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OpenAI CEO says the remote work ‘experiment’ was a mistake–and ‘it’s over’
- cat5e 3y ago[flagged]
- capableweb 3y ago[flagged]
- falcolas 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835787
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- villgax 3y agoNobody asked a former investor's opinion on how to run a company. There's literally outsourcing companies, freelancers who are continents/timezones away plus entrepreneurs who start up from dorms/garages.....this sort of mentality stems from insecurity &/or having bought real estate that you can't get out of without losses
- debacle 3y agoI don't know that I'd ever work in an office again. I've found that the calm and focus of working from home is unmatched. I do like going into the office for meetings and brainstorming/mentoring sessions, but if I'm "working" the best place is from my desk at home.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’ve found video is like 90% of in person for high bandwidth social exchanges like that. I’m not dismissing the residual 10%, but for me it feels like not worth it.
- basisword 3y agoHe can shout about it all he wants - you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s getting a bit tiring hearing millionaires and billionaires tell us how much more effective we can be at making them more millions and billions, when we just want an extra hour with our family or to save a couple hundred bucks a month that would be wasted on a commute. They can’t afford to give us pay rises to keep up with inflation either, but we’ve got a world-changing mission and the stock will be worth something to someone someday.
- ghaff 3y agoTo the degree people have the flexibility to (and many, including professionals like doctors don't), it's probably most productive at the end of the day for people to align with companies that share their preferences (and even collaboration/in-person needs).
- eterevsky 3y agoI really don't think OpenAI employees receive inadequate compensation. I think there could be a healthy balance between companies with 100% office time, hybrid and remote. There is a trade off that might work out differently for different companies.
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- sgammon 3y agohe says he's speaking for the entirety of tech and business here though, not openai
- ryandvm 3y agoIndeed. These companies reaped record profits during the most locked down period of the last 100 years and now we have to hear them piss and moan because they're afraid the proles are spending too much time in the bathroom while they're on the clock? Yeah, fuck that noise. I will tell you this much, if there's anybody whose job could go to the AIs, it's the fucking CEOs.
- ChildOfChaos 3y agoCertainly not a mistake for plenty of companies and more important plenty of people. A CEO doesn’t care about the people, cares more about the bottom line, but people matter and not everyone is working on some amazing life changing thing that they are super passionate about, some are just doing what they are good at to be able to survive and afford to pay bills, for these people, having a long commute and being stuck in the office 5 days a week as just another slap in the face for such people.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoWhen I’m super passionate about something the last thing I want to do is spend an hour going to a human hamster wheel and stand around talking. I prefer to be in my own environment I’ve customized to myself and work the way I work best. I don’t mind zoom calls or slack etc, and I’ll even head over for a coffee and hang out when it’s useful. But when I’m really into what I’m doing I want to do it and do it well. The human matrix pods they want us to head back to are specifically for the people you mention - the folks who aren’t into their job. They need them in the pod so they can watch their body and be sure it’s not doing other things than whatever soul crushing task they’ve been assigned by an over controlling boss. I get that some people really need to breathe my aerosols to feel satisfied in life. That’s fair. They can all sit around breathing on each other and feeling fulfilled. But I don’t need to, I’m happier living in my local community and breathing local artisanal aerosols of my neighbors for my social juice. What folks need to do is get out of the way and let the work force settle into a configuration that optimizes for personal productivity. We have the tools to allow for group productivity in a partial office and partial remote environment. Look at any multinational / multi office company. But this isn’t about productivity or doing good work - it’s about a moral stance against a loss of control by senior leaders.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoit's kinda funny, that the CEO of a company that wins by halving the employment rate through ai, wants real people to return to real offices. you'd think he'd win more, the more we had towards a metaverse. honestly I think if a metaverse is to succeed it needs to be malleable easily, and with things like Midjourney that's much more accessible to non graphic artists etc, I have a feeling they'll find ways for everyone to work still -:even if the work is just mining in a virtual mine. it's still all about control. I saw a spoken word music YouTube video once about schooling and how schools were literally devised during the industrial revolution to teach people to take orders, listen to authority, and basically be good little factory workers. I honestly don't care what Altman says, I think openai is probably as over valued as Tesla, and will be eclipsed by others now that there's an arms race with everybody picking sides or starting their own army etc... That leaked article, whether real or fake was some of the best commentary on the current state of open source ai vs Google and openai, Microsoft, etc... I'm a little nervous about ai being unchecked and so divested, but at the same time- do I trust Altman to be our savior and keep ai in check and only do good with it? fuck no.
- rdxm 3y ago[dead]
- nr2x 3y agoOdd statement considering the path they are is to conduct a societal wide experiment on mass unemployment as the robots take over more and more jobs.
- _siis 3y agoThey aren't there yet though. Reminds me of the 2001 movie 'conspiracy' with how that all played out. First you follow the vision, then when its untenable, and left you in a inescapable position, you redefine words and talk about what you aren't talking about. Arguably you can't let robots take over a large portion of the jobs because rational pricing goes out the window, and you end up just like non-market socialist economies did at the turn of the last century. A lot of people generally get culled when food shortages occur.
- zamalek 3y agoIf there is one thing that these past few years have taught me, it's that you need an extreme amount of cynicism when contemplating the opinions of CEOs. Their ignorance was put on display for the whole world with the events surrounding the pandemic (and I'm not only referring to layoffs). There is actual science showing that autonomy improves motivation and creativity (alongside other basic human motivators). That includes all of working in-office, at-home, or up a damned tree if the employee so desires.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoCEOs are going to find they're not irreplaceable by ai, I'm certain it'll be one of the first places we find the most performance from ai. Especially to run DAO like companies(not necessarily needing Blockchain). It can strategize and analyze data and make great suggestions, top team members could be elected by coworkers to sit on a board to approve things and tweak the CEO when it's hallucinating etc... it can ingest literally every book on business theory etc and store it in a vector memory, etc.... im basically trying to actually build this as a service, maybe I should start it as a DAO/coop.
- olliej 3y agoAnother billionaire who values seeing that they've forced people to be in an office more than employee morale or well being.
- whatshisface 3y agoOutsourcing twelve timezones away is great, but thirty minute's drive? No, that's taking things all too far...
- SmoothBrain12 3y ago[dead]
- ren_engineer 3y agofunny considering all of the open source AI projects that are quickly blowing OpenAI out of the water in terms of efficiency and results are developed remotely. Who has used DALL-E in the last 6 months? The entire software industry is built on open source software developed async and remote. The fact so many "data-driven" tech CEOs and investors have to defend office work based on nothing but gut feeling is also pretty funny, when on the other end you have studies proving that open offices kill productivity/focus and the obvious wasted time and energy with commuting. Pretty much everything they complain about is a solved problem at remote first startups, like onboarding and helping junior employees learn. These people refuse to change tactics for the times like WWI generals marching into machine gun fire I guess we'll find out either way in the next few years whether remote companies are able to keep competing. There are already several billion dollar companies that have been remote since day 1. I can't see how being able to hire talent globally doesn't give a startup a huge advantage
- gremlinsinc 3y agoIronically I'm trying to build something that could replace CEOs, essentially chatGPT agents on mental steroids, it can help with coding too, I think a structure of founding visionaries, with a plan/goal plus a board elected by the employees, could have a team of ai CEOs that defer to the board. This is my plan for running my company, essentially as soon as I get a prototype finished. I might even have chatGPT try and devise a more equitable pay structure that rewards seniority, etc. I use openai now for ease but the system I'm building should support any LLM and I'll definitely switch when I finish my benchmarking system(roadmap), it's basically a langchain GUI. somebody will probably beat me to market but there's no leaders in this space yet, so there's still a chance and I'm actually having fun coding again. I just wish I had some investment to build faster, I've got people interested but they want a prototype first. If anyone wants to join me, tech stack is nextjs/t3, planning to eventually move API to micro services using mojo, as python has much better ai tooling and mojo is python with 30000x performance. im also trying to build a round table podcast with 2 people and 2 ai agents, it'll kinda be like mystery science theater 3000 meets "all in" around ai and tech etc.. and a newsletter as marketing channels and some recurring income while I build my app.
- monero-xmr 3y agoHmmm how then do I own a profitable tech company with hundreds of employees distributed around North America, all remote working, for years? Seems fine to me…
- lunaru 3y agoVacheron Constantin was founded in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron, a watchmaker, who later took on a partner François Constantin who traveled the world managing sales of their highly complicated watches. In fact, the two (Vacheron and Constantin) barely ever met and communicated solely through letters. The "Overseas" model of watches, which is their most popular sports model, celebrates this fact in the name (that the company was literally built through communication over oceans) and VC is arguably one of the top 3 swiss watch brands that still thrives today. I'm not saying that the business didn't have a physical location (it clearly did for manufacturing) but if two co-founders could build a remote-first startup using 1755 technology, there's no reason why early stage startups today with the power of Slack, Zoom, Email, Git, etc can't build the next generation of business in a fully remote fashion. Startups like this will naturally have a competitive advantage when hiring as well, as they'd be able to tap into a world-market, rather than a local-market. Remote work is here to stay and companies that can find a good hybrid of remote and in-person will thrive going forward, as has always been the case, whether it's 1755 or 2055.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoI don't think meta is going to lead the charge, but soon we'll have quality vr worlds where we can commute to virtually and meet in person in our own home office. if we're building to that, why not rip the band-aid off since there's enough tools to make it feasible?
- gsaines 3y agoThis is a clickbait title. Altman is mostly talking about startups here, not larger or more well-established companies. I’m a huge believer in remote work for jobs at big and midsize companies. But I’ve also started two companies myself and would never start a startup full remote. Context is key.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoThat makes no sense, a start up in the bootstrapping phase needs to conserve all the cash it can. Having a real office is extremely costly, and I'm certain there's many businesses that may have survived that died, had they not had that extra expense. it's also easier to find better talent to build startups remotely and for less pay initially with maybe more equity... than it is in a specific area, plus you need to relocate to big cities. I'm in southern Utah, rural. I'm 2 hours from Vegas, if my startup needs some face time we can all fly to Vegas for a retreat or something or meet once a month there... other than that remotes the only way I'll work and I don't think anyone should be forced into an office if their productivity is better remotely.
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- stavros 3y agoI mean, he's a CEO. He doesn't care about you having more time for yourself and your family, he cares about how you can make him more money. I'm sure I've been taking a huge pay cut in order to work remotely all these years, and I can't say it hasn't been worth it.
- LightBug1 3y agoDream on, Sam. Dream on. I've witnessed the slow decline and implosion of two companies so far who denied this. It starts slow, but inevitably what gets them is the lack of access to the talent they need. They end up hiring D-grade staff (sorry) who are the only ones who will accept non-flexibility. Sure, D grade companies can make this work, they'll always be D grade or worse. And cutting edge A-grade companies may well be able to enforce staff being on-site. Everyone is making a pro/con calculation. But for the B and C grade companies (the vast majority on the Bell curve), you're either hiring the best you can, or you're not, and if you're not... then you're falling back in the race, and, inevitably bye bye, baby ... at least to your company vision.
- dismantlethesun 3y agoThere are more D grade companies than A or B grade companies combined.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoWhy does the debate seem to be forever revolving around a one-size-fits-all solution? On-site, hybrid, full remote, whatever, all need to be seriously considered by management instead of dismissing any of them outright. Fully remote or hybrid companies existed well before covid and they ran just fine for their needs. I agree early stage startups probably operate better when everyone is in the same room rapidly iterating and exchanging ideas, but why should larger corporates force everyone to sit in a meeting room instead of a video call for drawn out arbitrary meetings where 90% of attendees never even give input? Going to the office is great if: the commute is reasonably short or even walkable, the office has decent amenities, and compatible co-workers personality wise. Unfortunately the vast majority of jobs do fulfill these criteria. Commuting to an office in the middle of some suburban business park where you have to deal with a food desert with limited & overpriced options unless you pack your own meals and the most luxurious amenity in the office is a Keurig that makes lukewarm burnt water? No thanks. That kind of company should never act surprised at cratering employee morale when RTO is demanded.
- ghaff 3y ago>Why does the debate seem to be forever revolving around a one-size-fits-all solution? Because people who have strong preferences (for whatever reason) for one mode or another really hate the idea that the system that isn't their preference could end up strongly normed (as it mostly was in the case of in-office work pre-pandemic). If you like being in an office most days, you probably don't really want an environment where most of your co-workers are at home and everything's a video call anyway. And if you prefer to work from home but most of your teammates/collaborators are co-located in an office, be prepared for people to basically forget you exist.
- alanfranz 3y agoI wonder what’s the point of this kind of “declarations”. Do you want to hire locally? Can you satisfy your headcount needs? All great (unless you’re changing conditions on workers which were hired to be permanently remote), it’s your company, you make the rules. But hiring locally means having access to fewer people and/or needing to pay more. It’s a tradeoff. Very few workers will say “ok I will move to SF from some remote area and keep the same salary.”. Some will quit, some will ask for a significant raise. Unless you’ve got some kind of “vested interest” in office space value; then you should disclose it before discussing remote work for others.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoI work remotely 9 out of 10 days. It sucks. Yes, I don't have to commute, which is great but I miss having colleagues I could learn from. I miss access to decent facilities, feeling a member of a community, and (some) face-to-face contact. I am not saying remote work is universally bad. I am just saying it is not for everyone.
- ghaff 3y agoWell before COVID, some jobs basically required no travel and others required pretty much 100%. Many jobs were 5+ days a week in the office. Others had very little. To the degree you have choices, it's one of many tradeoffs you need to make. And, yes, some people who enjoyed having the flexibility to not go into the office much now dislike a somewhat trend for moving back in and others don't like that the before-times at their particular company seem to be gone.
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- osigurdson 3y agoBehind a paywall. As an aside, it seems incredible to me that a company (fortune in this case) expects people to pay $20 / month for content like this. No one is going to enter their credit card number and sign up for a monthly subscription just to see some article about a CEO's views of working from home. I understand that writers need to be compensated, etc, but to me it is like pricing Cheerios at $1000 / box.
- neilv 3y agoThis article seems very one-sided, as if the conclusion or message that was intended when it was written is: "Work-from-home is bad for many reasons, even though some workers prefer it. And the only ones who think it's a good idea is some workers, and that might just be because they are working two jobs, or outsourcing their work to ChatGPT and goofing off on the clock (and companies should look at whether they can cut out of the middleman on the AI outsourcing)."
- ok_coo 3y agoYou can’t have affairs and avoid your family if you’re WFH.
- trts 3y agoI work for a small, remote-only company and overall it works well. I probably work 40-55 hours in a given week, and give back 25-50% of my commute time to the company, mostly because I'm not a morning person so would rather just open the laptop and get to work. It is much easier to stay productive when I can take short breaks in the comfort of my home, change the laundry, make a healthy lunch, or walk down the street for coffee. My day is done when it's done, there's no hour commute plus a pile of chores waiting for me at home. It's hard to remember who I have or haven't met in person, despite physically seeing them a few times a year; I know these people well and they are friends and colleagues. I've been to their weddings and have had people visit me from out of state just to spend time together. Never knew any of them prior to joining the company. On the other hand, my partner works remotely for a large (5K+) remote-only company, and seems to often have less than 20 hours of actual work to do in a given week. I know several others at BigTech who just need to create the verisimilitude of being online. keeping their Slack bubble green and superficially responding to messages. One conclusion would be that remote doesn't scale. Another would be that the redundancies endemic to large companies mean that in the office, people have to spend a lot of time looking busy, but regardless of where the work happens, they aren't. The remote work experiment is a success. A permanently larger proportion of knowledge workers will continue to do it. Every organization has different circumstances and some won't set things up that way. Doesn't matter what someone with a billion dollars thinks is supposed to apply everyone else.
- linguae 3y agoI have mixed feelings about remote work, given that I worked remotely during COVID and have been working in a hybrid environment for over five years. On one hand I feel a stronger sense of camaraderie in the office, and I also feel that spontaneous collaborations are easier. I think there are certain types of projects and missions where fostering a collegial atmosphere is essential to their success, and I understand where Sam Altman is coming from. On the other hand, the costs of commuting and living within commute distance from a job center are immense. I make six figures as a non-FAANG, non-unicorn AI researcher working in Silicon Valley and live comfortably, if not lavishly, in a one-bedroom apartment as a single adult, yet in terms of purchasing a home even a one-bedroom condo would be difficult for me to afford. I could afford a home in the Central Valley, but then I’d be facing a 4-6 hour round-trip commute. I could move to a smaller tech hub like Seattle or Austin where I have better housing options, but finding similar CS research positions may be more challenging. A healthy ecosystem of employers offering remote positions frees employees from having to live in expensive metro areas, and it also frees them from the anxiety of facing an abrupt move back to an expensive tech hub should a job loss happen. Housing is a serious mess in this country, especially in Silicon Valley, and I wish the leaders of tech companies had more sympathy for their employees instead of just assuming that employees would make whatever personal sacrifices necessary to join or remain part of the company.
- neilv 3y agoI think there's some merit to the osmosis learning idea. Personally, I think we can do a lot remotely with mentoring, teach by example, morale, and personalizing -- using modern tech, practices, empathy, and mindsets. And I actually prefer WFH-but-in-town to WFH-across-continents, for the occasional high-value, low-key in-person interactions, such as a couple hours a week, walking meetings, etc. (Maybe a bit like I take a multivitamin pill, to help cover any deficiencies in my generally healthy vegetarian diet.) But I don't know what to make of a VC who claims to care about nurturing the career development of junior ICs. Are VCs thinking about that, or is this a random opinion or only an attempt to persuade towards some other intention?
- johnea 3y agoExcept for him, of course. Fuck that rich asshole...
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoExpect more of these sock puppet articles as the big real estate investment funds continue to see their profits slide.
- amclennon 3y agoAm I the only person who would sometimes work from home before the pandemic? I don't understand the need to take an extreme position one way or the other.
- mahathu 3y ago> and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups. Remote first clearly can work well in some cases (like open source projects) but maybe some people just don't enjoy working remotely and never meeting their fellow colleagues and technology wouldn't change that.
- dimal 3y agoAnd yet, a lot of companies are doing well as remote-first. It depends on the company culture. You can’t use Slack and Zoom and expect it to work well. It’s a different way of working, and I think the companies that learn to do it well will have a competitive advantage as time goes on.
- breakpointalpha 3y agoWhat an unbelievably biased article. Knowing it's from Forbes, it's propaganda for the C-class... Quoting James Clarke, CEO of digital marketing firm Clearlink, without disclosing that he has recently come under fire for praising an employee for selling their family dog to return to the office on his orders is outright negligent of the author Steve Mollman. Doubly bad that the quote is about how remote might be working multiple jobs, while James Clarke himself sits on multiple boards and charities. Disgusting propaganda all around and pretty gross to see it here on HN.
- Krisjohn 3y agoFortune magazine should not be considered a source of anything other than propaganda for the wealthy elite.
- kugutsumen 3y agoAltman thinks that remote work often leads to employees slacking off significantly. He suggested that the lack of supervision and the comfort of working from home may create an environment where work ethic declines.
- ghstcode 3y agoSam Altman needs to shut up