12 ms·

Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches t

by lolsal 4y ago

Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and will never work from an office again, but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.

shlurpy 4y ago
I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it. I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
  - antihero 4y ago
    Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
    - lolsal 4y ago
      > Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net. I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
    - r00fus 4y ago
      You are vastly underestimating the value of 3h (Bay Area average) of out of each week if one commutes 5 days a week. 3h*50wk = 150h - assuming $100 (lowball) bill rate that's $15k. A more median bill rate would likely be about $250 meaning it's probably worth $50k.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      Maybe you mean monthly?
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  If you think active, in-person collaboration is a "minor optimization" than it doesn't feel like you're starting from a neutral, open position on this issue.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    It seems like someone could start at a neutral, open position and reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Some users commented upthread that IRL whiteboarding is good but infrequent. This matches my experience. I think real productive IRL knowledge transfer or collaboration has been a once-a-month thing for most of my career, and the downsides of doing it in some sort of virtual environment seem smaller than the downsides of spending 1-2 hours per day for everyone. As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.
  - wink 4y ago
    As usual, it depends. Imagine a team that sat in one room, communication was terrible. People never had time for questions. Queue the pandemic and everyone working from home and suddenly communication improves tremendously, people who you'd have to pester endlessly for a review or ask about some code they wrote suddenly answer the same day. Your team lead is not on the phone in the room where you're trying to work.
- asoneth 4y ago
  Commuting time may not be officially factored into working hours but companies already pay for it in domains like tech where they must compete against each other for employees. Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs. The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.
thrower123 4y ago
Working remotely is better than all of those things, iff you commit to doing things correctly and writing things down. Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.
- lolsal 4y ago
  This sounds a bit like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products. No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.
  - thrower123 4y ago
    Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful. At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
    - lolsal 4y ago
      > Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful. Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?
- balaji1 4y ago
  Companies being paranoid about "losing control of employees" seems overblown. People (at these tech cos anyway) (on average) are very responsible as individuals and motivated to work and grow their careers. It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.
CalRobert 4y ago
Your lunch break should be a break, not time you're forced to spend with your colleagues.
- lolsal 4y ago
  I agree! You're welcome to do whatever you want. But I am a friendly person and find it easy to make friends with my co-workers and we don't even talk about 'work' most of the time. I still have lunches with my colleagues from years ago that live in the same city, even though we don't work together. Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    You're still welcome to ping people on Slack during lunch and see how they like that. More often than not though, I think you'll find that they're going to respond to you once they're back on the clock. It's fine if you're a friendly person, but I think you underestimate how much social pressure is involved in talking to people during their lunch break. The only reason I really engage in conversation while eating lunch is because the alternative of "I'd rather just enjoy my food and save the work talk for work time" is a faux pas.
    - Macha 4y ago
      I'm pretty pro wfh, but for a lot of people (myself included), the value of a slack conversation is less than a in-person conversation, so as a recipient I'm less likely to make time for it. That doesn't reflect on the worth I put on the person, but rather the type of communication.
  - wink 4y ago
    For me the main problem is that going out for lunch in person with coworkers (even ones from other departments I've never met) is completely fine and I like to do that (when I was in the office I did that 3-4 days per week) but when I am having lunch at home I don't like it at all. I can't put my finger on it but it always feels like useless smalltalk and not making any connection where in person that works quite well. And I'm neither pro-office or anti-WFH or even someone who doesn't make friends online... but going out for lunch or a beer or just an afternoon coffee break is something that I can't reproduce via video/audio.
0x500x79 4y ago
I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO. The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue. Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes. My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise. Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this ... This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc. > ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO. I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'. > Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in. Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
MattGaiser 4y ago
Depends on who you are. I cannot really process non-explicit communication all that well nor do I like to whiteboard without access to research, so I prefer a playing field where everything is explicit/where I am researching as we work. In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.
- lolsal 4y ago
  I hear you and see you. Fully remote sounds like a boon to you!
madengr 4y ago
sam0x17 4y ago
Unapologetically, yes, and I'd take it a step further. Often the online version is more fun and more interactive than a bunch of people uncomfortably thrust into the same room. There are things people suddenly become comfortable saying and doing that they wouldn't normally say or do in person. If you've grown up with gamer friends you know exactly what I'm talking about -- seeing someone's silly avatar light up when they talk versus being in the room with them is sometimes just more fun and more open and more preferable. It gives them the ability to express themselves exactly how they want to express themselves, not limited by their appearance which they only have so much control over. I talked with my nephew about this, since I noticed he and his friends never really have sleepovers and such like our generation did, and he cited this very reason. His friends are just more fun to be around in a Discord call than in person. Furthermore, he is able to socialize a LOT more than my peers were able to at that age--they'll do 4-5 hour discord calls every night. For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.
- lampshades 4y ago
  This is me. I find it much easier to converse online. I also am content staying in my house for years on end (as COVID has shown) and getting my social interaction from text on a computer screen. The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    > so I guess I've adapted to this way of living. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable, but if the vast majority of the world doesn't adopt a lifestyle similar to yours I fear you're really going to miss out a big part of what "living" includes. One large component: diversity, both in content and medium. There's also the real and serious worry about "not going outside". this is terrible for your health and also has a huge corelation with poor diet and lack of exercise. You're so much more than your eyes, hands and brain.
jasonlotito 4y ago
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides. > There is no value in body language when communicating? There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication. > I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience. > but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls. Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer. A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously. Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest. > No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides. Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point. > There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication. Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators! > Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience. I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition. > A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice. I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.
jedberg 4y ago
Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time? The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it. In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding. The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle. If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time? Very often back when I worked in an office. > The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it. We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great! > In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding. I'm glad you are able to make it work for you! > But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.
onesafari 4y ago
This is a rift between digital only natives and digital hybrids. The hybrids know the tradeoffs of both. Digital only don't have the lived experience to know what they're missing.
- lolsal 4y ago
  I hadn't thought of this distinction before; thank you for enunciating this point!
- kbelder 4y ago
  I think for completeness, you should have three categories, and include the offline-onlys. They, similarly, don't understand all that they're missing. (Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
"There is no value in body-language when communicating?" Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding. Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan). Feel free to continue to argue that position.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  It's despicable that you equate "neuro-normative" with "racist".
- lolsal 4y ago
  > Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only. > You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding. Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately. > Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan). When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    >When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team. >Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you? I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
fullshark 4y ago
Yeah the discussion is so dishonest on both ends at this point. The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans. At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 21723 4y ago
  > The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans. It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Your comment is ridiculous. I'm an able-bodied white male but I'm also not neuro-normative, nor do I enjoy open office plans. What people do like open office plans? Hasn't this issue been settled yet?
    - 21723 4y ago
      Then you're included as disabled. You have a neurological makeup that increases the difficulty of securing and succeeding in employment. You have almost certaimly been given fewer opportunities than you would if you were neurotypical and good at politics. Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices; most of us are neutral at best, and with age most people come to loathe them.
maccard 4y ago
I'm a remote work advocate. > Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so. > There is no value in body-language when communicating? Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  > Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. That's... not all that body language conveys? Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion". Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest. You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs. > The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged. And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
greggman3 4y ago
Not that I think this is a solution for everyone but my personal experience is VR can provide many of these things. It's surprising how much body language comes across just from seeing head tracking in a shared environment and facial expressions are likely shipping this year. Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....
mehphp 4y ago
There is value in working in-office… just not enough for me to give up remote work. I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails. I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.
ensignavenger 4y ago
Is anyone trying to argue it is "exactly the same experience"? Most of the arguments I have heard in favor of remote work is that it is superior experience, on the whole.
21723 4y ago
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused. Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote. There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    My friends are not my coworkers and my coworkers are not my friends, nor do very many of my coworkers become my friends. It's a job, not a lifestyle. I'll do team and business lunches and hang outs, and they can be fun, but they are nothing but a distraction from what I'm trying to do. My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations. Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.
conjecTech 4y ago
Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo. All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation. I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo. I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.
  - conjecTech 4y ago
    Sorry if I misinferred. It seemed implied in the first and forth sentence of your comment.
ren_engineer 4y ago
can anyone honestly say trying to code in a open office is equivalent to being able to actually focus and write code without distraction in your own office? There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job
nathanaldensr 4y ago
I don't think anyone is claiming that it's "exactly the same;" I think many people are claiming it's better after considering pros and cons.
ineptech 4y ago
I think in-office culture does work better in a lot of ways, but we as a society spent a century building and optimizing that. We've only been WingFH for a couple years, and it seems (to me) blazingly obvious that it won't take long to adapt to and improve the tools and culture of it to the point that the benefits outweigh what we've lost. Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.
- EricE 4y ago
  Some of us have been teleworking/WFH to varying degrees for decades now. There are pro's and con's, but it's not all a bed of roses. The earlier on in your career - unless you don't care about advancing from where you are today - the more you should probably balance or lean more towards in office engagement. You simply aren't going to make the same impression on people virtually as you will in person. You're fighting millions of years of evolution/how our brains are wired. You can lie to yourself and tell you it doesn't really matter - and I can tell you from personal experience it's BS. In person interactions have far more impact and staying power - period. I've seen it happen and am convinced I have gotten jobs over others because of it. If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.
hyperman1 4y ago
Before my time, the company did some kind of retreat of 2 days, with sleeping in,for all 40 of the IT staff. The idea was to get them to know each other,as they where dispatched to 20+ divisions and only spoke by phone. There was no work to be done there, no cringy corporate stuff, just a mountain of food and drinks. It must have been expensive. We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened. It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.
- rsanek 4y ago
  > a very political corporation Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
  - hyperman1 4y ago
    Can't add much detail her, except this group of 50 people is tiny compared to the whole IT team, and political was a problem long before the retreat.
dleslie 4y ago
> whiteboards Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance. > Lunch Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch. > Body language Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team land heavily on Miro, for instance. I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room. > Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch. That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit! > Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them. I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!
  - dleslie 4y ago
    > But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room. It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it. > For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit! And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends. > It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.
xornox 4y ago
Whiteboards can be replaced by digital tools, but as far as I know, companies do not invest to remote work tools enough currently. There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?
tethys 4y ago
> it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience No one even made that claim. From the open letter: > We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.
dmitrygr 4y ago
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...
- lolsal 4y ago
  > I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ... That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.

by lolsal 4y ago

shlurpy 4y ago

I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.

lolsal 4y ago
> I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it. I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
- antihero 4y ago
  Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
  - lolsal 4y ago
    > Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net. I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
  - r00fus 4y ago
    You are vastly underestimating the value of 3h (Bay Area average) of out of each week if one commutes 5 days a week. 3h*50wk = 150h - assuming $100 (lowball) bill rate that's $15k. A more median bill rate would likely be about $250 meaning it's probably worth $50k.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    Maybe you mean monthly?
skeeter2020 4y ago
If you think active, in-person collaboration is a "minor optimization" than it doesn't feel like you're starting from a neutral, open position on this issue.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  It seems like someone could start at a neutral, open position and reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Some users commented upthread that IRL whiteboarding is good but infrequent. This matches my experience. I think real productive IRL knowledge transfer or collaboration has been a once-a-month thing for most of my career, and the downsides of doing it in some sort of virtual environment seem smaller than the downsides of spending 1-2 hours per day for everyone. As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.
- wink 4y ago
  As usual, it depends. Imagine a team that sat in one room, communication was terrible. People never had time for questions. Queue the pandemic and everyone working from home and suddenly communication improves tremendously, people who you'd have to pester endlessly for a review or ask about some code they wrote suddenly answer the same day. Your team lead is not on the phone in the room where you're trying to work.
asoneth 4y ago
Commuting time may not be officially factored into working hours but companies already pay for it in domains like tech where they must compete against each other for employees. Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs. The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.

thrower123 4y ago

Working remotely is better than all of those things, iff you commit to doing things correctly and writing things down. Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.

lolsal 4y ago
This sounds a bit like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products. No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.
- thrower123 4y ago
  Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful. At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
  - lolsal 4y ago
    > Nothing in all the years I worked offline in offices convinced me that whiteboards were particularly useful. Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?
balaji1 4y ago
Companies being paranoid about "losing control of employees" seems overblown. People (at these tech cos anyway) (on average) are very responsible as individuals and motivated to work and grow their careers. It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.

CalRobert 4y ago

Your lunch break should be a break, not time you're forced to spend with your colleagues.

lolsal 4y ago
I agree! You're welcome to do whatever you want. But I am a friendly person and find it easy to make friends with my co-workers and we don't even talk about 'work' most of the time. I still have lunches with my colleagues from years ago that live in the same city, even though we don't work together. Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  You're still welcome to ping people on Slack during lunch and see how they like that. More often than not though, I think you'll find that they're going to respond to you once they're back on the clock. It's fine if you're a friendly person, but I think you underestimate how much social pressure is involved in talking to people during their lunch break. The only reason I really engage in conversation while eating lunch is because the alternative of "I'd rather just enjoy my food and save the work talk for work time" is a faux pas.
  - Macha 4y ago
    I'm pretty pro wfh, but for a lot of people (myself included), the value of a slack conversation is less than a in-person conversation, so as a recipient I'm less likely to make time for it. That doesn't reflect on the worth I put on the person, but rather the type of communication.
- wink 4y ago
  For me the main problem is that going out for lunch in person with coworkers (even ones from other departments I've never met) is completely fine and I like to do that (when I was in the office I did that 3-4 days per week) but when I am having lunch at home I don't like it at all. I can't put my finger on it but it always feels like useless smalltalk and not making any connection where in person that works quite well. And I'm neither pro-office or anti-WFH or even someone who doesn't make friends online... but going out for lunch or a beer or just an afternoon coffee break is something that I can't reproduce via video/audio.

0x500x79 4y ago

I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO. The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue. Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes. My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise. Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.

lolsal 4y ago
> I think that a lot of those things can be replaced with new techniques as time goes on. Just because this is how we did things yesterday doesn't mean there aren't better ways to do this ... This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc. > ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO. I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'. > Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in. Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.
- jasonlotito 4y ago

MattGaiser 4y ago

Depends on who you are. I cannot really process non-explicit communication all that well nor do I like to whiteboard without access to research, so I prefer a playing field where everything is explicit/where I am researching as we work. In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.

lolsal 4y ago
I hear you and see you. Fully remote sounds like a boon to you!

madengr 4y ago

sam0x17 4y ago

Unapologetically, yes, and I'd take it a step further. Often the online version is more fun and more interactive than a bunch of people uncomfortably thrust into the same room. There are things people suddenly become comfortable saying and doing that they wouldn't normally say or do in person. If you've grown up with gamer friends you know exactly what I'm talking about -- seeing someone's silly avatar light up when they talk versus being in the room with them is sometimes just more fun and more open and more preferable. It gives them the ability to express themselves exactly how they want to express themselves, not limited by their appearance which they only have so much control over. I talked with my nephew about this, since I noticed he and his friends never really have sleepovers and such like our generation did, and he cited this very reason. His friends are just more fun to be around in a Discord call than in person. Furthermore, he is able to socialize a LOT more than my peers were able to at that age--they'll do 4-5 hour discord calls every night. For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.

lampshades 4y ago
This is me. I find it much easier to converse online. I also am content staying in my house for years on end (as COVID has shown) and getting my social interaction from text on a computer screen. The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  > so I guess I've adapted to this way of living. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable, but if the vast majority of the world doesn't adopt a lifestyle similar to yours I fear you're really going to miss out a big part of what "living" includes. One large component: diversity, both in content and medium. There's also the real and serious worry about "not going outside". this is terrible for your health and also has a huge corelation with poor diet and lack of exercise. You're so much more than your eyes, hands and brain.

jasonlotito 4y ago

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides. > There is no value in body language when communicating? There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication. > I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience. > but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls. Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer. A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.

lolsal 4y ago
> No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously. Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest. > No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides. Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point. > There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication. Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators! > Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience. I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition. > A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice. I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.

jedberg 4y ago

Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time? The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it. In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding. The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle. If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.

lolsal 4y ago
> Have you ever done a white boarding session where more than one person was writing on the board at a time? Very often back when I worked in an office. > The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it. We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great! > In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding. I'm glad you are able to make it work for you! > But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.

onesafari 4y ago

This is a rift between digital only natives and digital hybrids. The hybrids know the tradeoffs of both. Digital only don't have the lived experience to know what they're missing.

lolsal 4y ago
I hadn't thought of this distinction before; thank you for enunciating this point!
kbelder 4y ago
I think for completeness, you should have three categories, and include the offline-onlys. They, similarly, don't understand all that they're missing. (Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

"There is no value in body-language when communicating?" Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding. Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan). Feel free to continue to argue that position.

unethical_ban 4y ago
It's despicable that you equate "neuro-normative" with "racist".
lolsal 4y ago
> Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only. > You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding. Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately. > Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan). When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  >When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team. >Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you? I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.

fullshark 4y ago

Yeah the discussion is so dishonest on both ends at this point. The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans. At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
21723 4y ago
> The complaint that returning to the office will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce is maybe the most absurd attempt yet to destroy RTO plans. It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Your comment is ridiculous. I'm an able-bodied white male but I'm also not neuro-normative, nor do I enjoy open office plans. What people do like open office plans? Hasn't this issue been settled yet?
  - 21723 4y ago
    Then you're included as disabled. You have a neurological makeup that increases the difficulty of securing and succeeding in employment. You have almost certaimly been given fewer opportunities than you would if you were neurotypical and good at politics. Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices; most of us are neutral at best, and with age most people come to loathe them.

maccard 4y ago

I'm a remote work advocate. > Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so. > There is no value in body-language when communicating? Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)

BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. That's... not all that body language conveys? Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion". Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest. You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs. > The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged. And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.

greggman3 4y ago

Not that I think this is a solution for everyone but my personal experience is VR can provide many of these things. It's surprising how much body language comes across just from seeing head tracking in a shared environment and facial expressions are likely shipping this year. Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....

mehphp 4y ago

There is value in working in-office… just not enough for me to give up remote work. I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails. I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.

ensignavenger 4y ago

Is anyone trying to argue it is "exactly the same experience"? Most of the arguments I have heard in favor of remote work is that it is superior experience, on the whole.

21723 4y ago

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere. > There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.

lolsal 4y ago
> Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused. Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote. There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  My friends are not my coworkers and my coworkers are not my friends, nor do very many of my coworkers become my friends. It's a job, not a lifestyle. I'll do team and business lunches and hang outs, and they can be fun, but they are nothing but a distraction from what I'm trying to do. My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations. Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.

conjecTech 4y ago

Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo. All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation. I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.

lolsal 4y ago
> Insisting on a new solution being "exactly the same" to adopt it pretty much ensures you will never leave the status quo. I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.
- conjecTech 4y ago
  Sorry if I misinferred. It seemed implied in the first and forth sentence of your comment.

ren_engineer 4y ago

can anyone honestly say trying to code in a open office is equivalent to being able to actually focus and write code without distraction in your own office? There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job

nathanaldensr 4y ago

I don't think anyone is claiming that it's "exactly the same;" I think many people are claiming it's better after considering pros and cons.

ineptech 4y ago

I think in-office culture does work better in a lot of ways, but we as a society spent a century building and optimizing that. We've only been WingFH for a couple years, and it seems (to me) blazingly obvious that it won't take long to adapt to and improve the tools and culture of it to the point that the benefits outweigh what we've lost. Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.

EricE 4y ago
Some of us have been teleworking/WFH to varying degrees for decades now. There are pro's and con's, but it's not all a bed of roses. The earlier on in your career - unless you don't care about advancing from where you are today - the more you should probably balance or lean more towards in office engagement. You simply aren't going to make the same impression on people virtually as you will in person. You're fighting millions of years of evolution/how our brains are wired. You can lie to yourself and tell you it doesn't really matter - and I can tell you from personal experience it's BS. In person interactions have far more impact and staying power - period. I've seen it happen and am convinced I have gotten jobs over others because of it. If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.

hyperman1 4y ago

Before my time, the company did some kind of retreat of 2 days, with sleeping in,for all 40 of the IT staff. The idea was to get them to know each other,as they where dispatched to 20+ divisions and only spoke by phone. There was no work to be done there, no cringy corporate stuff, just a mountain of food and drinks. It must have been expensive. We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened. It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.

rsanek 4y ago
> a very political corporation Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  Can't add much detail her, except this group of 50 people is tiny compared to the whole IT team, and political was a problem long before the retreat.

dleslie 4y ago

> whiteboards Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance. > Lunch Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch. > Body language Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.

lolsal 4y ago
> Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team land heavily on Miro, for instance. I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room. > Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch. That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit! > Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them. I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!
- dleslie 4y ago
  > But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room. It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it. > For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit! And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends. > It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.

xornox 4y ago

Whiteboards can be replaced by digital tools, but as far as I know, companies do not invest to remote work tools enough currently. There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?

tethys 4y ago

> it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience No one even made that claim. From the open letter: > We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.

dmitrygr 4y ago

> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...

lolsal 4y ago
> I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ... That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.