freelancers like me realized a long time ago, but it takes time to realize it: It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure. I think it will take 20 years or so before a majority of people in white collar positions really adjust to creating their own work/life balance now that it's open to them to choose how to manage their geographic place and time. It's actually a lot of responsibility, and something a lot of people never asked for.
  - isoprophlex 5y ago
    I flat out disagree with every single point you make. Not to dismiss your own experience, disregard what you are saying, or be snide or whatever, but: 1. I met my new manager (switched jobs) for the first time over MS Teams in a personally challenging time; I needed to take care of my family the second week after starting a new job. I worried a lot over this, which was met with incredible kindness and empathy. 2. I've started several serendipitous, fruitful collaborations by expansion of offhanded questions or remarks in remote meetings. 3. My mental and physical health is better than pre pandemic because of less commute, more leniency to take a walk or bike a bit, lower stress around picking up kids, being able to cook my own food instead of relying on (potentially unhealthy) cafeteria
    - 5y ago
whommmsup 5y ago
hm? Reading 'distributed' as 'decentral' ...thinking about: Once there was a time when 'some' try to track 'how informations spread' by using protocols... hu sounds off-topic... (-;
Comevius 5y ago
I hope remote with asynchronous interactions is the future, because big cities are increasingly unlivable, and corporate culture is often a culture of distraction. Remote is hard to do right, but it's worth striving for. Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.
- presentation 5y ago
  Idk I live in a city that honestly is great to live in (Tokyo), run a distributed team comprised of others who all live in big cities around the world, and nobody has expressed that they feel like cities suck to live in. Different strokes I guess. Or maybe it’s not that cities suck, but that the cities you’ve been to (cough USA cough) suck.
  - mping 5y ago
    If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
    - esrauch 5y ago
      I think your costs baseline is underestimating: even starting as a FAANG engineer in NYC or SF or you already can't buy a "large house next to the park"
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        Nor should you be able to do that.
        5y ago
ekanes 5y ago
It seems healthiest for companies and people to choose: have all-remote or all-in-person. It’s the muddled hybrid model that’s the worst of all worlds.
- eddieroger 5y ago
  You were right with the first part alone - let the teams choose. Hybrid worked for me and my team pre-pandemic, where we had no emphasis on location at all, so some people worked remotely full time, and the rest were free to come in to the office at their discretion. We would get together periodically (and deliberately), but outside of a few times a year, there was no emphasis on location at all. Most days, you wouldn't know who was in the office or not until the cams came on during standup.
- boise 5y ago
  Amen！
- heurisko 5y ago
  I worked hybrid before the pandemic. It was the best of both worlds. 3/5 days at the office was great. It gave the benefit of socialising and collaboration, with the flexibility of being at home for visiting home contractors, bulk deliveries, or somewhere where you could take a deep dive into something with no interruptions.
  - tonfa 5y ago
    I guess parent meant hybrid where part of the team is full remote and part of the team is in office.
    - ekanes 5y ago
      Yes. I should have been clearer.
lkrubner 5y ago
This is an important issue. My own experience is limited to New York City, so I can only comment intelligently on what I've seen here. Over the last 18 months I spoke to 30 entrepreneurs about this issue, and I've tried to synthesize what I have learned. I've posted some of this information previously in various comments, in particular, that many entrepreneurs seem to put a value on vague and intangible (but apparently important) aspects of in-person work. Like I said in an earlier comment, I've had clients who offered mid level software engineers an extra $30k a year to come into the office. I've also summarized all of this in a blog post. For anyone interested, see "What work can be done from home? What work needs to be done at an office?" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-from-home-what-work-needs-to-be-done-at-an-office http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-f...
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Dude, post this as its own submission.
  - Thrymr 5y ago
    He did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30914179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30914179
- koide 5y ago
  That's a good argument, but I didn't see the "we want the best people we can get with what we want to pay regardless of where they are." Which is what some companies do, they hire from all over the world and pay them in the same range. Why should companies hire only from the US if there are as good or better people elsewhere? You're looking at it from the cost reduction perspective, but work shouldn't be something you save money on, but invest it the best you can to get the best product. In summary, looks like the CEO and CTO of your sample companies don't know how to collaborate remotely. Which is natural because it's not intuitive. And if you don't know and don't want to learn, or happen to be at a niche not amenable to remote collaboration, sure, stay at an office.
  - 5y ago
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Maybe there is a balance? We don't have to be 100% either. We do need to build human trust and relationships, and you can't do that with remote easily. Also, communications are slower and full of paper cuts that will make any task requiring to gather a lot from different people harder with remote. Those 2 things make onboarding much harder. Young people are also the one that are paying the most cost from remote: - they are the ones with the less autonomy, which makes remote either very unproductive or make the task super hard. - they don't learn anything about politics, which remote hides from view, and maybe reduces a little, but doesn't remove. - they are already deep in the culture distractions, which is incredibly tempting in remote. How course, remote work has so many benefits it may very well offset all that. Time will tell I guess.
marmada 5y ago
How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful. It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs. And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated. TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this. In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.
- k__ 5y ago
  I'd rephrase it to: "Certain types of companies need a certain workaholic mentality" The way you describe led to monoculture and I hope this isn't the only way to do things. Wasn't there a saying that your software will resemble your company structure? I don't know if a software resembling two people sleeping in an office is a good structure to base your software on.
- presentation 5y ago
  I run a globally distributed startup - we still have very responsive communication but a) it’s not everyone on the team that’s a workaholic since not everyone prefers to be always “on” like that, and so that’s fine, they contribute in other ways; b) we have to be a bit more strategic about timing since you can’t powwow with someone unless that person’s awake, and c) we spend more effort explicitly aligning since misalignment can waste a ton of time, so in a way it’s upgraded the quality of our communication. I personally think it’s been fine, and as a result we have a much bigger hiring pool and are getting as much done as any startup in SV I’ve worked at.
- gedy 5y ago
  Hate to sound dismissive but I've worked with people who can't communicate very well unless it's in person. Writing/reading causes a lot of misunderstandings for them due to comprehension or patience, and video calls don't seem to work very well for them as they are typical scheduled and have less body language. This is fine, but I do disagree with those people saying "remote doesn't work" for startups, etc. It's just them.
laerus 5y ago
Well i hope it is. I can't stand commuting or the noisy and distracting office environment. Being close to my family is way more important than being close to coworkers. I'm also way more productive at home, I can wear what i want, I can speak out loud to myself, listen to metal, take a walk, use my clean bathroom and the list goes on. Overall it's healthier and more ecologic. It's just doesn't compare and any argument I've heard/read against 100% remote work just doesn't matter to me. I also don't care about small talk with coworkers or any kind of non-professional bonding, I have friends for that.
- UglyToad 5y ago
  Agree with you. I'm highly skeptical of an argument from a (X?)googler about why remote is bad. Like sure it might be nice to go to Google's office instead of work from the kitchen table but that's not what's on the table for 99.999% of developers. It's some open-plan dead air noisy hell.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    From what I’ve heard Google campus is very like a college campus - and if they provided dorms many of the younger employees would love it. And it would have been amazing in my college years. Not so much these days
  - galoisscobi 5y ago
    Having worked at Google previously, I completely agree with this assessment. I love remote work, mostly because actual work environment feels hostile towards ICs but if I had a Google like environment again, I’d have no problems going back to office.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  You can have the best of both worlds where you WFH and also your company pays for you to come out once every 3 months for a week or so.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
golergka 5y ago
This still limits your hiring pool to one particular city and one particular country.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  I don't really understand why (relatively) over paid US Software Engineers are so keen on remote work. The inevitable conclusion is the rapid decrease in salary paid.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Its pretty nice not having to move every time you switch jobs, nor be forced to only look at companies within a small region around you. If remote work leads to more efficient job markets, I'm not going to complain just because the efficiency doesn't benefit me.
  - golergka 5y ago
    I don't live in US and never have, but I now work there remotely.

148 points by goranmoomin 5y ago

“Zapier, a great distributed company, famously has quarterly offsites for its teams where everyone meets in person to replicate this effect. However, I highly suspect that most big companies won’t make any such effort to do this. Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted.” This seems to contradict the argument for offices. Companies save money by having fewer offices, so their budgets should be improved. Also, if companies do not see the value of employees periodically meeting each other then why do management largely prefer face time in offices? “Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization” Much of this article focuses on the workplace fulfilling out of work needs or out of work meetings fulfilling at work relationships. Why do people want and expect so much from their jobs? Why is that the place to fulfill ones social needs? Pursue hobbies and interests outside of work and meet people not tethered to your employer. These relationships are stronger and transcend work ties. Avoiding terrible commutes provides some of the time to pursue such ventures too.

cabraca 5y ago
I think its the google centric view of the article. All the perks google offer in their offices are tools to keep you in the office longer. Stay for the Gym, stay for Dinner or come in early for lunch. Considering that its naturally that they expect your social circle to be mostly other google employees.

benreesman 5y ago

The company I work for is still tiny, so we don’t know how it’s going to scale, but we’ve been spending the money we would spend on an office just traveling to work together either collectively or in small groups on an as-needed, voluntary basis. Some have more flexibility around travel, some less, but we all like and care about each other so someone is always willing to go the extra mile when someone else can’t travel. This only works because the enterprise is a COVID baby, and so the “base load” workflow is totally remote, we’ve never known anything different. This makes being in person pleasant and useful but almost never strictly necessary. I hope it scales because I love it.

sfg 5y ago

"working from home certainly increases the amount of control that people have over their day" Yep. This outweighs all the benefits of being in the office that are mentioned in the article.

ekianjo 5y ago

> While working from home certainly increases the amount of control that people have over their day, it does so at the cost of essentially all of these chance encounters. How much value do you actually get from those chance encounters? My experience, after years in everyday in the office, is very, very little. It's like playing lottery everyday, there's not much you earn under all probabilities.

agumonkey 5y ago
And it's not like it's a potential Oasis while talking a long cool hike. Office can be a minefield.. maybe you get lucky, but the life distortion effect of a bad building are too strong to ignore.

ekianjo 5y ago

> Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization into your day than sitting at home in your office. While it’s certainly possible that some people working from home will choose to socialize more, I predict that the majority of people will socialize less as they have fewer opportunities to meet and talk with people built into their days. When you are in control, you are in control of everything. Means that if you need to get exercise everyday, you need to make it a habit to go and walk outside during your remote working day. As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.

teh_klev 5y ago
> As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with. I agree. I'm happy to "socialise" to the extent that it facilitates getting work done. But I'm not looking for new pals, I'm just here to do the work and get paid, I have a separate life outside of the workplace. Maybe it's just an age thing but I don't want to do company pizza night, or company skiing or company drinks, for me work is a means to an end. Don't get me wrong, I really like the company I presently work for, get on well with my colleagues, even push the boat out and do a few extra hours to get a project over the line or to help others, but it is just work and that's it.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I suppose it's a different mindset. I'm not friends with anyone at work in the sense that we hang out after hours, or that I'd call them if I needed help with a personal problem. But it's still hard for me to think of it as "just work and that's it". I'm glad to be "work pals" with these people and want the best for them personally as well as professionally. I agree that work is a means to an end, but the people I work with aren't similarly means.

dudul 5y ago

Always the same "arguments". Spend time with your real friends instead of your coworkers, get out of the house on your own, nobody is forcing you to stay inside just because you don't have to go to an office. Work from a coworking space, distributed/remote doesn't mean everybody at home. It's crazy to see how unhealthy people's life can be when work is the only thing they have.

jdrc 5y ago

instead of obsessing over what will be the "new default", it's sometimes better to sit back, relax and watch the pieces fall where they may , as some of the forces here are irreversible. There is always a capacity and will for people to produce work, and it will find its way to productive use regardless of whether they job is distributed or not. we are still at the beginning of this Incidentally , academics have been used to this distributed mode for decades, with conferences purposely organized to provide opportunities for meshing mixing and friction.

michaelsalim 5y ago

KronisLV 5y ago

I actually wrote about the remote vs in-office culture a while ago, in my blog article "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... In short, i do not believe that having an office-centric culture is a bad thing, nor that a remote culture is a bad thing either. It's just that there are people who will always lean towards one or the other and that's where the incompatibilities begin. Personally, i'd want a 100% remote position and doubt that i'll be going back to spending my time commuting just to sit in an office. For others, the opposite applies - they might not be able to wait for being able to properly return to offices soon enough. Each of us might have our own valid (at least subjectively) arguments for pursuing these approaches. Hell, with slightly different life circumstances i might change my opinions (e.g. having kids around the house) or vice versa (wanting to travel more or move and not be bogged down). It is when the guilt tripping and peer pressuring as well as brainwashing starts, with every team/company/culture advocating for their own "normal" as the only proper way to work that the problems start appearing. Everything from virtuous articles in favor of a particular approach or against another, to trying to gaslight or convince those easily swayed to conform to whatever they want. That, in my eyes, is disingenuous and there will definitely be a lot of people looking for different jobs in the coming years, the so called "Great Resignation" (albeit there are also other factors to this, especially in other industries), after it became apparent that people can switch jobs without always relocating, something that's taken advantage of by many. But what's the end result of this? Plenty of people quitting and taking the domain knowledge with themselves, which will make things worse for others in the short term and long term - but that's usually just a case of documentation/knowledge transfer/bus factor being bad. I do hope that the current circumstances allow more people to find jobs that are suitable for them, whatever those jobs may be.

nowherebeen 5y ago

> I found that having experiences with coworkers from outside of a work settings would significantly strengthen the relationship with those coworkers. Why can’t work just be work? Do you really want to spent time with your coworkers outside of work? Some of us have families to care for. And some of us have actual friends that we like to hangout with. Coworkers aren’t my buddies or family. We are a team to get things done for a price.

iamstupidsimple 5y ago
I think it's a generational thing. As a young person, work is basically the default way to meet people after moving to a large city. I have real friends outside work now but they all started as colleagues or friends of colleagues. I'd also prefer to work with people I can trust over anonymous colleagues any day. I'm not saying it's the only way (it's probably not good or healthy) but this sentiment is super common among my peers. When we're older I suspect that will change.
imiric 5y ago
I agree. For me it's not required to know someone personally to be professional, establish trust, and have a great working relationship. If a friendship arises naturally, then great, but I also dislike the forced team building events (or after hour hangouts) companies think are essential for a team to work well together. And yet I've learned that not everyone is like this, especially nowadays with remote work growing in popularity. Some people do feel that a personal connection helps in a professional setting. So I tend to begrudgingly accept this and make an effort to do this for the team.
ryathal 5y ago
you spend about 50% of waking hours with co-workers, it doesn't make sense to me that you would want to ignore them. The majority of my friends are former/current co-workers.
- deleted 5y ago
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- 5y ago

higeorge13 5y ago

I hope distributed is the new norm in order to get similar salaries despite the fact we were born or chose to live in different continents.

deleted 5y ago
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newshorts 5y ago

My biggest gripe with returning to the office is the inability to determine and enforce priority. At home, if you slack me and you’re not my top priority right now, I can ignore you or politely reply that I’ll be with you shortly. In the office folks can simply walk over and tap me on the shoulder. Due to social norms, I cannot simply ignore you and most like will need to devote my full attention to your questions. Essentially, my actions throughout the day make a subtle shift from proactive activities to reactive. If I’m not the only person to experience this, I wonder what the macro effect is on an organization?

mr90210 5y ago

I think the author doesn’t take in account that some companies are being forced to hire remotely due to the shortage of professionals in the Software industry.

strikelaserclaw 5y ago
I think the biggest problem is that these companies all seem to establish themselves in the most expensive metro areas. Even with the good salaries of being a software engineer, a lot of people would hate to feel like most of their money is going towards taxes, rent, etc... and forget about being able to buy a decent house in the bay area, the housing prices seem to continually increase upward while the majority of the population is left renting. Most of my well paid coworkers in the bay area hate commuting to work because they live like an hour away.

throwaway787544 5y ago

Don't worry. Managers will never let distributed or remote be the default. People would eventually realize that we don't really need managers except a couple times a year. They need to be in-person so they can be seen around the office, so people will assume they're necessary.

mathgladiator 5y ago
This is only true for bad managers. I'm very used to having managers as friends and weekly 1x1s talking strategy. Well, I was used to it until I retired. An important aspect of retiring was understanding management's role and be allied in the company's direction.
- stonecharioteer 5y ago
  I have yet to see anyone who said their manager is their friend and continue to be so. I've been burnt far too many times. I'm never befriending my manager.

imglorp 5y ago

There's another aspect to meatspace, which is asymmetric loyalty. Most corporations are single-minded AI's with strictly zero loyalty to any worker without title =~ /^C..$/. The instant some spreadsheet cell turns yellow upstairs, you're out. Due to the human firmware drive of expected reciprocity, people often forget this and make enormous sacrifices for $work, uprooting their families, working long hours, missing family events, etc. When making this sacrifice of loyalty, they expect the AI to reciprocate in kind with loyalty but THE AI DOES NOT HAVE THAT FEELING. I recently joined a hot fintech only to have several offices closed and people sacked 5 months later, in order to keep an IPO route looking shiny (it wasn't). My advice to juniors is do not sacrifice for that machine.

mjburgess 5y ago
Incidentally, this is also Hobbes' view of the state, namely that it's an automaton.

asciimov 5y ago

Dude, your privileged is showing... I have yet to work for a company that buys me lunch, much less annual ski trips. Hell, coffee hasn't been provided at any of my jobs, I've always had to pitch into a coffee pool just to have it. That's not to even mention getting to go to conferences. If I wanted to attend a conference, it would be coming out of my wallet and vacation time. If you want me to collaborate, put it in on my schedule and pay me to do it. I'd say that most of these "spontaneous collision of people and ideas" happen during lunch. Guess what, that lunch which I am already paying for, is also unpaid time. Ever since I've been working from home, my lunch hour is mine. I get to unwind, read or watch tv, all while eating a healthy meal. Finally let's talk about things that would get me back in the office. Shorter days, I have to commute a total of 2 hours a day, so I want my day to be 2-3 hours shorter. An actual office, with a window, door, temperature control, and some kind of noise isolation. I don't like working in those open office bullpens where I get to listen to salesmen screaming on the phone or secretaries sharing the latest gossip. Start screening people for personal hygiene. I get so tired of having to work with a heavy smoker or someone who can't be bothered to shower before showing up to work.

noasaservice 5y ago
Indeed. "My gold-coated bon-bons are empty, the bottle of 20y scotch is half-full, and Im ONLY in a 5 star ski resort with my colleagues." Whereas I'm making 150k/yr in the midwest as 100% remote engineer, and livin every day to its fullest. I'm certainly getting no ski trips or otherwise. Most companies don't do that. I also don't look forward to working at a FAANG either. Way too much churn. And I frankly value stability as well. And the FAANGs aren't that at all. As much as the admins here want us to think in the most gracious way, I really think these are commissioned hit pieces against remote-work. Ive been tracking them, and its long-form articles like this that advocate in-person work where it doesn't need it.
- olliej 5y ago
  What? FAANGs are among the most stable in tech, Apple especially is notorious for lifers.

gedy 5y ago

> Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences I guess I've missed out, but in 20 years in the industry I've literally never had any critically important break-outs from office or off-sites or hallway conversations. Important work is intentional, and rarely accidental.

agentultra 5y ago

I'm happy as a bug with being fully remote. I'm glad there are more companies considering fully distributed teams and I hope the trend continues. If there's some future where we can mix things up and work in person some times that would be fine. I used to have an office in a co-working space I used just to get out of the house. It was nice seeing the regular, every-day familiar strangers along the way, get a coffee from the usual place, etc. ... but my team was still located all around the world and the office was within walking distance of my house. I don't particularly enjoy commuting, the dour glow of fluorescent lights, the desks lined up in rows, or working in a concrete coffin. I like being able to go for a walk in my neighbourhood in the afternoon or spend a bit of time in my garden. I enjoy being surrounded by my books. I like it when my cat snuggles in my lap. I like having no commute. Some people like after-work happy hours and "team building." Not me. I like to get my job done and go home to my family, friends, and neighbours. I also think productivity-wise it brings a lot of benefits. The best collaboration happens with people write things down and share them widely. That is often hindered in an office setting where hallway chats and random encounters ensure that the people engaged in those activities control what gets shared and with whom; great for politics but useless for work. I get the creativity side of it: ideas aren't born in a vacuum. For media work like music it's way harder to work remotely. But I don't think ideas are born solely in offices either. Great ideas come from people collaborating and sharing. This happens more in a distributed team because fewer people are left out of the process. It's way easier in a software engineering team. There's literally no evidence that offices contribute to anything other than needless CO2 emissions and traffic.

pixl97 5y ago
Add to your list "I don't enjoy the guy in the cube next to me that must be hard of hearing and yells into his headset at 85 decibels" What's worse is sometimes I'm that guy.
- agentultra 5y ago
  I do prefer the hum of case fans and the sound of my Model M. Having a choice over ones environment is a huge win for someone like me though that has sensory sensitivities most folks don't seem to have problems with.

pyjarrett 5y ago

I'm a super introvert who works remote. I don't want the company to spend a bunch of money on a ski trip for the company, I want to see my portion of that money in my pocket so I can do what I enjoy. Working from home means my employer gets more productivity, since I can handle "life" things easier without having to run home. They save money on office space, in-office meals, chairs, desks, and such, and I get more autonomy on my personal setup and how I want to work. It also means that people can move due to life reasons such as to be closer to an elderly family member, and still stay working for the same employer. I could get steps from walking around town, or, I can walk my dog while I'm waiting on a build or at lunchtime. My kid is home a couple days this week because of break for the upcoming holiday, so she gets to go with me and the dog on our morning walk, and I don't need to worry about child care. I like the people I work with, and have built rapport with them over years of working together on difficult problems. We connect based on our professional mutual work, but we each have our own interests and families. Remote work emphasizes this professional connection and broadens your ability to work with more varying people due to the limited and directed nature of the communications and interactions. You don't need to worry about the person in the next cubicle loudly talking on the phone or eating potato chips or burning popcorn in the microwave. It makes it easier to focus on positive interactions and tune out the bad ones. If I don't want to hear all the sports talk, I'm not in the #sports slack channel. Yes, I could operate in an office environment, a lot will probably return to it. However, I've been fully remote for years, and it'd be a hard sell for me to go back.

cma 5y ago
> I don't want the company to spend a bunch of money on a ski trip for the company, I want to see my portion of that money in my pocket so I can do what I enjoy. Your portion would be taxed, they can offer this avoiding 40% taxes on it or whatever it would work out to at your marginal rate. You may still not want it, but the alternative isn't getting the same money.
- sdoering 5y ago
  I'd rather have this as taxed bonus income than as a ski trip. Bei g crowded in with all my coworkers (whom I actually like by the way) still doesn't sound like a perk to me. And I like skiing. Or at least snowboarding. I still wouldn't see it as a perk to spend a few days together with the people with whom I work. I like working with them. I really do. But I also really like to do what I want when I am not on the clock. And that would be so worth the tax cut. At least in my personal opinion.

kkfx 5y ago

It's a bit more complex: being a team means being a community and since we are not (sigh [1]) Borg but still being social animals we need a certain physical interaction BUT we do need that for certain aspects, while we can avoid that for certain others. For instance a remote university is horrific, students and teachers need to be physically together at least for the majority of the time, a research team need to be together equally BUT a company that do not do much research once formed a team with a bit of punctual and casual physical interaction like few events per year do not need much the social part, individuals do have their local sociability separated from the work and while it's a change of culture and model can work well if well done and tested a bit. Actual issues came mostly IMO because of: - lack of real distributed org and practice - bad policies and tools - the sense of being in a short transitory phase so no one really need to invest in such work form In the end transports are and was for the entire human history the most expensive thing we need, if we can have many advantages of being together without the transport and physical presence need that's so good we need to work around issues as much as possible. [1] before the horrendous idea of a Borg's queen of course, because the Borg represent a PERFECT society despite the light S.T. draw on them, a fully integrated and egalitarian society where individual are really peers, all decisions are made in a pure Democracy and they can even makes memories of any individual survive in the community

apple4ever 5y ago

I do like having an in office job, but with the flexibility of working from home as needed. I don't even mind the commute as much. What I absolutely hate is open offices. I want my own office where I can have some privacy to think and have space.

jdauriemma 5y ago

RE: traveling to socialize with distributed coworkers: As a person with three children and a working spouse who's busier than I am, and as a person managing a distributed team, the notion of convening my colleagues in one area for a team-building event is stressful. I recently have been given budget to do so and have been volun-told to organize such an event. Many of my direct reports are eager to meet up in-person. I value their happiness so I will to oblige them. And I'm not going to lie, it sounds like fun - I really do like the people I work with. However, being away from my family for days is a hardship for my children and my spouse, who already has enough stress and is unaccustomed to being the day-to-day caregiver. Since those are the people I value most highly, it's hard for me to justify the time, expense, and effort involved with traveling for the sole purpose of socializing with my coworkers.

thex10 5y ago
I can relate to this. Honestly it's just one of many ways our society is not structured to adequately support caregivers. Disclosure: I am a working remote parent who misses meeting with her team greatly.

cvhashim 5y ago

I’d be in the office and would be more willing to accept a hybrid model if I worked at Google and got free perks like team vacations.

jlbbellefeuille 5y ago

There is a disinformation campaign against remote work. The likely culprit behind it are commercial real estate interests and good old fashioned corporate leaders with their head buried in the sand. Ed Zitron’s Substack has been following and reporting on the remote work propaganda machine for over a year. https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top

angarg12 5y ago

Everyone's different and unless you account for that we will keep talking past each other. Yesterday I went to the office for the first time in a month. I hated it. First I spent over 1 hour commuting each way, which felt like a massive waste of time. We moved to a town out of the city because here we could afford a better living space for us without having to spend half of our income in rent. Since I left in a hurry I forgot to take my lunch with me (that I cook at home daily), so instead I had to go to a takeaway around the corner and spend 25$ for a dubious sandwich and a snack. Coffee from the big tub in the lobby is so bad that makes me wonder how someone can botch coffee so badly. After lunch I got sleepy as sometimes happens, but instead of a powernap like I have at home, I had to bumble through my code until I sobered up. I ended up getting back home late and exhausted. Some of the arguments from OP are quite curious, such as the number of steps. In my case, rather than spending 2 hours sitting in busses, I could spend 1 hour in the gym and 1 hour walking my dog, and come up ahead. By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? I had to leave my family and lifelong friends behind due to moving to another city. What if WFH had been the norm when I started my career? Doesn't hanging out with your family and friends count for anything? Again I recognise each person's circumstances are different, but after having a taste of remote work (after 12 years of in-the-office career) I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.

porcoda 5y ago
> By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? One of the most consistent themes in the “please go back to offices” articles is that there is a cohort of people who appear to have designed their lives around their job. Their social life solely revolves around work. They don’t appear to actually have social lives that don’t involve coworkers. They also appear to believe all that matters is optimizing work performance. Not exactly what I’d think would lead to a generally good level of well being, but I guess it works for some people.
bee_rider 5y ago
> By the way, why is bonding with colleagues such a big deal? I had to leave my family and lifelong friends behind due to moving to another city. What if WFH had been the norm when I started my career? Doesn't hanging out with your family and friends count for anything? I think this is for the company? If you have a good rapport with your co-workers, I suspect it will be easier to work together on problems. It is of course also possible to do things more formally. I dunno. I like to keep coworkers at an arms length and not get too buddy-buddy, and I prefer to socialize with my non-work friends. So I'm not suggesting that people should replace their social friends with work friends or something ridiculous like that. But the there's plenty of room between best buds and total icy formality that for coworkers to exist in, which might make it easier to bounce ideas back and forth.

jeffwask 5y ago

There are a lot of alternative methods for bonding in an online space. I've been a gamer and run guilds where we never saw each other yet people built such strong connections they traveled cross country to meet up by choice not force years after. (and multiple people got married) The idea that this is only possible in meat space is such an antiquated mindset. Think outside the box. There are a number of companies offering tools, one we use is Donut. https://www.donut.com/blog/ https://www.donut.com/blog/ Once a week, I am randomly peered with someone for a half hour coffee. It's been great and I meet people not just in engineering.

TxProgrammer 5y ago

COVID caused a revolution guys -lets not lose sight of that just because we miss the ritual of the office. in his post, looks like OP wants the team to have occasional meetings and more in-person meetups.. sure I'm fine with that, covid permitting. BUT if a Remote lifestyle allows me to check in code, manage teams and be productive while at the same time caring for my family, extended family, save commute time, or if I have the means, to sit on a beach or in a forest and do my work, why shouldn't we prefer that flexible way of working, at the expense of some added communication overhead ... why do we need to enforce the ritual of the office at all -ie, lets DOWNSIZE the office. make it less relevant, sure we cant give it up completely for many organizations or projects.. And especially for those of us who work in shitty companies (and there are many of us) we know that some workplaces can be like this: https://youtu.be/jg047oJf1B4?t=58 https://youtu.be/jg047oJf1B4?t=58 -anything that lets people work remotely or gets away from the hell of being a wage slave should be an option..

chaostheory 5y ago

”While it’s certainly possible to boot up Among Us during work or schedule Zoom lunches between random teammates, the set of remote bonding activities is significantly more limited than the set of in-person bonding activities.” I’d like to see this revisited once VR / AR is more mature. Apple’s and Meta’s new headsets are just around the corner.

taeric 5y ago

I expected this to be about system design, not team design. I question really only the last claim. Integrated doesn't beat distributed every time. Rather, spending money/effort beats hoping for the best. Every time. To that end, if we will see this work, we will see ways of increasing effort in the area. My gut is that this will be by getting more ways of encouraging inefficient encounters. Think of it in terms of hits. You can try and ensure your one effort is a hit. Or you can do what you can to maximize the effectiveness of an effort, while also increasing the number of efforts you make.

stonecharioteer 5y ago
Seriously. I opened the comments section (I don't read the article unless the comments seem excited about it. Life is too short), and I expected people to be talking about how K8s and cloud is so complicated. I'd have been super interested in a story about how to achieve vertical scalability. My company expects us back at work 3 days a week. I go 2 days. I'm partially deaf and I do badly with social cues. I don't want to socialize with my colleagues. I'd rather work from home and cuddle my cats and dog when I'm taking a break. I love them more than I like people I work with, irrespective of which company I'm at. I'm waiting to shift to a completely remote company one day. My employer doesn't have to give me a social life they deem fit. Pay me and I'll make friends outside of work.

manuelabeledo 5y ago

I may be a bit of a cynic here, but it surely sounds like this guy doesn't have any sort of life outside work. "It gets you out of the house", "it helps you socialise"? And all that after having worked in the Chrome codebase, whose devs are from all over the world.

waynesonfire 5y ago
it gets _YOU_ out of the house, it helps _YOU_ socialize.. don't worry him. In all honesty it sounds like he'd benefit if _YOU_ returned back to the office.

lupire 5y ago

Is this post a year old, or does OP not use calendar correctly?

bee_rider 5y ago

Personally I was mostly just happy to be getting back into the office occasionally because I'm tired of working 3 feet away from my bed. I can see work-from-home working really well if you are lucky enough to have a big place with an extra office, but for me it totally and completely sucked.

jackson1442 5y ago
I think this is where most of the divide is coming from. Single engineers with studio apartments have no interest in working from home (at least I don't) because I'm just working alone from my box all day, save for the time when I go to the coffee shop every day. My most productive hours are away from home, at the coffee shop, even without my relatively nice wfh setup. Some claim that people who don't like wfh wrap too much of their social life around work, but I'd just like to be around people while I work rather than sitting in my bedroom alone for 8 hours a day. This might change when I find a partner etc but I'd really prefer a hybrid environment for now.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I love my partner dearly but * They get up earlier than me and, by default, would end up taking the living room when also working from home. I'm sure they would have been receptive to trading off who used which room, but trading workspaces is kind of a hassle. * I don't need to spend every single minute with them.

paxys 5y ago

Always comes down to the same argument – I need social interaction therefore everyone must come to work.

betwixthewires 5y ago

The premise of this article, and in some way a major point to all "return to the office" arguments, is nothing more than an artifact of the system devised around the inability to work remotely. It is a secondary effect. It's not a deliberate benefit to working on location, it is just how things are when you have to spend all day in a room or building with other people who also have to do so. And there are also many non-beneficial secondary effects to having to commute to a location. A technological revolution that changes how we need to do things is going to take away some of these secondary effects. But it will have it's own. Some of them will be positive and some will be negative. But overall we don't do things how we do them because we get to lay in beanbag chairs (at the office) or on the couch (at home) while working, we do them how we do them because they're the most efficient and reasonable way to do them. Commuting was once the most efficient way to do information work. With worldwide high bandwidth networking this is no longer the case, therefore we will stop commuting. Inertia slows this but it doesn't stop it.

russellendicott 5y ago

For me, I agree that remote work doesn't work as well as collocation. Remote work is great for workers but terrible for managers and company efficiency. The type of work I do doesn't translate well to JIRA tickets. It takes 3 whiteboard sessions, 5 meetings, and a water cooler conversation to come up with something resembling a work item that isn't a complete waste of someone's time. Remote work is great for workers who can pull work from a queue. It's terrible for the people trying to fill the queue with quality work items. So I guess it all depends on what you want to do with your career.

mdoms 5y ago

I agree completely with this article. And I understand fully if you don't. But for me, nothing I have done in remote work compares to my in-person work at really well-functioning companies. I struggle to recall a single memory of my remote working career older than 4 months old. But my head is full of memories of my in-person work because, while sometimes grueling, was often full of fun, surprises, bonding experiences, challenging conversations, war rooms etc. Most of all I worry that our younger employees don't know what they've missed out on. I hope they can find a way to develop great memories of their own in this brave new world.

simoneau 5y ago

It makes me sad if future generations of programmers never have the experience of working with a team in-person. I know it doesn't suit everyone's work style or life style. I'm not even arguing it's more productive. But it can be a lot more fun!

mbrodersen 5y ago

Companies that are not flexible when it comes to WFH will be less competitive in the jobs market. It’s that simple.

mbrodersen 5y ago

If you need your employer to satisfy your social needs then you have a serious problem.

wodenokoto 5y ago

> However, even the fiercest distributed team advocates agree that an office provides some benefits that are difficult to replicate on a distributed team. I want to dig into some of those benefits. Or, how to say you don’t read hacker news without saying you don’t read hacker news. I don’t disagree that offices have their benefit, but I do know where to find internet pundits who do!

gregdoesit 5y ago

I know two startups started both in 2020. They started out with roughly on the same idea, having raised similar funding. Startup #1 decided to do full-remote from day one. After a year, the founder of the full-remote startup had little progress: they ended up figuring out how to work, had to fire people "not cut out" for remote work, and then realized they really make meaningful progress after week-long retreats as a team which they now do on an adhoc basis. Startup #2 stayed in-office even during the pandemic in the same location - following local guidelines on COVID rules as with all businesses. They did this because this was the way the founders knew how to work, and they knew that full-remote would be a steep learning curve and slow down their iteration speed as they are rushing to find product-market-fit. They only hired for onsite 2-3 days a week, and paid very well in return. Startup #2 found PMF in year 1, and now are at ~30 people, ~100 paying businesses, growing strong, ready for their Series A. They have engineering, product, sales and customer support in the same office. As this startup grows, they are putting remote-friendly policies in place as they realize they'll have a hard time hiring and retaining without. But their core culture is collaborating frequently as in-person. Startup #1 is looking for PMF and are still learning how to work efficiently as a full-remote team. In this sense, they are well ahead of Startup #2. In product progress, they are behind. For runway, they are about the same, as Startup #1 runs with a smaller team than #2. In my social media feed, almost everyone advocates for full-remote work, as from a personal point of view this is the preference of most people. No commute, more flexible work hours and choosing where to live and where to work from are all undoubtedly huge benefits for any individual. Still, my observation is that working full-remote or full-distributed has a learning path that takes time and effort. There are people, managers and teams are not there just yet. And we might learn that certain team phases, team dynamics and business environments are better fitted for full-remote or fully distributed versus one that has more "in-office" contact.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago
If we've learned anything from reading HN, a sample of two isn't statistically significant, especially when talking about startups. I've known people in several startups and very few cashed out - and they were all in office. It's interesting that you state that Startup #2 paid very well in return for coming into the office. I get paid very well for doing my job, regardless of whether it is remote or in office. If Startup #1 has decided that remote means they don't need to pay very well, then that is probably your root cause.

deleted 5y ago

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thinkharderdev 5y ago

> At Google Chicago, we had a yearly two day team ski trip So get the remote team together for a two day team ski trip. With all the money you save on office rent, get the while team together for a whole week of skiing. > Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences are near impossible to replicate over any remote tool I’ve used True, but again, remote teams can also go to conferences and have off sites. > Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted Maybe so, but team ski trips, conferences and offsite will also be on the chopping block. And the budget is much more likely to get stressed when you have the huge fixed cost of downtown office space in it. This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.

lumost 5y ago
Anecdotally it seems much more difficult to get an offsite together in the modern remote office than it was in the old offices. With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. While this surely results in fewer time wasting pep talks, it also means that the worthwhile activities are also getting side lined.
- pc86 5y ago
  What about it is more difficult? The (admittedly few) off-sites I've been to have been scheduled 6+ months in advance and the general expectation is that everyone is going unless there's a wedding or a kid is sick or something, in the sense that it's not really culturally acceptable to take PTO during that time unless it's for something very important. When the VP or CTO comes around in February and says "we're going to $CITY for a week, all expenses paid, in September" it's pretty easy for all the teams to get around that.
- bfung 5y ago
  > With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. I’d say that is more of a sign of poor management chain management, communication, and people management. Senior mgmt can stay in touch by, surprise, staying in touch. Remote makes it harder for those poor at written skills and tech skills, but a good manager should’ve been writing things down to begin with. Opinions from someone doing mgmt for quite some time now.

noduerme 5y ago

>> it gets you out of the house Well, it does. Just not for the right reasons.

richardfey 5y ago
This. I am always in a hurry and anxious, even if I leave the house with large advance, just because I am on the "mission" to get to work and have to counteract public transport that can be delayed etc. Instead when I am out in a park I do truly enjoy my green surroundings and relax.

meghaditya 5y ago

Distributed was always an alternative. The pandemic just made it popular among people who never tried it before. These kinds of arguments in favor of office culture seem like a reflex action resisting any change.

tazjin 5y ago
Some people also just like interacting with other people, no "reflex action" about it.
- mvanbaak 5y ago
  things like starbucks or wework or whatever shared office space rentable by the hour are a better solution for this then big office spaces that stay empty most of the time.

dannyw 5y ago

I like remote work, I like meeting my colleagues in the meatspace (irregularly). Don't force me into the office for a majority of the time, and give everyone a travel budget to meet once a quarter. IMHO this is a great balance, moreso that the "hybrid" of 3 days a week.

yu-carm-kror 5y ago

The points are essentially: * ski trips and the like build good rapport * chance encounters with colleagues are valuable * steps make you healthier The world is realizing that these are so much easier to solve for in remote-first work than it is to solve the problems associated to office-first.

noduerme 5y ago
I will say this about the world, though. (As someone who hasn't gone to an office job in 20 years). * No one builds rapport through zoom meetings. * People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them. * People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home. The world is realizing what offroad warrior freelancers like me realized a long time ago, but it takes time to realize it: It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure. I think it will take 20 years or so before a majority of people in white collar positions really adjust to creating their own work/life balance now that it's open to them to choose how to manage their geographic place and time. It's actually a lot of responsibility, and something a lot of people never asked for.
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  I flat out disagree with every single point you make. Not to dismiss your own experience, disregard what you are saying, or be snide or whatever, but: 1. I met my new manager (switched jobs) for the first time over MS Teams in a personally challenging time; I needed to take care of my family the second week after starting a new job. I worried a lot over this, which was met with incredible kindness and empathy. 2. I've started several serendipitous, fruitful collaborations by expansion of offhanded questions or remarks in remote meetings. 3. My mental and physical health is better than pre pandemic because of less commute, more leniency to take a walk or bike a bit, lower stress around picking up kids, being able to cook my own food instead of relying on (potentially unhealthy) cafeteria
  - 5y ago

whommmsup 5y ago

hm? Reading 'distributed' as 'decentral' ...thinking about: Once there was a time when 'some' try to track 'how informations spread' by using protocols... hu sounds off-topic... (-;

Comevius 5y ago

I hope remote with asynchronous interactions is the future, because big cities are increasingly unlivable, and corporate culture is often a culture of distraction. Remote is hard to do right, but it's worth striving for. Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.

presentation 5y ago
Idk I live in a city that honestly is great to live in (Tokyo), run a distributed team comprised of others who all live in big cities around the world, and nobody has expressed that they feel like cities suck to live in. Different strokes I guess. Or maybe it’s not that cities suck, but that the cities you’ve been to (cough USA cough) suck.
- mping 5y ago
  If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
  - esrauch 5y ago
    I think your costs baseline is underestimating: even starting as a FAANG engineer in NYC or SF or you already can't buy a "large house next to the park"
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Nor should you be able to do that.
      - 5y ago

ekanes 5y ago

It seems healthiest for companies and people to choose: have all-remote or all-in-person. It’s the muddled hybrid model that’s the worst of all worlds.

eddieroger 5y ago
You were right with the first part alone - let the teams choose. Hybrid worked for me and my team pre-pandemic, where we had no emphasis on location at all, so some people worked remotely full time, and the rest were free to come in to the office at their discretion. We would get together periodically (and deliberately), but outside of a few times a year, there was no emphasis on location at all. Most days, you wouldn't know who was in the office or not until the cams came on during standup.
boise 5y ago
Amen！
heurisko 5y ago
I worked hybrid before the pandemic. It was the best of both worlds. 3/5 days at the office was great. It gave the benefit of socialising and collaboration, with the flexibility of being at home for visiting home contractors, bulk deliveries, or somewhere where you could take a deep dive into something with no interruptions.
- tonfa 5y ago
  I guess parent meant hybrid where part of the team is full remote and part of the team is in office.
  - ekanes 5y ago
    Yes. I should have been clearer.

lkrubner 5y ago

This is an important issue. My own experience is limited to New York City, so I can only comment intelligently on what I've seen here. Over the last 18 months I spoke to 30 entrepreneurs about this issue, and I've tried to synthesize what I have learned. I've posted some of this information previously in various comments, in particular, that many entrepreneurs seem to put a value on vague and intangible (but apparently important) aspects of in-person work. Like I said in an earlier comment, I've had clients who offered mid level software engineers an extra $30k a year to come into the office. I've also summarized all of this in a blog post. For anyone interested, see "What work can be done from home? What work needs to be done at an office?" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-from-home-what-work-needs-to-be-done-at-an-office http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-f...

barry-cotter 5y ago
Dude, post this as its own submission.
- Thrymr 5y ago
  He did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30914179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30914179
koide 5y ago
That's a good argument, but I didn't see the "we want the best people we can get with what we want to pay regardless of where they are." Which is what some companies do, they hire from all over the world and pay them in the same range. Why should companies hire only from the US if there are as good or better people elsewhere? You're looking at it from the cost reduction perspective, but work shouldn't be something you save money on, but invest it the best you can to get the best product. In summary, looks like the CEO and CTO of your sample companies don't know how to collaborate remotely. Which is natural because it's not intuitive. And if you don't know and don't want to learn, or happen to be at a niche not amenable to remote collaboration, sure, stay at an office.
- 5y ago

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Maybe there is a balance? We don't have to be 100% either. We do need to build human trust and relationships, and you can't do that with remote easily. Also, communications are slower and full of paper cuts that will make any task requiring to gather a lot from different people harder with remote. Those 2 things make onboarding much harder. Young people are also the one that are paying the most cost from remote: - they are the ones with the less autonomy, which makes remote either very unproductive or make the task super hard. - they don't learn anything about politics, which remote hides from view, and maybe reduces a little, but doesn't remove. - they are already deep in the culture distractions, which is incredibly tempting in remote. How course, remote work has so many benefits it may very well offset all that. Time will tell I guess.

marmada 5y ago

How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful. It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs. And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated. TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this. In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.

k__ 5y ago
I'd rephrase it to: "Certain types of companies need a certain workaholic mentality" The way you describe led to monoculture and I hope this isn't the only way to do things. Wasn't there a saying that your software will resemble your company structure? I don't know if a software resembling two people sleeping in an office is a good structure to base your software on.
presentation 5y ago
I run a globally distributed startup - we still have very responsive communication but a) it’s not everyone on the team that’s a workaholic since not everyone prefers to be always “on” like that, and so that’s fine, they contribute in other ways; b) we have to be a bit more strategic about timing since you can’t powwow with someone unless that person’s awake, and c) we spend more effort explicitly aligning since misalignment can waste a ton of time, so in a way it’s upgraded the quality of our communication. I personally think it’s been fine, and as a result we have a much bigger hiring pool and are getting as much done as any startup in SV I’ve worked at.
gedy 5y ago
Hate to sound dismissive but I've worked with people who can't communicate very well unless it's in person. Writing/reading causes a lot of misunderstandings for them due to comprehension or patience, and video calls don't seem to work very well for them as they are typical scheduled and have less body language. This is fine, but I do disagree with those people saying "remote doesn't work" for startups, etc. It's just them.

laerus 5y ago

Well i hope it is. I can't stand commuting or the noisy and distracting office environment. Being close to my family is way more important than being close to coworkers. I'm also way more productive at home, I can wear what i want, I can speak out loud to myself, listen to metal, take a walk, use my clean bathroom and the list goes on. Overall it's healthier and more ecologic. It's just doesn't compare and any argument I've heard/read against 100% remote work just doesn't matter to me. I also don't care about small talk with coworkers or any kind of non-professional bonding, I have friends for that.

UglyToad 5y ago
Agree with you. I'm highly skeptical of an argument from a (X?)googler about why remote is bad. Like sure it might be nice to go to Google's office instead of work from the kitchen table but that's not what's on the table for 99.999% of developers. It's some open-plan dead air noisy hell.
- bombcar 5y ago
  From what I’ve heard Google campus is very like a college campus - and if they provided dorms many of the younger employees would love it. And it would have been amazing in my college years. Not so much these days
- galoisscobi 5y ago
  Having worked at Google previously, I completely agree with this assessment. I love remote work, mostly because actual work environment feels hostile towards ICs but if I had a Google like environment again, I’d have no problems going back to office.
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
You can have the best of both worlds where you WFH and also your company pays for you to come out once every 3 months for a week or so.
- notreallyserio 5y ago

golergka 5y ago

This still limits your hiring pool to one particular city and one particular country.

richardwhiuk 5y ago
I don't really understand why (relatively) over paid US Software Engineers are so keen on remote work. The inevitable conclusion is the rapid decrease in salary paid.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Its pretty nice not having to move every time you switch jobs, nor be forced to only look at companies within a small region around you. If remote work leads to more efficient job markets, I'm not going to complain just because the efficiency doesn't benefit me.
- golergka 5y ago
  I don't live in US and never have, but I now work there remotely.