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I will say. I'm gonna be burned for this here, but... yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. As a worker I like it! And there are some positives -

I will say. I'm gonna be burned for this here, but... yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. As a worker I like it! And there are some positives - mainly, you don't have to commute and live in a cheaper place. But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective, and I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. One thing that's good is that it gives you access to a bigger talent pool, and you can pay people less, because they are happy they can work remote. I was originally against hybrid, because it's not really one thing or other thing, but now I start to see its positives too.

t-writescode 3y ago
And at my company, we've seen performance and throughput improvements across the board that the managers themselves agree with :)
- data_maan 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - serial_dev 3y ago
    Do you mean to ask if I sent three of my colleagues on a multi-year doctorate research program for a question that everybody seems to already know the answer to and is in agreement, or if I let my team work on my product?
    - data_maan 3y ago
      Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :) Let me tell you that the history of statistics is littered with unsound, but plausible looking decisions, to which "everyone already knew the answer". One example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias So yes, that's exactly what I mean. Though if they need multi-year training for a simple A/B test, then you should fire them :)
      - krageon 3y ago
        If it was so simple, everyone would be doing it correctly. Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. What you have done is talk down to someone else. All in all, I think your entire argument would be a lot more sympathetic if you made it by giving a concrete example of your own beliefs (what do? Is that really simple?), otherwise you will have to get used to folks not listening to you.
        data_maan 3y ago
        > Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. Fair enough - though I did mention a few basic things like A/B testing and survival bias (trying to being aware of one's own cognitive biases is the first step in making better decisions; to be aware means you first have to know them). And yes, it is not trivial at all and dependent on the context. The best and simplest starting point would be to make a list of potential confounding variables (I mentioned a few of them) and then just looking at the R^2 statistic. That already should point him in the right direction. I was less bothered that his methodology wasn't 100% correct, but rather by casually making a statistically unsound decision which has a big effect on people's lives, so getting it right is important - and then when called out dismissing it. I have a lot of sympathy for people honestly trying to make decisions rigorously and getting it wrong; but you have to try.
      - bamfly 3y ago
        > Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :) I have bad news for you if you think this doesn't apply to like 99% of of management decisions (and product, and...). Even, and perhaps especially, the ones that are trying to be "data driven": usually the data's shit, but everyone just pretends it isn't because they don't want to spend the time and money to do it right. The "modern" "scientific" "data-driven" business world mostly runs on hunches and prejudice.
pauby 3y ago
If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done. Don't force your team back to the office because you find it easier to manage them. I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.
- sshine 3y ago
  I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.
  - piva00 3y ago
    I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important. To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
    - vincnetas 3y ago
      What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room. So public by default, private by choice.
onlypositive 3y ago
> I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. I've worked remotely for years before COVID and these meetups are always hyper productive. I'm also burned out and need to sleep for a week straight afterwards. Just because people get motivated seeing each other once in a while doesn't mean that's sustainable if they were in an office. To me, working remotely was less effective in the beginning, it uncovered undiagnosed ADHD and after dealing with that I'm doing far better than I ever did in an office. Office work is fine if you prefer it, working from home requires a lifestyle and an office space to make it work, something not everyone can manage. But that doesn't make it worse at all, and as others have said, it requires different management skills, if you haven't picked them up, you probably won't see the benefits from your perspective because you're not letting your team work properly.
- elcritch 3y ago
  As a fellow ADHD’er and soon remote worker could you share any ADHD specific tips to be successful? I’m both excited and hesitant as Remote work should let me work when I’m productive more (ie evenings) with exercise and chores in the afternoon “deadzones”, etc. That and not spending energy masking in an office environment. However there classic adhd problems to contend with like keeping schedule, etc. I also find I need people to stimulate me. I’ve been thinking of a coworker spot in addition to my home office.
  - okamiueru 3y ago
    Not the person you asked, but, ADHD/ADD covers quite a lot, and what works for some might have adverse effect for others. It's not uncommon to be extremely focused and productive on certain tasks, then struggle immensely with distractions and procrastination for other tasks. I say immensely, because this applies to some degree to everyone. I too felt I was only productive during certain times and deadzones. But, it turns out, I just need to be left alone to focus. Which not only means not being disturbed by others, but also not so easily doing it myself by wanting to interact with others. If no one else is working, nothing to do but focus. This same effect made working in an office exhausting. I now work 40%, exclusively remote, and I get more done than I did at 100%. Some weeks by a factor of 2. "How is that possible?", consider that under normal office hours, I would clock in-the-zone productive work to about 2-4 hours. Remote: 7-11 hours. A bad week at the office: 10 hours, two good days at home: 20 hours. "Yeah, but that's just you sucking at working in an office environment". Indeed. And there are dozens of us. Dozens! A good manager should strive to get the best value out of their workers.
jkaplowitz 3y ago
Meeting together once in a while is very different than either hybrid or in-office. I once worked at a small all-remote startup spanning from the west coast of the US to Eastern Africa. Yes, we all met in person for a week several times per year. That didn’t mean 3+ days per week in office. And yes that company is still around and doing fine several years later even now. My last information on their in-person meetings is itself years old now, but when they got too big to have everyone meet in person together, they still continued the same principle, just in appropriately sized subgroups.
kubb 3y ago
I'm going to get downvoted by the managers, but chances are, your team is doing just fine, but you can't keep up with that remotely. When you're in the meeting, everyone politely explains to you what they're doing and they say "yes" to your ideas, so you feel like you're making progress. But when they actually need to do focused work, which you don't want to know the details of because it's too hard, they do far better outside of an oxygen-deprived, loud office that they need to commute to.
- palata 3y ago
  This. Most of my interactions with managers are about explaining to them why I am doing what I am doing. Once in a while, they give valuable information. I definitely don't need to be onsite everyday to keep up-to-date with a manager. One call a week is already a luxury, some interactions via chat (where I can report some progress and stuff). Mostly it's managers who want to see their team everyday and talk to them, I guess because it makes them feel like they are managing?
  - notagoodidea 3y ago
    I don't know your special teams/managers etc. I switched from a technical position to a manager one one year ago. My team is remote mostly, myself included in different countries/continents. I do travel to the office to meet colleagues going to the office and having face-to-face time with some. I don't need to see my team everyday but I do need to have a vision of what they are doing and busy with because we are working on a lot of different projects, pursuing sales opportunities and trying to balance the work based on skills/time available/opportunities to learn or emergencies. So I tend to do 1 team meeting weekly and weeklies with most of the time on the side at least, track project on slack/jira/crm and try to have a board view of my team while being read to deep-dive when needed. Do I like being on site? Yes but mostly to talk with project manager and product owner, it is more easier to brainstorm/have meaningful discussions in a semi-informal setting of a coffee. For technical colleagues on my team, it is different depending on the tasks : creative/architecture/whatever or routine/operational. Can't see my team on site everyday anyway but would prefer for some specific type of interaction. Well that's just me trying to find my way in management so grain of salt and personal bias and imposter syndrome warning :)
brozaman 3y ago
I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money. Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year. I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  That's an insane salary for Spain, and remote to. Can I ask how to get such a wage there?
  - brozaman 3y ago
    Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount. 1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them. 2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more. 3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche. 4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot. I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*. As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.
- fogoflove 3y ago
  There are definitely cases in which this is true -- yours, for example -- but I imagine Google has done the math on this.
Lolaccount 3y ago
Maybe you're just not a good remote manager? No offence. Perhaps you're a fantastic on-site manager. But you should consider the probability (from what I've read) that remote management isn't in your toolkit ... and it is a distinct skill.
pdpi 3y ago
I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job. I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.
  - mm007emko 3y ago
    Same here.
- Nurw 3y ago
  Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.
ricardobayes 3y ago
I'm a big believer of enabling people to perform their best, which means accomodating their needs. If someone has a later circadian clock I'm not going to set up a meeting at 9AM with them. That's the same for work environment, neither remote or in-person is "better" but they are for some people. You will always have people who only excel remotely and people who excel and thrive in-person. Mandating one specific environment is not efficient in my view. I've always followed this and generated hundreds of millons in value through the years so I guess it works.
- samfar90 3y ago
  Are you hiring right now by any chance?
bob1029 3y ago
> I can tell that remote is far less effective. This is a mixed bag. Remote work can be less effective if you don't have the right people. Employees who can sustainably work remote and generally keep their shit together without being babysat via Teams every day are surprisingly difficult to find. I am starting to think the "10x unicorn" is more common than the employee that you can trust to autonomously get their work done while at home. Certainly, everyone on HN (and during the interview) will spin the most elaborate tales about how they are an exemplar of Christ and enumerate all of the virtues of their home office/life separation. But, many of us know how these things really unfold in the following weeks and months. I am a human too. I fuck off periodically and am probably borderline disqualified from working remote per my own criteria. This is really hard to do right over long timeframes. I've been at it for a decade now and I still don't have any perfect answers, aside from sending 100% of the team back to the office 5 days a week. For whatever reason, both extremes are the only suitable option for my brain. The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.
- cgio 3y ago
  Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? We all have our ideal way of working and it is quite individual, by forcing one over the other we may get consistency but not best performance. In any case, this is in my view a power game. Now that market is soft let’s take advantage of it. Would love to see what happens when the wheel turns the other way around. Suddenly remote will be making sense again. On my end, I am only considering explicitly remote positions from now on. For what it’s worth, what confuses me is not the way of working itself but the expectation that I can switch from one to the other and change all the rest of my life, at the whim of strategy of the month.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    > Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all. You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.
deleted 3y ago
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honzabe 3y ago
>> remote is far less effective I think it depends on the type of work, personality of workers and maybe other factors. For example, I used to work in a team where we were each doing separate part of the thing and it was not too beneficial to talk about work. Sure, we talked in the office, but mostly about movies, personal stories and stuff like that. I did a lot more work from home because the office environment was distractive and I get distracted easily. I can imagine that remote would be far less effective if I worked in a different department.
the_gipsy 3y ago
Could it be that it just makes manager's jobs easier? The coordination part can be much easier in person, but the actual work part can be much worse, and what you as manager care about, and get rewarded for, is just the coordination part.
Zak 3y ago
This comment claims to be able to tell, but doesn't mention any attempt to measure. Most attempts to measure that I've read about find increased productivity with remote work. Do you believe your organization has circumstances that cause it to buck the trend, or that those measurements are flawed?
- serial_dev 3y ago
  I don't want to take a side in this argument (pro remote vs offsite vs hybrid), but productivity measurement in agile software development is hard and I have never seen it done well, so it's hard to trust these measurements with this decision. Another issue is the author's conscious and unconscious hidden biases and agendas. If a research is ordered by a video chat software company, you bet the result will be different than if it's paid for by a coworking space provider. Similarly, you'll have a different result if it's done by a SF company who needs to justify their expenses vs. by a remote team headed by a manager from the woods in Wyoming. By the third citation, you lose the source of the study, only have the clickbait outcomes like "86% productivity drop by onsite work", so I'm in the camp of "do whatever feels right for your team".
  - someweirdperson 3y ago
    > [...] productivity measurement in agile software development is hard [...] I'm sure its hard even for non-agile development. Likely for non-software development, too. For anything that's worth being called development.
scott_w 3y ago
> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective As a manager I can't disagree more. Remote really is a horses for courses situation. Practical example: my younger brother worked as a designer for a company that manufactured light steel frames. Their USP was that their design office was attached to their factory, so they were able to provide better designs with a faster turnaround on manufacturing. Despite living a 20 minute drive from his office, he felt that his ability to have these conversations ad-hoc helped him do his job better. Slack would never work because the lads on the floor were never going to pop that up. Also, it physically can't replace him going onto the factory floor to see what a problem was and being able to adapt his designs. He'd occasionally go on-site for construction issues but this, naturally, is a case where the site has to be away from the office; it might be on the other side of the UK. In contrast, I'm a manager at a fully remote software company (a very successful software company, I might add). The simple truth is that most of our work can be handled remotely. The biggest challenge is getting the right people together. This isn't a remote/office issue, though. I saw this in my office-based role previously, as well as hearing it from all my (office-based) friends. If you have something in software engineering that you feel requires people to be fully in-office, please raise it and I'll try to outline how we manage that.
- MyneOutside 3y ago
  This, we have been working remotely for almost 10 years. You can be as effective as in the office and even better, but it also depends on the type of work you do.
x3874 3y ago
As you say remote is nice for the worker, and i am certainly not less productive, but for "let's concentrate on this task today to get it out" i tend to drive to the office. And it is also nice to have chats and friendly banter with others that might be in on the same day. Ofc most devs seem to be the strightly professional and introverted type. Remote you definitely get less of the gossip that might help you, either for advancement, or by planning to steer things / intervene.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
>how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while The operative phrase here is "once in awhile". I agree that there is a need for teams to be in-person at times. But somehow that translated to everyone being in the office 3X a week last year and now that's turning into a push for 5X a week at many companies.
goobertime 3y ago
It’s absolutely less effective for the majority of organizations and engineers. Most of the engineers claiming they’re more effective aren’t actually. They may get to do the part they like more (though in my experience that’s not programming despite their claims, that’s goofing off on HN or doing their laundry), but that’s not the same thing as being more effective for the organization as a whole. (And sure you can blame it all on “managers” and how they should be better in all kinds of ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that remote, for most organizations and most engineers, is less effective as things stand today.)
JSavageOne 3y ago
> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. Completely disagree, and the countless examples of successful remote teams disprove your claim.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  Following the OP's assertion, they could have been even more successful if they weren't remote. Neither of these assertions (a general case assertion) nor a cherry picked set of anecdotes, proves the ideas. Everyone is arguing about the age-old questions around productivity and how to measure it, in software development. Google's tracked metrics fell (probably after a time of instability or increase) and so the organization is reacting.
lm28469 3y ago
Would be super effective to live on premise, and not have a partner/kids (huuuuge loss of time), to have nutrition handled by intravenous feeding tubes, diapers so that you don't have to go to the bathroom anymore, we could work until 80 too after all! Sooooooo many things to improve, we gotta please the capital overlords, god forbid we enjoy the progress we made so far to, you know, live life
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
No offense intended but if remote is less effective that's management's fault. Remote is a completely different way of working. If you don't adapt to it, yes it'll suck. But there is nothing you lack when remote. Even in-office, if anyone is not within 20 feet of you, they're basically remote. Ya gotta adapt and learn new ways of working, and then remote is more productive, not less.
krageon 3y ago
> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective With respect, this is a skill issue. I also manage people and satisfaction among those I manage is high (there is no change) and everyone else is just as happy with our output as they've always been. Of course there is plenty of complaining by other extroverted managers that they'd like to "see their colleagues more", but should that come at the cost of 2h per day for every single person? Absolutely no. If this is not clearly communicated they will abuse (IMO) their managerial powers by mandating folks do something to serve them. This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.
JeremyNT 3y ago
I agree, it's far less effective. People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work). The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly. Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa). You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.
- shp0ngle 3y ago
  Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_. And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place. And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week. Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote". As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.
  - smallkitten 3y ago
    > Only very little part of doing work is the coding. I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding. I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me. I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.
zffr 3y ago
> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. In my experience, remote work is only more effective for "heads down" type coding work where you need long uninterrupted blocks of focus time. Modern offices tend to have lots of distractions. For work that requires synchronous collaboration or conversations, remote work is less effective. It requires you to explicitly set up meetings to chat, which is much higher friction than just walking over to someone's desk. Remote work is also much worse for building cross team relationships. In an office, you can easily bump into people across the company and at various levels. You learn a ton from these people, and sometimes these connections can be valuable for your career or even personal life. I've made several friends once I started going into the office frequently.
leokennis 3y ago
In my experience the “productivity” many teams achieve on their “all in office days” usually amounts to a whiteboard of good intentions (and yes, whiteboard sessions are 100 times better in person), which indeed energizes your average PO/PM/manager.
MadSudaca 3y ago
I don't think it's globally far less effective. I think it's particularly less effective when you need constant communication, say being next to your teammates throughout the day, or when the people are really unmotivated and they won't work unless they're being constantly physically monitored. As someone who's in a startup and is very motivated, with coworkers who are experts in their area and there's little overlap in skillset, so that everyone knows what they need to do and do it well, without having to constantly synchronize with what each other is doing, I strongly doubt someone would be more effective than me simply because they're going to an office. Specially if they have a long commute and a family.

t-writescode 3y ago

And at my company, we've seen performance and throughput improvements across the board that the managers themselves agree with :)

data_maan 3y ago
[flagged]
- serial_dev 3y ago
  Do you mean to ask if I sent three of my colleagues on a multi-year doctorate research program for a question that everybody seems to already know the answer to and is in agreement, or if I let my team work on my product?
  - data_maan 3y ago
    Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :) Let me tell you that the history of statistics is littered with unsound, but plausible looking decisions, to which "everyone already knew the answer". One example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias So yes, that's exactly what I mean. Though if they need multi-year training for a simple A/B test, then you should fire them :)
    - krageon 3y ago
      If it was so simple, everyone would be doing it correctly. Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. What you have done is talk down to someone else. All in all, I think your entire argument would be a lot more sympathetic if you made it by giving a concrete example of your own beliefs (what do? Is that really simple?), otherwise you will have to get used to folks not listening to you.
      - data_maan 3y ago
        > Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. Fair enough - though I did mention a few basic things like A/B testing and survival bias (trying to being aware of one's own cognitive biases is the first step in making better decisions; to be aware means you first have to know them). And yes, it is not trivial at all and dependent on the context. The best and simplest starting point would be to make a list of potential confounding variables (I mentioned a few of them) and then just looking at the R^2 statistic. That already should point him in the right direction. I was less bothered that his methodology wasn't 100% correct, but rather by casually making a statistically unsound decision which has a big effect on people's lives, so getting it right is important - and then when called out dismissing it. I have a lot of sympathy for people honestly trying to make decisions rigorously and getting it wrong; but you have to try.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      > Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :) I have bad news for you if you think this doesn't apply to like 99% of of management decisions (and product, and...). Even, and perhaps especially, the ones that are trying to be "data driven": usually the data's shit, but everyone just pretends it isn't because they don't want to spend the time and money to do it right. The "modern" "scientific" "data-driven" business world mostly runs on hunches and prejudice.

pauby 3y ago

If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done. Don't force your team back to the office because you find it easier to manage them. I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.

sshine 3y ago
I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.
- piva00 3y ago
  I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important. To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
  - vincnetas 3y ago
    What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room. So public by default, private by choice.

onlypositive 3y ago

> I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. I've worked remotely for years before COVID and these meetups are always hyper productive. I'm also burned out and need to sleep for a week straight afterwards. Just because people get motivated seeing each other once in a while doesn't mean that's sustainable if they were in an office. To me, working remotely was less effective in the beginning, it uncovered undiagnosed ADHD and after dealing with that I'm doing far better than I ever did in an office. Office work is fine if you prefer it, working from home requires a lifestyle and an office space to make it work, something not everyone can manage. But that doesn't make it worse at all, and as others have said, it requires different management skills, if you haven't picked them up, you probably won't see the benefits from your perspective because you're not letting your team work properly.

elcritch 3y ago
As a fellow ADHD’er and soon remote worker could you share any ADHD specific tips to be successful? I’m both excited and hesitant as Remote work should let me work when I’m productive more (ie evenings) with exercise and chores in the afternoon “deadzones”, etc. That and not spending energy masking in an office environment. However there classic adhd problems to contend with like keeping schedule, etc. I also find I need people to stimulate me. I’ve been thinking of a coworker spot in addition to my home office.
- okamiueru 3y ago
  Not the person you asked, but, ADHD/ADD covers quite a lot, and what works for some might have adverse effect for others. It's not uncommon to be extremely focused and productive on certain tasks, then struggle immensely with distractions and procrastination for other tasks. I say immensely, because this applies to some degree to everyone. I too felt I was only productive during certain times and deadzones. But, it turns out, I just need to be left alone to focus. Which not only means not being disturbed by others, but also not so easily doing it myself by wanting to interact with others. If no one else is working, nothing to do but focus. This same effect made working in an office exhausting. I now work 40%, exclusively remote, and I get more done than I did at 100%. Some weeks by a factor of 2. "How is that possible?", consider that under normal office hours, I would clock in-the-zone productive work to about 2-4 hours. Remote: 7-11 hours. A bad week at the office: 10 hours, two good days at home: 20 hours. "Yeah, but that's just you sucking at working in an office environment". Indeed. And there are dozens of us. Dozens! A good manager should strive to get the best value out of their workers.

jkaplowitz 3y ago

Meeting together once in a while is very different than either hybrid or in-office. I once worked at a small all-remote startup spanning from the west coast of the US to Eastern Africa. Yes, we all met in person for a week several times per year. That didn’t mean 3+ days per week in office. And yes that company is still around and doing fine several years later even now. My last information on their in-person meetings is itself years old now, but when they got too big to have everyone meet in person together, they still continued the same principle, just in appropriately sized subgroups.

kubb 3y ago

I'm going to get downvoted by the managers, but chances are, your team is doing just fine, but you can't keep up with that remotely. When you're in the meeting, everyone politely explains to you what they're doing and they say "yes" to your ideas, so you feel like you're making progress. But when they actually need to do focused work, which you don't want to know the details of because it's too hard, they do far better outside of an oxygen-deprived, loud office that they need to commute to.

palata 3y ago
This. Most of my interactions with managers are about explaining to them why I am doing what I am doing. Once in a while, they give valuable information. I definitely don't need to be onsite everyday to keep up-to-date with a manager. One call a week is already a luxury, some interactions via chat (where I can report some progress and stuff). Mostly it's managers who want to see their team everyday and talk to them, I guess because it makes them feel like they are managing?
- notagoodidea 3y ago
  I don't know your special teams/managers etc. I switched from a technical position to a manager one one year ago. My team is remote mostly, myself included in different countries/continents. I do travel to the office to meet colleagues going to the office and having face-to-face time with some. I don't need to see my team everyday but I do need to have a vision of what they are doing and busy with because we are working on a lot of different projects, pursuing sales opportunities and trying to balance the work based on skills/time available/opportunities to learn or emergencies. So I tend to do 1 team meeting weekly and weeklies with most of the time on the side at least, track project on slack/jira/crm and try to have a board view of my team while being read to deep-dive when needed. Do I like being on site? Yes but mostly to talk with project manager and product owner, it is more easier to brainstorm/have meaningful discussions in a semi-informal setting of a coffee. For technical colleagues on my team, it is different depending on the tasks : creative/architecture/whatever or routine/operational. Can't see my team on site everyday anyway but would prefer for some specific type of interaction. Well that's just me trying to find my way in management so grain of salt and personal bias and imposter syndrome warning :)

brozaman 3y ago

I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money. Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year. I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
That's an insane salary for Spain, and remote to. Can I ask how to get such a wage there?
- brozaman 3y ago
  Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount. 1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them. 2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more. 3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche. 4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot. I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*. As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.
fogoflove 3y ago
There are definitely cases in which this is true -- yours, for example -- but I imagine Google has done the math on this.

Lolaccount 3y ago

Maybe you're just not a good remote manager? No offence. Perhaps you're a fantastic on-site manager. But you should consider the probability (from what I've read) that remote management isn't in your toolkit ... and it is a distinct skill.

pdpi 3y ago

I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job. I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.
- mm007emko 3y ago
  Same here.
Nurw 3y ago
Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.

ricardobayes 3y ago

I'm a big believer of enabling people to perform their best, which means accomodating their needs. If someone has a later circadian clock I'm not going to set up a meeting at 9AM with them. That's the same for work environment, neither remote or in-person is "better" but they are for some people. You will always have people who only excel remotely and people who excel and thrive in-person. Mandating one specific environment is not efficient in my view. I've always followed this and generated hundreds of millons in value through the years so I guess it works.

samfar90 3y ago
Are you hiring right now by any chance?

bob1029 3y ago

> I can tell that remote is far less effective. This is a mixed bag. Remote work can be less effective if you don't have the right people. Employees who can sustainably work remote and generally keep their shit together without being babysat via Teams every day are surprisingly difficult to find. I am starting to think the "10x unicorn" is more common than the employee that you can trust to autonomously get their work done while at home. Certainly, everyone on HN (and during the interview) will spin the most elaborate tales about how they are an exemplar of Christ and enumerate all of the virtues of their home office/life separation. But, many of us know how these things really unfold in the following weeks and months. I am a human too. I fuck off periodically and am probably borderline disqualified from working remote per my own criteria. This is really hard to do right over long timeframes. I've been at it for a decade now and I still don't have any perfect answers, aside from sending 100% of the team back to the office 5 days a week. For whatever reason, both extremes are the only suitable option for my brain. The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.

cgio 3y ago
Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? We all have our ideal way of working and it is quite individual, by forcing one over the other we may get consistency but not best performance. In any case, this is in my view a power game. Now that market is soft let’s take advantage of it. Would love to see what happens when the wheel turns the other way around. Suddenly remote will be making sense again. On my end, I am only considering explicitly remote positions from now on. For what it’s worth, what confuses me is not the way of working itself but the expectation that I can switch from one to the other and change all the rest of my life, at the whim of strategy of the month.
- bob1029 3y ago
  > Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all. You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.

deleted 3y ago

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honzabe 3y ago

>> remote is far less effective I think it depends on the type of work, personality of workers and maybe other factors. For example, I used to work in a team where we were each doing separate part of the thing and it was not too beneficial to talk about work. Sure, we talked in the office, but mostly about movies, personal stories and stuff like that. I did a lot more work from home because the office environment was distractive and I get distracted easily. I can imagine that remote would be far less effective if I worked in a different department.

the_gipsy 3y ago

Could it be that it just makes manager's jobs easier? The coordination part can be much easier in person, but the actual work part can be much worse, and what you as manager care about, and get rewarded for, is just the coordination part.

Zak 3y ago

This comment claims to be able to tell, but doesn't mention any attempt to measure. Most attempts to measure that I've read about find increased productivity with remote work. Do you believe your organization has circumstances that cause it to buck the trend, or that those measurements are flawed?

serial_dev 3y ago
I don't want to take a side in this argument (pro remote vs offsite vs hybrid), but productivity measurement in agile software development is hard and I have never seen it done well, so it's hard to trust these measurements with this decision. Another issue is the author's conscious and unconscious hidden biases and agendas. If a research is ordered by a video chat software company, you bet the result will be different than if it's paid for by a coworking space provider. Similarly, you'll have a different result if it's done by a SF company who needs to justify their expenses vs. by a remote team headed by a manager from the woods in Wyoming. By the third citation, you lose the source of the study, only have the clickbait outcomes like "86% productivity drop by onsite work", so I'm in the camp of "do whatever feels right for your team".
- someweirdperson 3y ago
  > [...] productivity measurement in agile software development is hard [...] I'm sure its hard even for non-agile development. Likely for non-software development, too. For anything that's worth being called development.

scott_w 3y ago

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective As a manager I can't disagree more. Remote really is a horses for courses situation. Practical example: my younger brother worked as a designer for a company that manufactured light steel frames. Their USP was that their design office was attached to their factory, so they were able to provide better designs with a faster turnaround on manufacturing. Despite living a 20 minute drive from his office, he felt that his ability to have these conversations ad-hoc helped him do his job better. Slack would never work because the lads on the floor were never going to pop that up. Also, it physically can't replace him going onto the factory floor to see what a problem was and being able to adapt his designs. He'd occasionally go on-site for construction issues but this, naturally, is a case where the site has to be away from the office; it might be on the other side of the UK. In contrast, I'm a manager at a fully remote software company (a very successful software company, I might add). The simple truth is that most of our work can be handled remotely. The biggest challenge is getting the right people together. This isn't a remote/office issue, though. I saw this in my office-based role previously, as well as hearing it from all my (office-based) friends. If you have something in software engineering that you feel requires people to be fully in-office, please raise it and I'll try to outline how we manage that.

MyneOutside 3y ago
This, we have been working remotely for almost 10 years. You can be as effective as in the office and even better, but it also depends on the type of work you do.

x3874 3y ago

As you say remote is nice for the worker, and i am certainly not less productive, but for "let's concentrate on this task today to get it out" i tend to drive to the office. And it is also nice to have chats and friendly banter with others that might be in on the same day. Ofc most devs seem to be the strightly professional and introverted type. Remote you definitely get less of the gossip that might help you, either for advancement, or by planning to steer things / intervene.

DebtDeflation 3y ago

>how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while The operative phrase here is "once in awhile". I agree that there is a need for teams to be in-person at times. But somehow that translated to everyone being in the office 3X a week last year and now that's turning into a push for 5X a week at many companies.

goobertime 3y ago

It’s absolutely less effective for the majority of organizations and engineers. Most of the engineers claiming they’re more effective aren’t actually. They may get to do the part they like more (though in my experience that’s not programming despite their claims, that’s goofing off on HN or doing their laundry), but that’s not the same thing as being more effective for the organization as a whole. (And sure you can blame it all on “managers” and how they should be better in all kinds of ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that remote, for most organizations and most engineers, is less effective as things stand today.)

JSavageOne 3y ago

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. Completely disagree, and the countless examples of successful remote teams disprove your claim.

Supermancho 3y ago
Following the OP's assertion, they could have been even more successful if they weren't remote. Neither of these assertions (a general case assertion) nor a cherry picked set of anecdotes, proves the ideas. Everyone is arguing about the age-old questions around productivity and how to measure it, in software development. Google's tracked metrics fell (probably after a time of instability or increase) and so the organization is reacting.

lm28469 3y ago

Would be super effective to live on premise, and not have a partner/kids (huuuuge loss of time), to have nutrition handled by intravenous feeding tubes, diapers so that you don't have to go to the bathroom anymore, we could work until 80 too after all! Sooooooo many things to improve, we gotta please the capital overlords, god forbid we enjoy the progress we made so far to, you know, live life

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

No offense intended but if remote is less effective that's management's fault. Remote is a completely different way of working. If you don't adapt to it, yes it'll suck. But there is nothing you lack when remote. Even in-office, if anyone is not within 20 feet of you, they're basically remote. Ya gotta adapt and learn new ways of working, and then remote is more productive, not less.

krageon 3y ago

> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective With respect, this is a skill issue. I also manage people and satisfaction among those I manage is high (there is no change) and everyone else is just as happy with our output as they've always been. Of course there is plenty of complaining by other extroverted managers that they'd like to "see their colleagues more", but should that come at the cost of 2h per day for every single person? Absolutely no. If this is not clearly communicated they will abuse (IMO) their managerial powers by mandating folks do something to serve them. This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.

JeremyNT 3y ago

I agree, it's far less effective. People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work). The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly. Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa). You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.

shp0ngle 3y ago
Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_. And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place. And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week. Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote". As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.
- smallkitten 3y ago
  > Only very little part of doing work is the coding. I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding. I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me. I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.

zffr 3y ago

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective. In my experience, remote work is only more effective for "heads down" type coding work where you need long uninterrupted blocks of focus time. Modern offices tend to have lots of distractions. For work that requires synchronous collaboration or conversations, remote work is less effective. It requires you to explicitly set up meetings to chat, which is much higher friction than just walking over to someone's desk. Remote work is also much worse for building cross team relationships. In an office, you can easily bump into people across the company and at various levels. You learn a ton from these people, and sometimes these connections can be valuable for your career or even personal life. I've made several friends once I started going into the office frequently.

leokennis 3y ago

In my experience the “productivity” many teams achieve on their “all in office days” usually amounts to a whiteboard of good intentions (and yes, whiteboard sessions are 100 times better in person), which indeed energizes your average PO/PM/manager.

MadSudaca 3y ago

I don't think it's globally far less effective. I think it's particularly less effective when you need constant communication, say being next to your teammates throughout the day, or when the people are really unmotivated and they won't work unless they're being constantly physically monitored. As someone who's in a startup and is very motivated, with coworkers who are experts in their area and there's little overlap in skillset, so that everyone knows what they need to do and do it well, without having to constantly synchronize with what each other is doing, I strongly doubt someone would be more effective than me simply because they're going to an office. Specially if they have a long commute and a family.