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Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says

• Clubber 3y ago
  At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and article by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up. I'll suspect most articles before this point were too.
  • izacus 3y ago
    Or maybe you just refuse to accept that certain ways of working have downsides because you have a personal vested interest to ignore the facts?
    • Clubber 3y ago
      Not for me they don't. Most of our team is remote and it's great for retention. Nothing makes people want to jump ship more than a shitty office culture you have to experience in person every day. Guess what, most office cultures are shitty, no matter how many ping pong tables you put in there. What's my personal vested interest do you suppose?
      • gumballindie 3y ago
        Agreed, same here. It appears that media workers are pushing hard against tech people - be it remote work perks or getting replaced by ai and so on.
      • izacus 3y ago
        The fact that you think "most office cultures are shitty" and have thus decided to dismiss everything that might mention any kind of downsides of WFH as a conspiracy. That's like... the definition of ignoring facts over personal bias.
        • Clubber 3y ago
          Do you think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a group of wealthy commercial real estate owners would get articles published and studies paid for, particularly when they face significant financial harm due to people wanting to work from home? Who do you think paid for that study? It's paywalls so I don't know. I doubt it was a union. Do you think it's strange that we've had a deluge of negative articles about working from home and almost no positive ones? Does this seem statistically normal to you? Serious questions to think about.
          • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
            It doesn't have to be either/or. Commercial real estate could have a vested interest, and there could be real downsides with many companies' implementation of work from home. At that point, if the problems are real, dismissing the article, not because of who wrote it, but because of who you suspect wrote it, seems rather narrow-minded.
            • Clubber 3y ago
              I can't read it because it's paywalled, but can you tell me the difference between this article and all the other articles we've been spammed with about how WFH is somehow bad? >Commercial real estate could have a vested interest, and there could be real downsides with many companies' implementation of work from home. You're also moving the goalposts I think. I just bet that both the article and the study were funded by said interests. Studies don't fund themselves and people who do funded studies have incentive to find the results that they are paid to find, or at the very least, omit any evidence to the contrary.
              • amrocha 3y ago
                Seems weird to admit you haven't read the article and are just commenting on the headline and speculating, while at the same time asking another user to summarize it for you and compare it to other articles that you also likely haven't read. The burden of being dismissively argumentative is so low, and engaging constructively takes so much time, that discussions become dominated by comments like yours and eventually everyone who wants to engage constructively leaves.
    • MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      I find this to be an ironic response to "real estate has vested interest in maintaining real estate value at the expense of worker quality of life"
      • dnissley 3y ago
        Sure they do, but unless you have some evidence this is the case it is just conspiratorial thinking. There's a reason we joke around about saying something is being pushed by "big x" where x = some shadowy group with a vested interest in y -- because it's silly to imagine and almost certainly not the case in most situations.
    • tkiolp4 3y ago
      But one cannot just consider the benefits of office work in isolation. If working remotely makes me see my family and friends more hours per week (e.g., having breakfast and lunch with my partner/kids) then to the hell that x% of productivity I could theoretically gain by working from the office.
  • dboreham 3y ago
    Likely. Everything you read is in support of someone's business model.
• ramraj07 3y ago
  I am totally for remote work but this is absolutely a real problem, and I see my junior engineers suffer tremendously from it. One asked me what made me so successful at my job, and there were many factors but being in the office really did help me. Success here doesn’t just mean solving chunks of problems from jira tickets but creating entirely new products and solutions which have then gone on to become important parts of the organizations offerings. This was only possible because of my initial years where I was constantly absorbing and brainstorming with folks in the office on a daily basis. We really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment. One of the ideas I’m thinking about is to hire only within a metropolitan area, but keep remote. Every month we just organize a 3 day retreat where everyone’s expected to attend it, which could be in a resort or a hotel even. This might satisfy the interaction and brainstorming itch while still keeping everyone happy with their remote arrangements.
  • jon-wood 3y ago
    Very much agreed on this. One of the key things in me being where I am now is spending a few years working for an ISP staffed by technology nerds in my early 20s, where I'd spend all day surrounded by people who knew what they were doing, and then spend several evenings a week in the pub with the same people. Its possible to get the same experience remotely - I got started in the industry via open source work, where mailing lists had a similar atmosphere, but it is so much easier if you can just bounce ideas around. I love the idea of regular 3 day retreats, but being in my late 30s with a child now doing them anywhere near that regularly is a non-starter for me. Maybe quarterly, but even then you're going to have to really sell it for me to commit to all of them.
    • ramraj07 3y ago
      It’s 3 days a month though, and to clarify my thoughts are that you still go back home every day. How would that be a problem?
      • alistairSH 3y ago
        I guess it depends where the retreat is held. And how long the commute is to get there. Taking my house as an example - I'm ~1 hour from the city center (assuming no major delays). If the retreat ended up downtown, I'd hate that. If it was on the far side of the city, I'd want to stay overnight. But, if the retreat was at the corporate office, I'd love it - as that's one mile down the road and I can walk.
• jtc331 3y ago
  https://archive.is/ezB6B https://archive.is/ezB6B
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Dramatic reduction in networking opportunities does have negative impacts. Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore. Then it very frequently won't happen anymore. Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results. When I lead a team I try to minimize the number of things that require unmonitored "discipline" to do right, and try to set things up so as many things as possible so they "happen automatically" or "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker." That's because a most people are lazy and communicating every detail of how to do things right is hard, so things tend to decay to some long/medium-term half-ass but short-term "easier" level.
    • cratermoon 3y ago
      > "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker." This is something that many places, including my current consulting placement, will consider a bad thing and actively work to do the opposite. The attitude at these places is that "blowing up" is a Bad Thing, and should never happen. This causes everyone to suppress useful signals of impending problems that can be mitigated in advance. What's left is things that do "blow up" because of neglect, and are truly Bad, so it's a self-reinforcing policy. These organizations accept the decay (apt word, btw) and really Bad Things happening too frequently over diligence and preventing Bad Things from happening in the first place.
    • ElevenLathe 3y ago
      > Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results. The problem is that they have to be intentional about it no mater what, either by making the remote networking happen or by intentionally having a policy where most people work in the office most of the time (Friday-only WFH or some similar arrangement). Nobody gets it for free anymore because non-remote office culture is no longer the default.
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  As a business owner it’s just so much more economical to hire remote. No office expense, the pool of talent is so much larger, no relocation expenses, people are happier with the flexible schedules. Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner. I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well). It’s way easier to figure out new mechanisms of working to mentor and grow junior employees in a remote environment than it is to fight economics. The economics are just superior and you can’t fight that.
  • lnsru 3y ago
    You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics.
    • tivert 3y ago
      > You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics. There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need to justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians, Eastern Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise of remote work, we should hopefully see those inflated remote salaries settle to the international norm.
      • Tade0 3y ago
        As an Eastern European: it went largely the other way and I'm happy that it did. I mean, I don't make American money - just 50-70% of that, but I also don't have American expenses - especially not on the level seen in SV.
• ghotli 3y ago
  Hm. I started working remotely at age 24 years back. This article just doesn't reflect my experiences whatsoever. One data point doesn't mean I'm right, just that this article seems written from an odd perspective from my perspective.
  • sneed_chucker 3y ago
    Wow, 24 years. What was it like in the early days, say 1999-2005?
    • Dragonai 3y ago
      I believe the parent commenter meant it as "I started working remotely at age 24, [some] years back" :)
• Brendinooo 3y ago
  I've been working remotely for about 9 years now, and have progressed from "designer who knows jQuery" to senior frontend dev. This criticism is true but not insurmountable. Working remotely requires more active communication and explicit processes to make sure you're filling the deficits, but this can be done. Do code reviews on your merge requests, talk on Slack, do a Live Share in VSCode. And make the most of your in-person visits: I've had people tell me that I seem to know more people in the company then some of the people who are in the office regularly because I make it a point to make my rounds, introduce myself, and talk to people when I'm there.
• jtc331 3y ago
  Even though I’ve personally taken the trade off of remote work, it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me that there are also massive benefits to being in-person because collaboration, chance conversations, and feedback are more likely to happen naturally and because communication bandwidth is far higher face to face. The trade-offs are largely around whether those things are desirable. Sometimes they aren’t. But also sometimes they are. And I’ve never understood why there seems to be such a dogmatic insistences that remote is better on all fronts and there can be no acknowledged benefits to in-office work.
  • manicennui 3y ago
    The reason you see so many of us being so insistent is because most of us work at highly dysfunctional companies with incredibly boring and annoying people and don't want to spend 1-3 hours per day commuting to the office and/or spending more on staying alive so we can be closer to the office. I've been remote since the start of the pandemic and will never go back. I'm the happiest I've been in my adult life (mid 40s) in large part because I'm able to get more sleep, don't have to deal with the noise and density of the city, and don't have to deal with commuting. My home office is better than any office environment I have ever had. I put less than 5k miles on my car in the last year. I eat far better and spend less money on eating out. I have also received great raises every year since the pandemic started (and before) and have been promoted (for the second time since the pandemic started) to what is probably equivalent to an L8 at Google (I don't work for a FAANG company). Some of us are flourishing in this new work environment, and we are being tired of being told that we'd be better off if only we would spend an hour commuting to hear Fred's mildly racist/misogynistic jokes and attend useless meetings in person instead of passively listening to video calls while we get actual work done.
    • jtc331 3y ago
      Notably I didn’t disagree with any of that, and, in fact, take pains to very carefully address only that there are tradeoffs—that is that there legitimate arguments to be made both ways particularly depending on the person. I don’t object to an individual saying “I’m far better off this way”; it’s often true. But it’s also the case that I’ve observed others who are far less productive working from home. And we should be intellectually honest enough to recognize both realities.
• mrsuprawsm 3y ago
  This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their currently declining investments.
  • diego_moita 3y ago
    I've been working remotely for 4 years and can assure you: no it isn't FUD. It is a real issue that can and should be addressed. And the good news is that CI/CD, Slack, Dischord and Meetup make the solutions possible. All you need is management understanding and buy in. There are a lot of organizations that try remote with the same culture/mindset of in office. This is an error. Communication and iteration on remote work must be explicit, formalized and enforced.
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    Ed Zitron's phrase for this sort of article is "boss erotica". https://ez.substack.com/p/techs-elite-hates-labor https://ez.substack.com/p/techs-elite-hates-labor
  • paulcole 3y ago
    I mean many people have a vested interest in working from home as well and push the narrative of middle manager = bad, office = bad as well. It's not that either narrative is right or wrong, they're just different. WFH isn't the unequivocal One True Way. It's a way.
  • matwood 3y ago
    I'm a huge proponent of WFH, but I do know where there are challenges. New employee onboarding is challenging. It can be done, but it has to be very deliberate. Any large team moves/merges are harder. Again, it can be done but there has to be a lot of deliberate work. Interpersonal relationships are important for working. They are the lubricant that helps prevent communication friction. It used to be those relationships happened naturally in the office, but now they have to be deliberately nurtured. And that's part of WFH, not something ignore.
    • 3y ago
• Beaver117 3y ago
  Why to we "really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment"? It simply doesn't exist. Remote work, while great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings, should only be reserved for senior people
  • throwaway173738 3y ago
    My juniors would like to have a word with you about why you think they’re not paying attention during my meetings.
    • nprateem 3y ago
      And I know some seniors who'd like a word about why you think they aren't playing computer games during meetings
  • pxc 3y ago
    > Remote work [is] great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings J/w: how large are these meetings where you notice that level of disengagement? How long are they?
  • bbbobbb 3y ago
    If they're able to play video games and not pay attention during the meeting then it's a waste of their time to be there in the first place. Stop wasting people's time with your meetings.
  • 49erfangoniners 3y ago
    Video games during meetings should be a best practice
• diego_moita 3y ago
  This is big, serious and meaningful. It is tangent to the main problem on making remote work to properly work: formalize communication and iteration. Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and deliberated effort to stimulate communication. Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn't just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of office work. My suggestions: * rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a development methodology with full support on CI/CD techniques, issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc. * people should be available on Slack/Dischord on pre defined times. You know the "my doors are open", "cubicles are meant to stimulate cooperation" slogans? In remote work these informal channels must be explicit * There should be overlapping timezones in the team. * stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people, where people should talk not only about work but also personal subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and personal trust.
• xwdv 3y ago
  If you want to stand out, the traditional way of just showing up to an office isn’t really enough. Write company blog posts, hold demos of new tech, have 1 on 1 talks regularly. You have to think like a content creator.
  • flyingfences 3y ago
    No, thanks; that's not my job. I'm hired as an engineer, not as a rat-race "content creator".
    • xwdv 3y ago
      Office small talk and interaction is often a form of content creation. Office theater.
      • armatav 3y ago
        I was going to disagree and be like “if you’re an engineer your only job is engineering” but there’s some truth in what you’re saying. You’ve gotta be charismatic even if you are an engineer.
        • xwdv 3y ago
          Most people think I’m wrong before realizing I’m right.
          • armatav 3y ago
            Nevermind
• bart_spoon 3y ago
  As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who 1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee 2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1) 3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office/remote. If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor/TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.
  • croutonwagon 3y ago
    >If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education. As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing". I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses. Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.
• TheGigaChad 3y ago
  [dead]
• Eumenes 3y ago
  I don't even know what half the people do at my company. Productivity has no doubt fallen to historic lows. I def feel like 5% of the people are doing 75% of the work. I agree with the article that junior employees are not setup to succeed in this environment which will ultimately result in companies hiring less junior people (fine with me, tired of babysitting).
  • tkiolp4 3y ago
    Honest question: why do you care? Don’t you prefer to see your family and friends more than working 8h+commute time? If you think you are working and others are not, why does that bother you? You are getting paid anyway. If you are forced to do extra hours because there are people who don’t do their job, then just say No (if you cannot do that, then you probably want to change of company anyway… they will bite you in some way or another). If any, remote work has taught me something: I care way less about the companies I work for. I’m a mercenary, I do my job to the best of my knowledge 9-5 and I couldn’t care less what the company does with my work (as long as it’s legal and ethical).
    • snapcaster 3y ago
      I agree with you, thanks for the term "mercenary". Was trying to discuss my (different) perspective similar to this with my girlfriend and couldn't find this word
    • Eumenes 3y ago
      How would you feel if this was not a cushy white collar tech job but a blue collar job involving physical labor? Say people are slacking, not working hard, generally being lazy, while a small group does the majority of the work? Would it be acceptable to care then? I don't see how its any different. Remote work has given the underperformers somewhere to hide, and quite frankly, its not going to help them in the long term.
• ryzvonusef 3y ago
  Would working totally remote, but paying for quarterly tickets and accommodation to gather all staff (from all over the world) for a week to meet and brainstorm, be cheaper than hiring locally and renting? I know someone who worked for a danish company, they has a similar scheme but every six months... worked really well for the most part. The company would hold retreats all over Europe, and since it combined both business and employee perks (stay at a nice resort), worked like a charm for them. ____ But it also highlighted an interesting issue, that might act as a counterpoint for the whole thing. The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like me... and visa for us is a really big headache. Not a big deal for an EU company to announce only a week or two before where the retreat would be held this time, and most of their workforce, who all had relatively strong passports, also didn't face major issues. But the earliest he himself could get any form of schengen visa was like 3 months after the retreat, so too late for the first one and too early for the second one, whenever and wherever that would be decided. I think it worked out for him after sometime, but remote work is not all sunshine and roses.
  • detaro 3y ago
    Even if you are in the EU, 1-2 weeks notice for something like that is bonkers. And as soon as company has more than a handful of employees, this is something you want to have booked with hotel and such earlier anyways. From what I've seen in other companies, time and location of such things gets announced months in advance.
    • ryzvonusef 3y ago
      Apologies if I am remembering the anecdote incorrectly, it might have been more than two weeks. (We were in a chat group and he was bemoaning his visa headaches, I forget the exact mechanics of his company policy, since that wasn't the crux of the issue) The point was, however earlier they had given their employees the notice, his visa was going to arrive much later than that. Visa for us is extremely difficult, someone on twitter shared a screenshot, the Canadian website told to expect a wait of "580 days" or something absurd like that. So you can hire remote workers cheaply from other countries (and no employment visa headaches), but if you expect to call them for a quick visit, plan absurdly early.
• moate 3y ago
  Management: You don't want to work remotely Employees: Yes we do Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for us? Employees: We don't care Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for you, sorta, in some minor aspects? Some people want to work remotely, other people don't, and management/corpos HATE it because they invested in massive office leases/are listening to their rich investor friends who have money tied in urban office real estate. I'm sick of these propaganda pieces, you're not going to convince the people who want something that they don't want it this way. IDGAF how much my "career" will suffer, I like spending my day hugging my wife and gardening when I don't have work on my desk. FOH.
  • anticensor 3y ago
    Management also wants to maximise control over their employees, which is easy to lose in a remote environment.
  • crhulls 3y ago
    I think your thesis about management wanting in-office is accurate, but your rationale for why seems misguided. I'm the CEO of a 500 person company and our lease cost is negligible relative to everything else, and being fully remote means lots of travel and expensive all-hands get togethers which almost fully negate any office savings. The overlap between VCs and public market investors and "rich investor friends who have money tied to urban office real estate" is non-existent from a pressure and influence standpoint.
    • moate 3y ago
      Management: We just want everyone to be able to meet and share ideas and be in a simple easy to monetize…monitor space. It’s about team work! Employees: we want to work remotely and don’t care about your fucking problems or rational so just stop trying to convince us
  • tkiolp4 3y ago
    One has to distinguish between management and upper management. I have met plenty of middle managers (e.g., Engineer managers) who love working from home, but have to sell the “go back to the office “ idea because it’s coming from upper management.
• dogman144 3y ago
  Relationships and quick chat get built and done on Slack. My professional network is a web of in-work, Signal chats, professional Slacks/Discords. I have a massively largely and more substantive professional information network that benefits me and my employer than I do if I kept all the focus in the office and on what Mike my manager fed me during hallway interactions. Proactivity to the above is worth hiring for, but works fine if you do. This all comes down to “since I don’t want to DM someone and set up zoom calls, and travel to the office once a week a quarter, let’s make everyone start commuting in.” This article describes people who don’t know how to do that well or want to leverage alternative routes to achieve. Or, using number of GitHub comments as a measure for good feedback is about as logical as number of slack comments per day. Engineers know these metrics are tracked for performance and compensation.
• lostcolony 3y ago
  From the article - "but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code)" Sooooo...literally just measuring how many comments are being added to the code? That feels like both a really poor measurement for feedback, and also really easily addressable (heck, if you really want that in person feel, make it so PRs are done synchronously; someone hops onto a zoom and the writer presents their code, talking through the changes).
• DrBazza 3y ago
  There's a couple of reasons I can think of: "young professionals" are more likely to be flat sharing or living somewhere that's sub-optimal for remote work, and the other is access to grey-beards like myself for questions about the system and so on. 50 yr old me versus 25 yr old me: flat vs house with office, knew my way around Solaris and Windows, but not much experience in large systems or databases and so on. And the IT world is so much bigger than 90s. Back then, it was Solaris or NT4. Oracle and Sybase. VB and C++.
• revlolz 3y ago
  Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I'm part of the demographic they claim and it couldn't be further from the truth for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a shitty team and that's hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment, hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote. They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don't need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects. Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I don't know.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • TeeMassive 3y ago
    > Propaganda piece from economists. I was under the same impression. The whole article is full of "but what about". If you follow the money this is not surprising, the managers, who also happen to own real estate in New York / California, want their workers occupying their expansive office space and living near it so the real estate bubble doesn't pop right now. So they had the NYT write an article about it.
    • mr_00ff00 3y ago
      It’s a bit bad practice to assume all research that promotes an opinion you agree with is truth, but anything against what you like must be propaganda.
      • cratermoon 3y ago
        It's not just the part about promoting an opinion that make it propaganda, it's the part about promoting an opinion that a. there is a problem at all, and b. advocating for a particular solution to the problem as defined. A huge part of propaganda is about setting the terms of the debate. Ideally, as George Orwell wisely pointed out, a successful propagandist makes certain opinions seem obvious, common-sensical, and even inevitable, while making other ideas all but literally unthinkable. So next time you read an opinion you disagree with, ask, "what would happen if that opinion were the dominant one in society?"
• xchip 3y ago
  Let me guess, and going back to the office is the only solution, isn't it?
  • IMTDb 3y ago
    Creating you own company; hiring junior remotely and having a big success going that proves the article wrong and is another viable option.
• slantedview 3y ago
  The study used as the basis for this article looked at one set of workers at one company. This is hardly worthy of a writeup in a local industry rag, let alone the NYT, but the point of this and similar pieces is to empower owners over workers.
• ldehaan 3y ago
  Dude why do you guys keep reading this trash company's articles? These corporatists are pay to print. They'll print anything you pay them to. Stop reading this garbage. I strongly suggest checking out your weekly media assassination, tune in to the best pod in the universe: No Agenda https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4175796 https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4175796
• rahimnathwani 3y ago
  From the paper: Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020. They studied just one company. I'm guessing that the company doesn't have a remote-first culture, and that things may have improved in the last 2+ years, as companies have gotten more used to both hybrid and remote-only.
  • typicalrunt 3y ago
    And their timeframe is pre-COVID and the worst possible time during COVID, when people were just trying to figure out how to work and live and not catch some deadly virus. 2020 was a hectic time and such an abnormality that I wouldn't base any long-term human behaviour on it.
  • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    Makes the entire article a glorified anecdote, IMHO.
• desireco42 3y ago
  I can see that they will say anything just to get people to sit in the office, commute downtown or wherever and justify commercial real-estate. Reality is that people are much happier when they can work from home. Not every profession and position can do this and maybe those who need to show up should be paid more tbh. Economical and ecological impact of working from home is huge, positively huge. Companies get to expand without huge fixed costs for example. Articles like this are created to promote world that has been and is not coming back.
• Workaccount2 3y ago
  I always feel that discussing remote work in the context of software dev (basically, discuss it on HN) is so heavily skewed to the point of being meaningless. We're talking about an industry that has a heavy concentration of, for lack of a better word, shut-ins, who don't really like socializing and really excel at work when they are alone and not being bothered. Most of them self-taught to some degree, or entirely. Heavy technical knowledge and strong ability to deal with technical hurdle of remote work. Probably have a bad internet addiction too, and attribute most of their knowledge to it. The nature of the work also heavily lends itself to being remote, and why there were even people in the 90's(!) who were doing remote developer work. But take another field, like say marketing, that has lots of extroverted types and lots of meetings with heavy emphasis on visual things, that no one was doing remote prior to 2020, and suddenly remote work becomes a much more grinding endeavor that can really chew up juniors. These people are not shut-in computer geeks and their work is not a fit for those types by a long shot. As much as they may hate the commute and insist that remote work is fine, the fact of the matter is that the type of work really doesn't lend itself to remote working. TL;DR: These articles about remote work failing aren't really talking about software jobs, and your experience as someone who has worked remote dev work for 15 years isn't really relevant. You work a job that is almost tailor made for remote work.
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Maybe the marketing people can do some market analysis and figure out that trying bully software developers back into the office so that marketing people can have a captive audience for their extroversion isn't a great path forward and instead is creating incredible amounts of resentment and even hostility. Maybe they should go hang out at the local Starbucks and make some real friends instead of trying to impose themselves and their preferences on others. Note that the WFH people don't give a shit if the extroverts with an addiction to endless external validation work in an office, at home, or in a deep sea trench but the converse isn't true with the extrovert trying with all their might to force their preferences on everyone else. You'd think marketers would understand people a bit better and realize that the outcome is going to be that they're going to get blasted each time they try to use their slimy sales tactics to force everyone to conform to their personal preferences.
• tonnydourado 3y ago
  First, there are the cliches: "face to face meetings are better", "spontaneous collaboration", "out of sight, out of mind". Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that? Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I'm a college dropout, I'm not qualified to do any scientific research. But I still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.
• gbrindisi 3y ago
  I feel like this is a management problem that needs to be solved. As the context has changed so should management style.
• rqtwteye 3y ago
  I work remotely and am a big proponent of remote work but onboarding is definitely a huge challenge. Getting young people up to speed is doable if you are using a lot of standard frameworks about which you can find information about on the internet. But it gets really if you need very specialized hardware and software and also use processes that are required by regulation. I work 8n medical devices and I have noticed a lot of our offshore don’t really understand things even after years. It’s probably solvable but you need management that understands this and puts resources into onboarding processes.
• nobody9999 3y ago
  I have a slightly different take about this than other folks. Perhaps it's because I'm older and when I entered the workforce, there were very few jobs that could be remote, and even fewer that actually were. I've worked in-office for most of my career (much of that was as a consultant hired for specific projects, and many clients want to see you working), but pre-pandemic I was full-time remote for more than five years, which was mostly positive, but with a few caveats. One of the biggest caveats was that it was more difficult to build strong teams, as your colleagues were just voices (this is before ubiquitous video meetings) on the phone and text in chat and/or emails. But that isn't limited to work environments either. More and more of our lives are spent online, with less and less human interaction. I suppose that might be a plus for the misanthropes among us, but it seems like that's fracturing our social cohesion (I'm in the US, my experience may not be valid elsewhere). Please note that I am emphatically not prescribing full-time return to the office. Not even close. WFH allowed me to be more productive and not waste 700 hours or so a year sitting on a train commuting. I shudder to think about how much I hated driving to/from client sites as a consultant as that's even worse than riding the train. No, I don't believe that your employer/co-workers are "family" (well, unless they actually are but that's not usually the case in larger organizations), but humans are social creatures and really do need real, physical human interaction (I'm not talking about sex which is important, but irrelevant in this context) to maintain a healthy outlook on other humans and society in general. An outlier (at least I hope it is) being the recent spate of people being shot just for attempting contact (knocking on a stranger's door) with other humans. What makes folks so suspicious and willing to harm their neighbors? I think it's a lack of regular human contact and the constant drumbeat of evil deeds from the news media (how does the old saw go? "If it bleeds, it leads."). And with the ability to get news from anywhere in the world in near real-time, we constantly hear about the worst of us, but rarely about the mundane, pleasant interactions that people have every day. Perhaps I'm way off base with this take, but it seems to me that fostering human interaction with physical proximity with one's larger society promotes social cohesion. That's not to say such interactions must be in the workplace, but for many folks (given car/suburban culture), it might the only time they might interact with other humans who aren't family or close friends. Which brings to mind Asimov's dichotomy (as he combined his 'Robot' and 'Foundation' universes), especially in Foundation and Earth[0], where the "Spacers" are so anti-social that they loathe any physical, human interaction whatsoever, whereas the "Settlers" were comfortable being around other humans. I'm not saying that this is what's happening, just that there are some interesting parallels. I don't pretend to have all (or even some/any) the answers, but interacting with actual human beings usually enhances my view of humanity/society/local community, while online interactions mostly degrade that view.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Earth [1] Please note that I'm not being categorical here. There absolutely are unpleasant/evil/nasty people in the world who should be avoided. But at least in my experience, most humans are honest, decent people just trying to live a decent life. Edit: clarified prose. Fixed typo.
• mercwear 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion based on my personal experience: Remote work is broken and we will slowly see a full return to the office in most cases. Why is it broken? This article points out some of the big reasons but the ones that stand out to me are: Lack of face to face collaboration, Lack of learning via "osmosis", and the biggest one I do not hear a lot about is the complete lack of social skills that I see from people who have worked from home for the past 3+ years. Some people have become totally incapable of dealing with others due to the fact they have been holed up for so long.
  • TheGigaChad 3y ago
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• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  The problem isn't remote work. The problem is tradional in-office management and leadership that don't understand remote isn't just add Slack or add Teams and you're a remote-able team. There's more to it than that. But once again leadership blames the proles for getting it wrong.
• cratermoon 3y ago
  "Hidden Penalty" is less feedback. But mostly the kind of feedback allistic people worry about. That not the kind of in-depth feedback that can make a real career difference, it's the "your pant legs are too short" kind of feedback that is important in the shallow sense of being a good corporate drone.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  How was any of this hidden? It was plain a day from the start of the pandemic that not being present, not building social relationships and just being a name in a chatroom is going to have consequences in the velocity of your career. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you because they don't want to lose the perk of the flexibility and don't personally care about their own trajectory at that point in their lives (nothing wrong with that, just wrong to claim its without tradeoffs).
• mbfg 3y ago
  "At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?” almost no one does that. Me smells a marketing piece done for property owners.
  • nprateem 3y ago
    I bet her boss wishes he can WFH again
• nprateem 3y ago
  After 3 years at home I wouldn't mind being a TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), provided I liked my colleagues and the cute account managers were in. But if I went back in and there was little social interaction I'd rather stay home.
• ragnarsson 3y ago
  It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in. I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can't get any time to help you.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  I love the photographs in this article, of young professionals smiling and having a great time in the open plan office. It's been a few years, but I seem to recall a different vibe prevailing in offices like that. I guess you can't take a picture of someone internally fuming because the person they're sharing a desk with can't stop drumming his fingers on the table and farting. I guess you can't have a photoshoot of someone working in the stairwell because it's the only place they can concentrate, since all the meeting rooms are already occupied by other people who can't get work done at their desks.
• jalapenos 3y ago
  No, you just open Zoom and share screen and everything's at least as good as in the office days when everyone was so distracted by interruptions that they could barely work.
• mk81 3y ago
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• aynyc 3y ago
  I'm not here to assign blames, it seems to me the younger generation somehow missing a lot of life skills. I was both a student and TA in college back in the days. My experience has been, those who go to Office Hours or TA hours usually perform better than those who don't (unless you are one of those folks who are just smart and know how to work hard). In my junior/senior year, I consistently went to office hours and TA hours, my grades got significantly better. This goes for my students as well. Remote problem is like that as well. No one is parenting you anymore, your success and failure is based on your action. If you are a junior, schedule calls with your senior, two to three hours a week, prepare your questions and see what you get out of it. Don't wait for your managers or seniors to contact you. I will say this, there are companies/seniors/managers that are shit at helping juniors, just like shitty professors and TAs.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • tennisflyi 3y ago
    Leadership is always busy. No way I’m try to impart anything else on them.
• root_axis 3y ago
  There's a lot to say about in-person collaboration and knowledge transfer through osmosis, but I think this quote from the article highlights the crux of it > When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind The people in the office are having lunch together, they're talking and laughing, participating in office birthday celebrations and get togethers after work. Even something as simple as a warm smile and a "good morning" has a cumulative impact on those around you. Your presence is a contribution to the cultural mosaic of the company in a visceral way. It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with. The business world is just as much about politics as it is about productivity and if you find yourself far away from court, you'll inevitably deal with the consequences of those who are present to assert their influence.
  • juve1996 3y ago
    > When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind This simply isn't a state of being. You can be out of sight, and out of mind, if you have a shitty manager or a shitty company culture, in that case, it's probably a blessing to be fired. > It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with. If you're at a company that chooses promotions based on a crappy HR pizza party leave immediately. I've never been rewarded at work because I pretended to care about coworkers personal lives beyond courtesy. What got me promoted was being courteous but also reliably getting shit done. You can do this in the office, remotely, or through some hybrid set up. I've done all three. Do good work, make sure it's visible. It's not complicated.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    I feel a whole lot closer to the sales people and random product people who come in the office than the other developers on my team because those people in office are real people while the others are just icons on a screen.
• disport 3y ago
  As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out. My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc. In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses "work", why they're organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I'm still in touch with to this day. As a remote, older professional now, I don't necessarily "need" these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they're an essential "ladder" that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it's a moral obligation for me to "pay it forward". For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.
  • o_nate 3y ago
    I'm an older professional now working in a hybrid arrangement, but I very much concur with the parent comment. I can't imagine how my early career would have gone without being able to put in the time in the office. Its a cliche, but work culture really does exist, and it's about social cues and rules of courtesy. These mores are not taught in school but are absolutely essential to working effectively in an office. I would suspect this socialization is even more important for people who perhaps come from families where no parent was a white-collar office worker. I was lucky to start out at places where it was common for teams to eat lunch together. These unofficial interactions were just as important as regular work interactions in helping me to understand the psychology of my more experienced colleagues, what was polite, and what was taboo.
  • shmatt 3y ago
    I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out of employees They always start with return to office = productivity, which people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football. Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. If we're talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at home for most But you're right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and socializing as a whole The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do less head down work at the office
• mihaigalos 3y ago
  At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to light that such research is funded by hedge funds owning the commercial real estate you "absolutely have to have for the poor young professionals."
• tennisflyi 3y ago
  This was stated early on as a downside.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  It's amazing how much better teams are at remote work now than in 2018. However... It's still just not as efficient as in-person fact-to-face ad-hoc meetings. The "water cooler discussion forum" is very real. Informational cross-pollination between teams and between levels of the org structure simply aren't happening as much with remote work. The siloing has locked companies into rigid plans that cannot respond to change.
• pradn 3y ago
  It's so much easier to take your laptop over to a senior colleague and ask them to help you debug something in person. There's much more friction to asking for a call, waiting for them to respond, sending them the invite, perhaps waiting for them to get to a phone room if they happen to be in the office, setting up screen sharing (with its minute and fuzzy type), and having to type things in yourself.
  • tkiolp4 3y ago
    It’s harder because you (the one asking for help) first need to articulate your problem in a way that is understandable via text. So, I would say that’s an advantage for everyone: think first, then ask. Usually, in the office is: poke first, then ask, then realize you actually didn’t even read the error message in the display.
    • amrocha 3y ago
      No, it's hard for a lot of reasons that you're conveniently leaving out of your argument because you prefer remote work
      • tkiolp4 3y ago
        Writing is harder than talking. In my experience, people who don’t care spending time writing properly, well, they usually don’t care about your time. Or perhaps it’s just me, since I’m a non-native English speaker, at work I re-read (and rewrite) what I write many times before hitting Send. More often than not, it’s in the rewriting of my own words where I find the solution to the problem I was about to ask (duck rubbing or something like that they call it)
        • blastro 3y ago
          amen, sibling
        • amrocha 3y ago
          I don't disagree with you, but pretending it's all positives and no drawbacks isn't it either
• TurkishPoptart 3y ago
  I am burnt out on remote work and have been burnt out on in-person work. Now I am just trying to plan a way out from all of this via self-employment.
• Moonshining 3y ago
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• repeekad 3y ago
  I worked really hard in school, and when I got my golden ticket to silicon valley I was so excited to leave the corn fields and start my new life. I knew zero people in the Bay Area, but my coworkers and roommates (and roommates’ friends) were enough of a social circle for me; I loved my work and my team. One year later, CA lockdowns hit and everyone I knew left CA or moved back to familys’ million dollar homes. I was left adrift, not wanting to go back to the cornfields, expecting things to reasonably end soon, working remotely, and alone. They did not reasonably end: I grew more and more depressed and isolated. I tried but zero in-network providers were taking new patients for therapy/psychologists, and the (sigh) remote therapy options just felt more isolating. I vividly remember having a good conversation on betterhelp, only for the call to end and just be left there sitting alone in my room, silence.. I talked to managers about it, but they told me I should watch more Netflix, and likely just furthered the decision to lay me off. Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me. The work culture that led to it being done over zoom, was the worst.
  • juve1996 3y ago
    This is your experience and is valid. But I would think about something. Those people left through their personal choice. Many workplace relationships are like this. I met some great people at work. They left, or I left, and I never spoke to them again. Work brought us together, but it was just work. After one of us would leave, we chose to spend our times with other people we'd rather spend time with. I've had maybe a handful of friends actually be friends when work changed and we were no longer on that same team. It's not personal, it's just life. My dad was a workaholic and never cultivated his life outside of work. When he finally retired he realized he didn't have any real friendships aside from a few. I make sure I do things outside of my occupation for this very reason.
    • lampshades 3y ago
      It doesn't sound to me like GP was placing blame on people for leaving of their own accord and it really doesn't help to disparage how people get their social interaction. I enjoy the social aspect of the office and someone leaving has no bearing on that.
• sinsterizme 3y ago
  I think feedback is a minor point, much more important in my mind is the morale-boost you get from working in the office alongside colleagues that in my experience is completely missing from remote-work
• paxys 3y ago
  > Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020. I'm not sure what broad learnings you can derive from such a narrow study. Individual firms have seen wildly different WFH outcomes based on how they implemented it.
• lynx23 3y ago
  Do we have a word/phrase to describe the rather obvious fight over remote-work that broke out roughly 2 years ago? I still remember the mechanics. Covid-19 forced management to go all-in on remote-work, which was a god-sent for those which always wanted to have more of it. Now, these people (rightfully so) realized that with the end of the pandemic, their newly acquired "right to work remote" would be endangered, so we started to see dogfights over the concept. The one side emphatically arguing for remote-work because they were seeing their new acquisition endangered, while the other side trying to get back to work with other people. That said, in my opinion, the discussion wouldn't have to be so energetically loaded if both sides would realize that it all boils down to CHOICE! If people were not forced to go one or another way, they could actually choose what fits them best, and there would be no need to fight over what is right or wrong. This article wouldn't even have to be written. Because if WFH is not mandated, people choose what they prefer, and missed opportunities are much less relevant as long as you are walking a path you actually decided to walk on.
• mkl95 3y ago
  I started my career in my early 20s at a junior-unfriendly office. Senior guy next to me literally bought some noise-cancelling headphones to avoid talking to people. I hated that place. Getting a 100% remote job is still the best decision I've made in my career. It has allowed me to make way above market average money and work with incredible professionals from all over the world, despite living in a country with a mediocre IT market.
• ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  I think there's a valid argument for the premise because office and remote environments are very different and people default to working like they're in an office, but this piece reads like shit. > At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?” All I could think when I read this first paragraph is, "she sounds incompetent". Feedback 10x a day makes zero sense once you have basic competence. You need much longer feedback loops for more complex and important skills. Feedback is guidance. If you need guidance 10x a day... 30m once a week is a lot of time for feedback (Perhaps too much) if you're smart about using the time, and it's way more useful than 10x a day.
  • xiaosun 3y ago
    Sales and sales development roles are very different, especially if you are in an inside sales role. The number of feedback touchpoints are much higher for those roles. Sales interactions happen very frequently and getting feedback real-time increases the quality and relevance of the feedback.
• pigeonhole1 3y ago
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• pigeonhole1 3y ago
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• saos 3y ago
  This is why every company should adopt hybrid. Its just totally unfair on young professionals starting out/
  • tkiolp4 3y ago
    How does hybrid fix anything? Seniors at home and juniors in the office? 1 day/week everyone at the office (so “no-hire” to anyone who doesn’t live in the city)?
    • saos 3y ago
      everyone in the office 2-3 days a week > so “no-hire” to anyone who doesn’t live in the city This can be adjusted to 1-2 days in the office a week
• garbagecoder 3y ago
  I don't have an answer for this, really, and I can see it. Still, I think if workers prefer a certain way of working, they aren't cattle, or just a number, and they should be allowed to make this decision for themselves. I'm older, financially set, and have a partner with a good job, so I can't make that call for others. Part of how I got to this place was by leveraging professional relationships along the way. I was never more than a couple of phone calls away from something if I was starving. If I didn't have that I'd just be a house husband I guess. Or maybe a NEET. 10 years ago, I would have told youngers to get their ass back to work and never have lunch alone. Now that I'm rounding the corner towards retirement, I can't give that same advice in good faith.
• dhbradshaw 3y ago
  For now, jobs that can be performed remotely should also be the easiest to automate. We'll see how long it takes.
• crimsontech 3y ago
  This really only applies at a company which is “in office first”. I’ve gone from being a junior to a lead fully remote. The only time I have had an issue is when all other team members were office based and the work culture was based on that. When a company is remote first this issue goes away.
• deleted 3y ago
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• slipswflaps 3y ago
  Our plane of reference for our coworkers and interactions with them is now confined to the two-dimensional nature of our screens, rather than the three-dimensional world we "used" to see and interact with them in. This is another interesting way our cultural changes in work may affect our experience because of our biology. The spatial data that contribute to declarative, episodic memory in amygdala-hippocampal memory formation, for example.
• willio58 3y ago
  One thing my remote team does that I think helps massively with this is we have a zoom room that's always open and we use it for regular meetings like standup, sprint planning, etc. When the meeting is over, you can hop (many do) but you can also stay as long as you want. Even as a write this, I'm in the zoom meeting. You can go camera off, but if you ever have even a small question it's encouraged to ask. This has helped massively with keeping an open communication channel that feels organic and synchronous. I highly recommend this, but the key is it's fully optional, it's camera optional, it's mic optional, and there's zero punishment for not being there.
  • umeshunni 3y ago
    how does the zoom channel help over a team slack channel or something like that?
    • willio58 3y ago
      slack is great, we have that too. But it's asynchronous by design. Async communication is great, it's super useful for getting work done. Synchronous communication is important for things like brainstorming, when ideas are half thought out and that's a good thing because it gets gears turning. Slack is too easy to sit there and edit your own words out of existence when maybe those ideas could have been helpful in a group branstorming session.
• cracrecry 3y ago
  Something relevant here: The New York Times is a Real State company now. They manage the real State they had in the center of New York that is more valuable that all the printing presses in the US. So this company is highly biased against Remote Work. If people can work from home, they don't need the super expensive Offices in the center of the city, prices go down and NYT loses money.
• balderdash 3y ago
  I think I learned more from the fellow juniors in my first couple of jobs than I ever did from managers/supervisors/seniors - remote work is easy for me now that I’m mostly “baked” but think it would have been a huge detriment for me early career.
• fatneckbeard 3y ago
  first world problems. a huge number of employees are punished for socializing / having "random" meetings at work. why arent you at your cube / chair doing your job instead of wandering around talking to people? the metrics a lot of companies use purposely look for that and punish it. and tech-bros should understand this because they developed a lot of those tools. the lunch breaks are 20-30 minutes, the cafeteria is replaced with shitty vending machines, breakrooms have taken away all the chairs, the ones that are left have some giant TV blaring reality TV 24/7. people get in trouble for spending too much time in the shitter. buildings are sectioned off, you have to have a badge to go anywhere and do anything. if you are in the wrong area you are a security risk and could be written up. dunno if people realize what tiny tiny fraction of the workforce has these jobs where they are supposed to randomly walk around and talk to each other about problems.
• lampshades 3y ago
  What a timely article. While I'm not a junior, I did take a down-level at my current job because it's a completely different field. So, even though I'm not junior, I've felt the affects of this as well. However, the main problem I've had is social isolation. I'm going to be quitting my remote job and don't plan to work fully remote again for the foreseeable future.
• xchip 3y ago
  Yet another study to try to get people back to the office
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