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The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. If your work can be done in isola

• jollofricepeas 3y ago
  Or… Just have optional office hours, Slack huddles and mob sessions every few days. Some of my engineers… - have a open huddle for a few hours a day where anyone can drop into their project while they work - others make use of our scheduled themed mob sessions (ie. Maintenance Mondays, deployment Thursdays). have a problem, idea or just want to hangout then come by? - ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice. The default doesn’t always have to be return to office for a physical meet. There’s lots of other options.
  • rcme 3y ago
    > - ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice. When I was a junior engineer working in-person, I was learning from senior engineers multiple times a day, not just once a week.
    • clnq 3y ago
      There are remote-first companies that have 24/7 channels for anyone to ask questions and discuss things with seniors. There are office-first companies with poor training culture. Commitment to training is the deciding factor.
      • rcme 3y ago
        Only part of my learning was from direct question answering. Seeing how senior people worked also helped a lot. E.g. over hearing a design discussion or seeing how they debugged outages was very helpful to me. Those things are very hard to recreate remotely.
        • frumper 3y ago
          Those things are easier to recreate remotely. You can see their actual screen instead of watching on a projector or over their shoulder. Pair programming is even easy to do remotely, there are IDEs that support it. Hop in any kind of voice call and they can talk you through what they’re doing as they’re doing it.
          • rcme 3y ago
            What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact. I was like a fly on the wall during their discussions just because I happened to be sitting near their desks when the discussion started. Or when there was an outage, I could overhear how they were debugging the issue. Also, I've run a remote work company over the pandemic. Maybe you don't feel working remotely is different, but many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. In person, you can look at someone, see if they're busy, and, if not, approach to start a conversation. Online, you can never tell if someone is available. There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
            • frumper 3y ago
              Clearly we differ on how we feel about approaching people. I’d rather get a simple message. When people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond. Your last line sums up how you feel about remote interactions nicely. I’m sorry, I just don’t find that your feelings about online rejections is a good enough reason to drive into an office.
    • jollofricepeas 3y ago
      Obviously, it’s a balance. Because at the same time, ICs working on critical projects shouldn’t be forced to stop every 15 minutes to answer “It’s not working” questions.
      • rcme 3y ago
        That seems more like a hiring issue
    • redeeman 3y ago
      and now you may learn from them multiple times a day, not in person, but over the internet
      • hedora 3y ago
        And also from people in multiple geographic regions!
        • jollofricepeas 3y ago
          Exactly! That’s a point we often miss when discussing remote work.
  • kkfx 3y ago
    Hm, remote work does not also means asynchronous work. Something can be asynchronous, something can't. In that case it's just a matter of agree some timeframes like normal office hours where anyone can easily join anyone else because anyone should be there like in the office. It's a matter of discipline not much of physical presence.
• surgical_fire 3y ago
  > The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles. I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home, where I have full control of the environment I'm in and not wasting effort on social interactions. Collaboration happens effectively in a remote settings as long as the company embraces it properly. Since we are discussing feelings about remote work, this is as valid as anything else.
  • richbell 3y ago
    > The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles. My company disbanded its employee productivity research group after they started providing data to the contrary. It's not about facts, it's about forcing the peons to fall in line.
  • yarg 3y ago
    Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make? I've had many face to face conversations in a room with a whiteboard that couldn't have happened nearly as efficiently if everyone was remote. Now I do think that the push against work from home in general has very little to do with operating efficiency (if companies cared that much about operating efficiency they wouldn't have developers working in loud open plan offices, drowning out the world around them with headphones), but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless.
    • surgical_fire 3y ago
      > Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make? When the claim is that remote work is a mistake and that its era came to an end... Yes. It's an exceptional claim, and exceptional claims demand exceptional data. Otherwise we should call it bullshit. > but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless. Probably. I do prefer remote work, and I favor working for companies that allow me to stay remote. But I think there's place to companies that prefer to work in office, and people that prefer to work in the same physical space as their colleagues. This balanced take doesn't seem to be very popular, however. I wonder why.
• gedy 3y ago
  > However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, Please, I've worked on plenty of successful new projects with a distributed team. This in-person bias is largely for people who don't know how to communicate effectively.
  • IMTDb 3y ago
    Please, I've worked on plenty of successful new projects with a fully onsite team. This remote bias is largely for people who don't know how to behave effectively around other people.
    • clnq 3y ago
      Please, I've worked on plenty of successful projects with a team that only existed in a Schrödinger's office - simultaneously onsite and remote, until observed. This position and momentum work bias is for those who don't know how to behave effectively in a superposition.
    • watwut 3y ago
      Good thing they did not made such claim. The usual argument is that they are better able to manage own time when working from home.
    • isbjorn16 3y ago
      It sure is great that this industry doesn't have a larger than normal population of neurodivergent folks, or this might be a real problem for a lot of us!
  • olyjohn 3y ago
    It's always more productive to come into the office they say. Then they hire half your team in a country with a time zone that is 12 hours off.
• proper_elb 3y ago
  > However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together. Not convinced yet, at this point it just seems to be anecdotes, and pretty nebolous ones at that. I would be open to listen to this position if it was backed up by actual examples like "So we were working on Product X and team Y struggled with remote work in that and that way." Creativity/Innovation is not something fuzzy, but something very real that will result in deadlines not met, lower morale and so on - I will start to consider Altmans et al.'s position once I hear those non-fuzzy experiences. (As someone working in a small startup doing innovative products, and collaboration being crucial).
  • scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
    I work in a small startup doing innovative software/hardware products. Some of the most 'creative' work we have ever done as a team was when the power went out and we finally spent time workshopping what a particular thing should be like with a whiteboard and pieces of paper. That was a defining moment and what we came up with on that day is kind of what we have today. Some of the best and most valuable insights in our process are captured in recorded IRL onsite sessions with our users. Humans put on a bit of a show when they're remotely connected and that just ruins the process because they just sort of withdraw after they say their bit. I have recordings that prove this - users spontaneously changing their minds or sharing more about how they really feel about something. I would argue that the best creativity on a team occurs when there are actual meat-skeletons together in a room smelling each others' farts, interrupting each other, eating together, getting excited, getting pissed, whatever etc. But you are absolutely correct that this is anecdotal and nebulous at best. In the article he mentions how this is better when the product is unclear and unformed yet.
    • florbo 3y ago
      My anecdote is experiencing this same creativity when everyone had pen display and a shared digital whiteboard while on a video call.
    • Klinky 3y ago
      I don't think that's much of an endorsement of in-office collaboration if you need the power to go out to actually focus and get work done.
• anonzzzies 3y ago
  > The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. That used to be my feeling as well. As much as I don't like Zuck in general; we hold our meetings in VR and for us there is no (measurable) difference from being in the office for creative work. While we really struggled on Zoom. After I tried a Quest 2, I decided to just get 15 of them for the team and it just works. Your brain (well our brains, guess there are exceptions) forgets you are not actually sitting in a room with your colleagues to the point where you actually try to physically touch them when working. It works very very well. Never setting foot in the office ever again. Don't really mind if Sam Altman thinks differently...
  • edandersen 3y ago
    Do you physically try to touch your colleagues when together IRL?
    • anonzzzies 3y ago
      Tap their arm/shoulder to get attention. And also I don’t live in a country where you have to think 5 hours about every human interaction lest you get sued.
      • hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Which country is that?
        • ardit33 3y ago
          The rest of the world…
      • watwut 3y ago
        There is no such country, but also, tapping people on shoulders is seen as rude and pushy in many different countries.
  • baremetal 3y ago
• collabguy1337 3y ago
  Assuming your team members are actually: - capable and not just good salesmen that got into their positions due to various factors like resume-driven development, obscene levels of networking or nepotism, being in the right place at the right time — and riding that wave — etc. - have gotten the junior-level giggles out of them — and understand that the simplest solution is the best solution; rather than something needlessly complex because: (“it won’t scale” (i.e I’m at best bored and want to try something new, and at worst trying to shoehorn something insane to further my resume) || “we have to do it this way” (i.e. I read a blog post last night and want it to seem like I’m knowledgeable and not an imposter with zero critical thinking ability) || “this is the correct way to do it” (i.e. I’m stalling again because I cannot think of a way to provide business value other than prostelyzing various opinions and philosophies about software engineering, despite there being zero hard and objective data that what I’m saying is in anyway effective for anything more than making me seem like I know what I’m talking about)) At that point, once you have enough maturity and experience (i.e the knack for being able to adapt to circumstances by your lonesome), you do not need to collaborate. You can almost always figure it out by searching online for what is almost always a trivial, already-been-solved issue, or by going for a few walks and mulling it over in your head. If it’s a truly hard problem, you can even sit down somewhere and work it through inside your head. The only two types of collaboration I’ve ever seen in the workplace is: 1). Someone less learned on a subject picking the brain of someone more learned (fair if the subject is complex, and not easily accessible through literature; but grating if it’s something puerile like how to use a tool — RTFM) 2). Two people brainstorming something and coming to the wrong conclusion because they’re implicitly more interested in socializing correctly than coming up with the right answer. You see this with whiteboards a lot. For example, M$’s Roslyn a few noobs were trying to figure out what data structure to use for representing syntax nodes and the solution they come up all these years ago was utterly silly (red and green trees) — solely because they were white boarding the problem out, and trying to come to a consensus (and to keep the vibes good, maaan) rather than to find the best answer. Both are subpar from an efficiency standpoint, but great from a career standpoint. N.B. If it’s not already apparent, I’ve grown tired of “collaboration.” I’ve grown tired of seeing it create more problems. And I’ve grown tired of the intellectual dishonesty around it.
• mgarfias 3y ago
  I “look at the clock” to make sure I don’t miss the train home. I did that once, and it sucked, badly.