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Seeing lots of people on teams very vocal about not wanting to work with remote people either and saying no to anyone that has the inkling of it. Something the

Seeing lots of people on teams very vocal about not wanting to work with remote people either and saying no to anyone that has the inkling of it. Something the remote crowd might not realize is happening.

mike_d 4y ago
Sounds like a pretty toxic environment. Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office. Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office. True, but it's possible that a company had nearly 100% co-located teams prior to COVID.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The reality with a lot of teams at many large companies is that meetings of any size will involve people in different offices/fully remote/traveling/etc. Even if I and others nominally assigned to my local office all came in, I'm not sure I'd know a single person on a given day.
  - oregano 4y ago
    I work at a large company based in Seattle and this is exactly my experience. I go into the office maybe once every few weeks and maybe talk to one or two people from my org. We do coordinate to get together in the office every couple months which is kind of fun but not worth doing on a weekly basis as our team is already distributed across the country and world.
- jayd16 4y ago
  Its toxic to not want to be on zoom or have to book a meeting room to talk? >no different than working with someone in another office Given the choice, they'd likely prefer someone local in this case as well.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I might have used a different word than toxic. But, in general, it's unrealistic for many teams at many larger companies to expect everyone to be local and physically available for a random meeting. On my team people are scattered all over the US and at least one is in Europe. And that's not at all unusual.
    - jayd16 4y ago
      Well ok, but its also quite realistic for many teams and for many careers its the only option. Why are we pretending that in person work isn't still the norm for most people? I'm not sure I understand what point you're making, exactly.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    > Its toxic to not want to be on zoom or have to book a meeting room to talk? Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior. How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  > Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance. Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.
KerrAvon 4y ago
I've seen those posts on HN. Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing. And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Think it's more likely the interesting work is gonna fall on the in office teams rather than the remote inclusive teams. One has free form ideation and camaraderie the other is people sitting in silos in a chatroom
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  As one of these people, that is explicitly why I don't want to work remotely. I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to. But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    The standard is 200 sqft of office space per employee (this factors in conference rooms, common space, bathrooms, etc). That means best case, you are looking at approximately 300 people per football field of office space. Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings. None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.
none_to_remain 4y ago
For real - I'm planning to switch jobs late 2023 and "no remote" is going to be an important criterion. Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)
throw827474737 4y ago
Sounds like a threat, and that something is what? Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides? For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Interesting from a dev perspective - every dev I've spoken to or read about is very against office working, and usually very against meetings (in-person or remote). And the studies have shown that devs are more productive when left alone, and especially when working from home and not put in an open-plan office where we're constantly interrupted. If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored. And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.
nonameiguess 4y ago
This seems a little ridiculous, probably a backlash against shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic, from companies and teams that didn't handle it well. Putting aside that my current company is 100% distributed, doesn't have offices, and I'm the only one in the company that lives in my city, so they can't ask us back, I haven't had a job since I managed a bar nearly 20 years ago that didn't involve remote teams. Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow. Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?
- ghaff 4y ago
  >shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.
gedy 4y ago
Then pay up so I can afford to live by office. If not, this important collaboration can just suffer a little with remote comms.

mike_d 4y ago

Sounds like a pretty toxic environment. Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office. Consider the pre-pandemic prevalence of "phone booths" and one person conference rooms, so you can be in a meeting as the only local attendee. As far as the other location is considered, you are remote just with access to a bigger coffee maker.

alistairSH 4y ago
Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office. True, but it's possible that a company had nearly 100% co-located teams prior to COVID.
ghaff 4y ago
The reality with a lot of teams at many large companies is that meetings of any size will involve people in different offices/fully remote/traveling/etc. Even if I and others nominally assigned to my local office all came in, I'm not sure I'd know a single person on a given day.
- oregano 4y ago
  I work at a large company based in Seattle and this is exactly my experience. I go into the office maybe once every few weeks and maybe talk to one or two people from my org. We do coordinate to get together in the office every couple months which is kind of fun but not worth doing on a weekly basis as our team is already distributed across the country and world.
jayd16 4y ago
Its toxic to not want to be on zoom or have to book a meeting room to talk? >no different than working with someone in another office Given the choice, they'd likely prefer someone local in this case as well.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I might have used a different word than toxic. But, in general, it's unrealistic for many teams at many larger companies to expect everyone to be local and physically available for a random meeting. On my team people are scattered all over the US and at least one is in Europe. And that's not at all unusual.
  - jayd16 4y ago
    Well ok, but its also quite realistic for many teams and for many careers its the only option. Why are we pretending that in person work isn't still the norm for most people? I'm not sure I understand what point you're making, exactly.
- mike_d 4y ago
  > Its toxic to not want to be on zoom or have to book a meeting room to talk? Refusing to work with people because of their office situation is toxic behavior. How would the PM who is in remission from cancer or the engineer with a disabled child supposed to feel when someone says that they prefer to not work with them because they need to stay home?
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
> Working with remote employees is no different than working with someone in another office This is just a straight up lie, the speed of communication is literally 50% in real life by my reckoning. The huge vocal delay pauses, the having to focus more to get information out of low bandwidth sound, lack of body language (camera body language doesn't translate the same as in person). That's before we get to "ummmmmm.... errrr..." "Sorry can you repeat that" "oh sorry no you go first" "Oh can you mute your mic please I can hear myself" and videocall bandwidth only allowing 1 person to talk at once with a 2 second barrier either side of each thought from the sound delay and mute dance. Literally video calls are so broken that you can't do creative discussions in them, if the tech was magnitudes better then maybe but these small delays and lack of presence make it a objectively different beast to working in the same space.

KerrAvon 4y ago

I've seen those posts on HN. Something the in-person crowd might want to consider is that a lot of interesting roles are going to involve lots of work with people who aren't in the room with you no matter whether you're in office or WFH. If you go in being highly vocal about no remote work, you may not be considered for roles that aren't fully remote but do involve a lot of videoconferencing. And maybe that's OK with you, but do think about it.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Think it's more likely the interesting work is gonna fall on the in office teams rather than the remote inclusive teams. One has free form ideation and camaraderie the other is people sitting in silos in a chatroom
throwaway22032 4y ago
As one of these people, that is explicitly why I don't want to work remotely. I don't want to spend my life doing Zoom calls. A quick telephone audio call for 5 minutes along the lines of "hey, are you nearly at the store" - sure. A call to avoid literally flying 5000 miles or something - if we have to. But in general, for actual communication I want to be in the room with someone, and I think that a combination of colocating people and spending an hour or whatever on travel for clients is normally worth it for that. Hybrid office environments are an absolute non starter for me for that reason.
- mike_d 4y ago
  The standard is 200 sqft of office space per employee (this factors in conference rooms, common space, bathrooms, etc). That means best case, you are looking at approximately 300 people per football field of office space. Colocating functional teams together, and by extension the teams they need to work with, is a great idea but the math just doesn't work out for a company of more than a few hundred employees. At the minimum you are still traveling to other buildings on the same campus to have meetings. None of us want to spend our life on Zoom. But I'll take a few hours a day of calls to get back 2 hours a day in traffic that I can spend having coffee with my wife and petting my dogs.

none_to_remain 4y ago

For real - I'm planning to switch jobs late 2023 and "no remote" is going to be an important criterion. Not ironclad, a place could be implementing it decently, but they'd have to do some convincing. (Being remote pre-pandemic would help.)

throw827474737 4y ago

Sounds like a threat, and that something is what? Also seeing enough whole companies buing fully into remote, and more and more remote teams happily working together.. and tbh there sure are jobs/people for which this doesn't work out - but then good that there is more for both sides? For those it works it is not just a lot of saved time, the flexibility to hire anyone anywhere (a lot of people are not ready to move their whole life for a new work) but also just great for environmental impact, imo.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Interesting from a dev perspective - every dev I've spoken to or read about is very against office working, and usually very against meetings (in-person or remote). And the studies have shown that devs are more productive when left alone, and especially when working from home and not put in an open-plan office where we're constantly interrupted. If this is not shared with the non-engineering staff, then we'll end up with (even more of) a two-stream staffing problem - non-engineers will be social at work hanging out together, engineers will be productive at work being ignored. And the implied threat of "you're less employable if you want to work remotely" is utterly pointless when applied to engineers. We're employable based on productivity not sociability. Thus it has always been.

nonameiguess 4y ago

This seems a little ridiculous, probably a backlash against shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic, from companies and teams that didn't handle it well. Putting aside that my current company is 100% distributed, doesn't have offices, and I'm the only one in the company that lives in my city, so they can't ask us back, I haven't had a job since I managed a bar nearly 20 years ago that didn't involve remote teams. Even my last fully-classified job, where had to be in office because we could only work from a SCIF, we still had SCIFs in Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and PA and that worked fine. Maybe because we weren't Scrum and there were only 2-3 meetings a week everyone had to go to? Theoretically, software development should be a job that is possible to do in a mostly asynchronous, largely work alone manner. Linux, GNU, and other gigantic open source projects seem to have gotten along fine for decades without needing offices. Even when I was last in the Army working in the 1st CAV HQ at Fort Hood, we had brigade HQs in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, and South Korea and that worked fine. And, of course, when I was at Platoon/Company level, I was a tank commander. Obviously, during maneuvers, you can only communicate with the other tank crews via radio. We managed somehow. Unless you're sitting within speaking range of every person you work with, you're surely sending them messages via some chat platform or e-mail anyway, aren't you?

ghaff 4y ago
>shittily-handled hasty retreats to full-remote for the pandemic That's more than a bit unfair. From what I've seen a lot of companies that were completely unprepared to switch to remote, handled it a lot better than they thought they could.

gedy 4y ago

Then pay up so I can afford to live by office. If not, this important collaboration can just suffer a little with remote comms.