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"Your remote team is my company's opportunity." Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lo

"Your remote team is my company's opportunity." Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time. Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially. What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work. YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.

redleggedfrog 4y ago
I'm replying to myself here - might be a bit gauche, but I read all the replies carefully and most were quite reasoned and thought provoking. Thank you! Hacker News for the win.
vocram 4y ago
> Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system the kind of work those systems track is assembly line tasks. They can’t measure alone the strategic impact employees have on a company.
duxup 4y ago
I work a sort of hybrid model. We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things. I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on that one issue more in person than when remote. When it comes to some topics it's just much faster and the result is more complete in person.
- Cwizard 4y ago
  I think this is a great model, only downside is that you still have to live close to the office which in my opinion is less of a problem in Europe than it is in the US.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Yeah it's really a catch there that requires folks be there. It does make it sorta an event when everyone is all in, exciting, and such.
nend 4y ago
I wouldn't assume the in office workers get more done because they go to the office, correlation != causation. It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.
- CousinMicks 4y ago
  Good point. I'm curious if there's a relationship between those who work-to-live/live-to-work and work remote/work in office, respectively.
  - redleggedfrog 4y ago
    That's a good question to an angle I hadn't considered. The in-office people are strict 8 to 5ers and none of us work from home that often - just the random voluntary thing when something is interesting. The remote workers work more hours to be certain. Most voluntarily with some of the tech people being roped in on weekends. The core in-office engineers have spent years insisting on strong work-life balance that sadly has not propagated to other teams as much.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Maybe in that case but not necessarily. It might just be their home isn't so nice. Ages before covid I worked at a company that had an office but was mostly remote. There was a guy who was going to the office because his wife was unemployed and they lived next to his mother in law, so he wanted some calm. I'd go because the heating at home sucked so on cold days it was better to be in the office :D
wpietri 4y ago
I'm on an all-remote team right now and I totally miss the level of ambient information I used to have when working with a collocated team in a good environment. On the other hand, a lot of collocated teams, especially at larger companies, have bad enough environments that they're essentially remote workers as far as communication goes. I've visited plenty of teams in open-office environments where all the coders are packed in, hunched over wearing headphones all day, while random people blather loudly nearby about things unrelated to the coding, and key people for their project are scattered across the building. Or farther. If I could have a properly collocated team with dedicated space and the correct layout for collaboration, I'd love that. But I'd still prefer all-remote over the average BigCo setup, where space is set up for the convenience of managers and office planners, not the actual work.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Hi. Great post. Thank you to raise the important topic of relevant ambient information. If you are pure tech writing new features for sales, you might want to sit right next to them. (Listen to how they use my software / interesting business problems.) However, if you are working on credit card payment settlement, you do not give a sh-t about sales team golf scores / "amazing" drinking stories. It is a bother / nuisance. But maybe sitting next to the account team makes good sense!
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Yes, absolutely! Relevance makes the difference between information and noise. Relevant information is hugely powerful. But noisy environments just make for bad output.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  You wrote: "ambient information" This is a brilliant term. I never heard it before this post. (Thank you!) My whole career is working next to traders and sales at global investment banks. Everytime I hear someone say: "Sales & traders can all work from home / [low cost] country X,Y,Z", I cringe. They fundamentally do not understand "ambient information".
Terretta 4y ago
Pretty strong chance the “noticers” are on-prem, not remote, and may be (literally) prejudiced.* Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture. Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. … - Excalidraw+ - Microsoft Whiteboard - Samsung Flip2 - Microsoft Surface Hub … and (b) experimenting with elevated telepresence beyond just the green/yellow/red dot: - https://www.remotion.com/ You have to be radical about this: “If it didn’t happen in [remote-first tool], it didn’t happen.” This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?” The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira. In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands. > I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success * There it is.
chrisfosterelli 4y ago
Whenever I see this sort of comment I feel bad for the remote workers because it's always an indicator that the company doesn't properly involve or support their remote workforce. If the in-person members are vastly more productive, it's because the team has processes and culture that makes it harder for the remote employees to be productive.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Bingo, but it’s much more that hybrid is REALLY hard to get right. The remote employees are always at a disadvantage.. dealing with this now at my new job, I’m not remote, but my local office is not where most of my specific teammates are. “Top talent” getting diluted by remote-ness may be not worth it. Hiring local to work in-person may be better if the less talented team can really communicate and get shit done.
  - chrisfosterelli 4y ago
    Yeah I agree. Hybrid is the hardest version of remote work to do right and unfortunately the one more frequently chosen by orgs that don't want to properly invest in remote but don't want to demand in person, so it's a double whammy. I do think it's a false dichotomy though to compare "top talent diluted by remote-ness" with "less talented in-person team that can communicate well". I agree with that direct comparison, but it's not the only option. Remote can be done well. With proper investment in remote, a team can have "top talent that can communicate well" instead of picking one of two bad options.
barbazoo 4y ago
I've seen this too in an organization that that didn't put much thought into the remote side of things. How to enable the remote folks to _be_ productive and how to facilitate communication. I felt it was obvious for onsite folks to look more productive when meetings were mainly in person and decisions were made synchronously.
jvanderbot 4y ago
My team is about 40% remote. About 25% nonlocal remote. If I had to pick my top 5 performers, two would be remote non local, one would be remote local. And two would be onprem. Seniority, past experience, action-orientation, and conscientiousness are the determoning factors it seems.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
I can see the difference between remote and in office being passion. I like remote because I don’t want to be all in on work. I don’t care enough about my company to even write up an expensive bug I noticed. I just let it waste my org’s money. I can see those who actually give a shit being more likely to go into the office. I don’t think your remote workers would be more productive in office. I wouldn’t be. I just stare dead between the eyes in the same meetings I just nap during when I am remote. Rather, highly productive and engaged people are just less likely to want remote.
juve1996 4y ago
> by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. These are very specific numbers - how do you measure this?
- origin_path 4y ago
  Their post says this already. It's metrics from their project management system i.e. tickets.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    So really a nothing statement - we have no idea how this system works or what "tickets" actually means.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking that. Once people know how the system works, people will game the system. In my experience, there are some people who want to manipulate everything in their favor and against the rest and you cannot really do that (‘networking’ with your manager etc) from home, so they invariably go to the office. So metrics from pm systems are suspect: they are skewed often to people who figured out how to make the stats look good for them. I have seen it too many times. The last big client I had, had a system which gave a combined score analysis based on hours worked, tasks done, github commits, LoC (yep) and some other stuff. It was trivial to make yourself look 10x better than someone who didn't know how it worked or who didn't care or who was just honest.
bbarn 4y ago
I am convinced that in office software teams produce more and better code overall than remote ones do. I am remote now and go to my office about a week every two months, and those weeks tend to be ones I can rally the team to get big initiatives done. I put in the same effort when I'm remote but it just doesn't work out the same. You can blame tooling, you can blame the company not being remote-first or remote-forward or whatever, but I honestly believe the reason there are so many champions for remote work is simply because people want to do it and it's easier or more comfortable for them.
- tsm 4y ago
  Counterpoint: pre-Covid I had an in-office job, and I would specifically request a WFH day if I had an especially meaty problem to write. The office was full of distractions, whereas at home I could focus in on writing code without background noise. Several of my coworkers followed the same pattern.
  - bbarn 4y ago
    That's more of a respect for your coworkers thing than a remote vs. office thing though? Headphones on meant leave me alone in every shop I've been to. I also, personally, rarely have extended periods of just coding. The value I add is almost exclusively helping other people work through problems at this stage in my career. "Distractions" are "the job" for many of us.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  For in-office work to come back, employers need to stop tracking time. Most office workers work 2-3 hours a day max. The 8 hour workday is is a relic from factory work. If I was to go back to the office, this is what my day would look like: * Show up at the office at 10:30, just in time for the meeting * Put in a couple hours of solid work, finishing whatever story I planned to complete today * Go home at 1:30 to smoke weed and play videogames That's what I do now, except I don't have to commute. What's going to change to make office work more appealing?
  - 4y ago
davemp 4y ago
> we also get the most important projects and are paid the most Seems like this would drastically affect motivation and therefore output. Sounds your company may have a self fulfilling prophecy about remote work being less productive.
throwaway2037 4y ago
Holy sh-t. This is exactly my experience during COVID-19 crisis. Will it pay in 5 years when WFH is the normal? I don't know.
LtWorf 4y ago
If they wanted to have success they'd be trying their best to play rock in a stadium, not settle for working in your company :D
raydev 4y ago
> Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially. Working remote requires a number of changes, and it may even require training that your company isn't providing, because as you clearly have guessed, in-person interaction is more natural. But how this looks to me, is that your company is doing a great disservice to the remote workers by not provided them with the tools and comms to be fully productive. You are letting them sort it out for themselves when they may not know how to, which is... bad. Claiming you're doing better because "monkey brains" is just silly. Many things take practice, including clear communication over video and text.
ren_engineer 4y ago
there are now numerous unicorn startups and public companies that have been fully remote from day 1. All the most important open source projects have been developed by remote contributors. 95% of cases where I see people complaining about remote work is because the company basically changed nothing about how they operate day to day when Covid started, they are a normal company trying to work remotely. Obviously that is going to fail miserably. Hybrid model is the worst of both worlds
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gilbetron 4y ago
My mileage does vary - in my experience, I often wonder what non-remote people are even doing. Remote is blowing them out of the water. I think on-prem workers tend to chit chat more, go to lunch, come in a bit late, leave a bit early, do happy hours, and generally socialize a lot more (not to mention commutes!). I see largely the opposite as you, with remote workers doing the bulk of the work. On prem might get the bulk of the credit though - politics are ... evolving with remote workers. But your experience doesn't match mine at all.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

I'm replying to myself here - might be a bit gauche, but I read all the replies carefully and most were quite reasoned and thought provoking. Thank you! Hacker News for the win.

vocram 4y ago

> Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system the kind of work those systems track is assembly line tasks. They can’t measure alone the strategic impact employees have on a company.

duxup 4y ago

I work a sort of hybrid model. We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things. I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on that one issue more in person than when remote. When it comes to some topics it's just much faster and the result is more complete in person.

Cwizard 4y ago
I think this is a great model, only downside is that you still have to live close to the office which in my opinion is less of a problem in Europe than it is in the US.
- duxup 4y ago
  Yeah it's really a catch there that requires folks be there. It does make it sorta an event when everyone is all in, exciting, and such.

nend 4y ago

I wouldn't assume the in office workers get more done because they go to the office, correlation != causation. It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.

CousinMicks 4y ago
Good point. I'm curious if there's a relationship between those who work-to-live/live-to-work and work remote/work in office, respectively.
- redleggedfrog 4y ago
  That's a good question to an angle I hadn't considered. The in-office people are strict 8 to 5ers and none of us work from home that often - just the random voluntary thing when something is interesting. The remote workers work more hours to be certain. Most voluntarily with some of the tech people being roped in on weekends. The core in-office engineers have spent years insisting on strong work-life balance that sadly has not propagated to other teams as much.
LtWorf 4y ago
Maybe in that case but not necessarily. It might just be their home isn't so nice. Ages before covid I worked at a company that had an office but was mostly remote. There was a guy who was going to the office because his wife was unemployed and they lived next to his mother in law, so he wanted some calm. I'd go because the heating at home sucked so on cold days it was better to be in the office :D

wpietri 4y ago

I'm on an all-remote team right now and I totally miss the level of ambient information I used to have when working with a collocated team in a good environment. On the other hand, a lot of collocated teams, especially at larger companies, have bad enough environments that they're essentially remote workers as far as communication goes. I've visited plenty of teams in open-office environments where all the coders are packed in, hunched over wearing headphones all day, while random people blather loudly nearby about things unrelated to the coding, and key people for their project are scattered across the building. Or farther. If I could have a properly collocated team with dedicated space and the correct layout for collaboration, I'd love that. But I'd still prefer all-remote over the average BigCo setup, where space is set up for the convenience of managers and office planners, not the actual work.

throwaway2037 4y ago
Hi. Great post. Thank you to raise the important topic of relevant ambient information. If you are pure tech writing new features for sales, you might want to sit right next to them. (Listen to how they use my software / interesting business problems.) However, if you are working on credit card payment settlement, you do not give a sh-t about sales team golf scores / "amazing" drinking stories. It is a bother / nuisance. But maybe sitting next to the account team makes good sense!
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely! Relevance makes the difference between information and noise. Relevant information is hugely powerful. But noisy environments just make for bad output.
throwaway2037 4y ago
You wrote: "ambient information" This is a brilliant term. I never heard it before this post. (Thank you!) My whole career is working next to traders and sales at global investment banks. Everytime I hear someone say: "Sales & traders can all work from home / [low cost] country X,Y,Z", I cringe. They fundamentally do not understand "ambient information".

Terretta 4y ago

Pretty strong chance the “noticers” are on-prem, not remote, and may be (literally) prejudiced.* Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture. Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. … - Excalidraw+ - Microsoft Whiteboard - Samsung Flip2 - Microsoft Surface Hub … and (b) experimenting with elevated telepresence beyond just the green/yellow/red dot: - https://www.remotion.com/ You have to be radical about this: “If it didn’t happen in [remote-first tool], it didn’t happen.” This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?” The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira. In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands. > I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success * There it is.

chrisfosterelli 4y ago

Whenever I see this sort of comment I feel bad for the remote workers because it's always an indicator that the company doesn't properly involve or support their remote workforce. If the in-person members are vastly more productive, it's because the team has processes and culture that makes it harder for the remote employees to be productive.

thehappypm 4y ago
Bingo, but it’s much more that hybrid is REALLY hard to get right. The remote employees are always at a disadvantage.. dealing with this now at my new job, I’m not remote, but my local office is not where most of my specific teammates are. “Top talent” getting diluted by remote-ness may be not worth it. Hiring local to work in-person may be better if the less talented team can really communicate and get shit done.
- chrisfosterelli 4y ago
  Yeah I agree. Hybrid is the hardest version of remote work to do right and unfortunately the one more frequently chosen by orgs that don't want to properly invest in remote but don't want to demand in person, so it's a double whammy. I do think it's a false dichotomy though to compare "top talent diluted by remote-ness" with "less talented in-person team that can communicate well". I agree with that direct comparison, but it's not the only option. Remote can be done well. With proper investment in remote, a team can have "top talent that can communicate well" instead of picking one of two bad options.

barbazoo 4y ago

I've seen this too in an organization that that didn't put much thought into the remote side of things. How to enable the remote folks to _be_ productive and how to facilitate communication. I felt it was obvious for onsite folks to look more productive when meetings were mainly in person and decisions were made synchronously.

jvanderbot 4y ago

My team is about 40% remote. About 25% nonlocal remote. If I had to pick my top 5 performers, two would be remote non local, one would be remote local. And two would be onprem. Seniority, past experience, action-orientation, and conscientiousness are the determoning factors it seems.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

I can see the difference between remote and in office being passion. I like remote because I don’t want to be all in on work. I don’t care enough about my company to even write up an expensive bug I noticed. I just let it waste my org’s money. I can see those who actually give a shit being more likely to go into the office. I don’t think your remote workers would be more productive in office. I wouldn’t be. I just stare dead between the eyes in the same meetings I just nap during when I am remote. Rather, highly productive and engaged people are just less likely to want remote.

juve1996 4y ago

> by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. These are very specific numbers - how do you measure this?

origin_path 4y ago
Their post says this already. It's metrics from their project management system i.e. tickets.
- juve1996 4y ago
  So really a nothing statement - we have no idea how this system works or what "tickets" actually means.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking that. Once people know how the system works, people will game the system. In my experience, there are some people who want to manipulate everything in their favor and against the rest and you cannot really do that (‘networking’ with your manager etc) from home, so they invariably go to the office. So metrics from pm systems are suspect: they are skewed often to people who figured out how to make the stats look good for them. I have seen it too many times. The last big client I had, had a system which gave a combined score analysis based on hours worked, tasks done, github commits, LoC (yep) and some other stuff. It was trivial to make yourself look 10x better than someone who didn't know how it worked or who didn't care or who was just honest.

bbarn 4y ago

I am convinced that in office software teams produce more and better code overall than remote ones do. I am remote now and go to my office about a week every two months, and those weeks tend to be ones I can rally the team to get big initiatives done. I put in the same effort when I'm remote but it just doesn't work out the same. You can blame tooling, you can blame the company not being remote-first or remote-forward or whatever, but I honestly believe the reason there are so many champions for remote work is simply because people want to do it and it's easier or more comfortable for them.

tsm 4y ago
Counterpoint: pre-Covid I had an in-office job, and I would specifically request a WFH day if I had an especially meaty problem to write. The office was full of distractions, whereas at home I could focus in on writing code without background noise. Several of my coworkers followed the same pattern.
- bbarn 4y ago
  That's more of a respect for your coworkers thing than a remote vs. office thing though? Headphones on meant leave me alone in every shop I've been to. I also, personally, rarely have extended periods of just coding. The value I add is almost exclusively helping other people work through problems at this stage in my career. "Distractions" are "the job" for many of us.
welshwelsh 4y ago
For in-office work to come back, employers need to stop tracking time. Most office workers work 2-3 hours a day max. The 8 hour workday is is a relic from factory work. If I was to go back to the office, this is what my day would look like: * Show up at the office at 10:30, just in time for the meeting * Put in a couple hours of solid work, finishing whatever story I planned to complete today * Go home at 1:30 to smoke weed and play videogames That's what I do now, except I don't have to commute. What's going to change to make office work more appealing?
- 4y ago

davemp 4y ago

> we also get the most important projects and are paid the most Seems like this would drastically affect motivation and therefore output. Sounds your company may have a self fulfilling prophecy about remote work being less productive.

throwaway2037 4y ago

Holy sh-t. This is exactly my experience during COVID-19 crisis. Will it pay in 5 years when WFH is the normal? I don't know.

LtWorf 4y ago

If they wanted to have success they'd be trying their best to play rock in a stadium, not settle for working in your company :D

raydev 4y ago

> Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially. Working remote requires a number of changes, and it may even require training that your company isn't providing, because as you clearly have guessed, in-person interaction is more natural. But how this looks to me, is that your company is doing a great disservice to the remote workers by not provided them with the tools and comms to be fully productive. You are letting them sort it out for themselves when they may not know how to, which is... bad. Claiming you're doing better because "monkey brains" is just silly. Many things take practice, including clear communication over video and text.

ren_engineer 4y ago

there are now numerous unicorn startups and public companies that have been fully remote from day 1. All the most important open source projects have been developed by remote contributors. 95% of cases where I see people complaining about remote work is because the company basically changed nothing about how they operate day to day when Covid started, they are a normal company trying to work remotely. Obviously that is going to fail miserably. Hybrid model is the worst of both worlds

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gilbetron 4y ago

My mileage does vary - in my experience, I often wonder what non-remote people are even doing. Remote is blowing them out of the water. I think on-prem workers tend to chit chat more, go to lunch, come in a bit late, leave a bit early, do happy hours, and generally socialize a lot more (not to mention commutes!). I see largely the opposite as you, with remote workers doing the bulk of the work. On prem might get the bulk of the credit though - politics are ... evolving with remote workers. But your experience doesn't match mine at all.