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IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a quest
by thatsagreatcomm 3y ago
IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.
It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.
- steve1977 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. Well, the person that got interrupted by you probably lost quite a bit of productivity because of you.
- chrisallenlane 3y agoYeah. One of my favorite things about working remote is that people can't do this to me. It's a feature, not a bug.
- cdelsolar 3y agoCan you jump on a zoom real quick
- sensanaty 3y agoI've literally never said yes to this question unless it was something incredibly urgent like prod being down or whatever.
- mr_gibbins 3y agotriggered
- zoover2020 3y agoEasy, just learn to push back or setup mechanisms like office hours to attend for folks whom are in need of support. Like security, the human chain will always be the weakest link here. If you don't have backbone to stand up for your own time, that's on you - not the remote work inherently IMO.
- escapedmoose 3y ago“Sorry, I need to focus on something right now. Try asking [person]” Or if I’m already on DND? Ignore, and create an appointment for later.
- bradlys 3y agoThis is a great way to get management up your ass and get fired. End of the day, it’s all about the culture of your workplace. No one here really understands that. I’ve been interrupted more during remote work at some companies than when in person at others. It’s entirely culture dependent.
- JohnFen 3y ago> This is a great way to get management up your ass and get fired. If you get fired for doing that sort of thing, the company is doing you a favor.
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoStatus on IM platform set to busy, notifications suppressed unless from a select group (direct manager, etc). So uh no. Can’t jump on a zoom real quick, I’m doing work.
- dgfitz 3y ago“Nope.”
- berniedurfee 3y agoSorry already in a meeting, can we chat here?
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago"Sorry, you'll have to give me 15. I'll send you a message when I'm available, OK?"
- red-iron-pine 3y ago"let me finish this email, i'll poke you in 10" 10 might actually be 2 hours, but whatever.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoWell, ideally you follow through. The only way to get people to respect the social contact is by honouring it yourself.
- xenolith234 3y agoIt's always my direct manager that does this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 3y agoor just "Hello, dekhn" without any additional context.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Lio 3y ago...and when you stop what you're doing and reply they don't follow up for 10 minutes, just a moment after you go back to your work.
- godshatter 3y agoI don't understand this way of looking at things. I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to. That helps both of us. If I don't even have to think about it, it helps the other person be immediately productive (and learn something) at the cost of taking me out of "the flow" as opposed to having them beat their head against it for who knows how long while I get a a couple more minutes of uninterrupted time. I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately. If it happened every five minutes that's a different story.
- chrisallenlane 3y ago> I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to This can happen on Slack or whatever too, but with much less friction. I'm not ignoring teammates for days - I just want to be able to take 10 minutes or whatever to reach a reasonable place to context-switch versus being forced to do so right now. > I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately. I envy you, but I very much cannot do this. If I'm working on something of sufficient complexity, I'm going to lose at least 15 minutes every time I'm forced to make a substantive context-switch. It's a huge drain for me.
- bluedino 3y agoYour lack of communication can hurt others. One person being 'productive' while causing blocks for others isn't good for the team.
- JohnFen 3y agoWhy do you assume he's causing blocks? I don't see what he said as lacking communication. It's enhancing it by allowing them to "schedule" it according to their workflow. Very rarely does anything actually need an immediate response, and when it does, just call the person.
- elcomet 3y agoBut what if overall the productivity is higher ?
- lolinder 3y agoAn org can find ways to ensure juniors don't stay blocked while also ensuring that seniors can keep in flow state for long, uninterrupted periods. Prioritize docs and tests. Teach juniors how to use docs and tests. Spread knowledge and mentorship around enough that a question on the team channel gets an answer from someone who is available. All of these things have other major benefits in addition to restoring flow state for seniors—juniors learn faster, your tests are more comprehensive, seniors can basically onboard themselves, your bus factor goes way up. "Stick everyone in the same room" is just a local maximum, not peak productivity.
- commandlinefan 3y ago> overall the productivity is higher Then why is my performance review always individual?
- HDThoreaun 3y agoThe company at large doesn't care about your individual performance review when making decisions that effect everyone.
- zabana 3y agoTraining a junior or helping a collaborator is everything but loss of productivity.
- nonethewiser 3y agoIn a way, but not the way that counts. If you spend all day helping people with their work will you be lauded when you make 0 progress on yours?
- lesuorac 3y agoIf your superiors don't consider you training people part of your job then you should either get them (ahead of time) to agree it's part of your job or you should stop doing it.
- Technotroll 3y agoYou certainly should because you're building the company that way.
- vbezhenar 3y agoCompany which those juniors will switch to as soon as possible.
- saiya-jin 3y agoAnd then seniors have to pull overtimes just because they need to semi-constantly babysit juniors, or clueless managers of other teams or projects who only know how to escalate and chase etc. I get it, if you are junior, there are benefits. If you are senior (and not ie team lead and control freak at the same time), you lose. Hell you lose a LOT, can confirm. Offices are way more stressful, so this is clear downgrade for senior people. Constant noise and interruptions way overweight the benefits. Guess who brings more added value to companies, juniors or seniors? (not talking about long term perspective, most companies are led by people who focus on next bonus only, and who they manage is steered that way too).
- asoneth 3y agoI think this is the crux of why people have such disparate estimates of remote productivity. Senior folks seem to experience more upside and less downside being remote whereas junior folks seem to experience more downside and less upside. Depending on the makeup of the team, one or the other may be net more productive even if you yourself feel less productive. (It may also depend on whether your company sufficiently acknowledges and rewards the work senior folks do unblocking and mentoring others.)
- bluefishinit 3y agoI don't think senior/junior is the right divide. There's tons of young people cranking out absolutely amazing things from home in the open source community. What I've found is that product focused people who ship with high velocity like remote work, regardless of their time in the industry. Low velocity shippers who lean on process are the ones who seem to want to go back in the office. Presumably because you can mask not shipping by chatting with your manager or playing meeting roulette.
- asoneth 3y agoI don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own. There are absolutely exceptions who prove the rule but on average we found productivity plummet with remote junior hires and remain similar for folks who have been at the company for decades across all skill levels. Even high-velocity junior folks seemed to be spinning their wheels or getting stuck when remote in a way that perfectly average senior folks did not. I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.
- doxeddaily 3y agoWell sure, seniors have concerns outside of work that juniors often don't have.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI never minded someone asking me a question. At the very least I reason my 5 minutes loss of productivity saved their loss of perhaps hours.
- lolinder 3y agoSome people don't work like that. When I'm in a flow state, a 5 minute interruption can break me out of it and slow me down for a half hour or more before I'm finally able to get back into flow.
- berniedurfee 3y agoSame. I typically have 4 or 5 threads of things I’m working on simultaneously. It takes a bunch of time to get back in that headspace.
- masfuerte 3y agoThey are doing it wrong. If you keep two or three things on the go you can switch to a different one when you get stuck without wasting hours or interrupting someone else right this minute. Very often, having switched focus the solution to the original problem will reveal itself without needing to bother anyone.
- bionsystem 3y agoI agree. Most people only see the 5 minutes lost though...
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoAbout ten years ago I worked at a company with a DBA who saw gatekeeping everything database related as a form of job security. But he also complained bitterly about how often he was interrupted. Even simple things like adding a column to a table required his participation. When developing, these types of changes are frequent and often blocking, so creating something like a ticket queue wasn't a good solution. Our manager was not only aware of the situation but seemed entertained by the inherent conflict it created. Since going through that extreme case of blocking through gatekeeping, I try to keep my eyes out for ways to allow other to self-service as much as possible. It's not possible to eliminate all interruptions but it's often worth spending a bit of time examining how the interruption could have been avoided in the first place and if similar interruptions are likely, invest in creating something more self-service. At least in the DBA situation I was in back then, simply allowing developers to have local database or even control over development database on a dedicated database instance would have eliminated most of the blocking and interruptions.
- JackFr 3y agoYou seem to think that answering my question isn't part of his job. It may be that you have the wrong measure of productivity.
- chank 3y ago> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoMy experience has aligned with the person you're responding too. Often the best ideas came out of lunch conversations, slam diagramming on hallway white-boards....
- garrickvanburen 3y agoThis can still happen. Let’s be deliberate about it - eg “hey let’s grab lunch together and then whiteboard out a few ideas” To me, this kind of deep collaboration is a reason to be in the same physical space. Though it only actually happens a handful of times a year - even if you sit next to the collaborators daily.
- j45 3y agoA recurring calendar invite can increase the frequency of good types of meetings too :)
- throwbadubadu 3y agoIt's strange (and also independent if real or virtual), but for me the worst ideas actually came out of those meetings where people "needed to brainstorm to come up with solution" - and usually also endless technical debt. The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team, draft something up, and again others can have time to think this through and thoroughly review. Not that the other thing also sometimes happens, but majority not. Different problem domain, skills? (But anyway, totally independent if virtual or not..)
- SecretDreams 3y agoReally depends on the stage of the project and nature of the work. Also, on the individuals. Being in the office mostly means you can afford to have less gems because you know you'll spend more time in person walking them along. I favour some WFH/Hybrid setup, personally. And I view a lot* of this new office push as mediocre managers being unable to leverage their talent.
- Jedd 3y ago> ... people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart .. Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or do you just believe it to be true?
- iforgotpassword 3y agoFully agree. Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off. As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment. there isn't a single colleague in my department (~30 people) who preferred WFH where I feel they were more productive, or even on par. Quite the opposite, those who exclusively stayed at home when working completely lost touch, gave vague updates and excuses about what they're working on and what current problems are. When they returned to office (we've three mandatory days at the office now), it really showed how disconnected they were from all the process and changes that happened over the last two years. And I mostly don't have to care, I'm not responsible for these people, except for one instance my work doesn't even directly depend on them, but I can absolutely see why an employer wants to get everyone back into office. It's not worth keeping WFH up if for every one of those few who actually benefit from it, there are five others who you basically now need ten times the effort to make sure they di their hours and don't just bullshit you in endless video conferences with flaky connections and parrots going mad in the background and whatnot.
- lifeonlars 3y ago> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off. > As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment. You prefer to chat with your colleagues during work, and you work well collaboratively with interruptions, but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets. Instead you accuse them of slacking off.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago> but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets. I can, but as said, I think they are rare. > Instead you accuse them of slacking off. I transparently stated the numbers where I got my anecdotal evidence from. I could go into detail of how and what individuals did or didn't do, but I don't see how that helps. Either take my word for it or you don't believe it anyways. And again, in my sample WFH folks were a minority, the majority was rather indifferent, and some preferred the office like me.
- rcarmo 3y agoAs someone who's been working remotely (or nomadically) for nearly a couple dozen years or so, I firmly subscribe to the notion that the sentence "hell is other people" was coined because someone kept interrupting the author, or because they had to share a workshop (or an open space office) with apprentices, bolstering peers or customers barging in unannounced. You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done. Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends). I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoI work in the office, but when I really need to make progress on some stuff, I tell my boss I'm staying home. It absolutely makes a world of difference to be hard to find.
- beepbooptheory 3y agoImagining Camus bothering Sartre at the coffeeshop now.
- jason-phillips 3y agoHopefully there is violence.
- suslik 3y ago
- mnky9800n 3y agoA while ago on hacker news there was a story about a team of n<10 that was split between the east coast and West coast. They setup an always on zoom call on a dedicated screen in each office. Obviously this won't scale if you work with tons of people, but I would think it's quite useful if you are prototyping or building something together as a team.
- dunham 3y agoI recall reading that the French Laundry and Per Se restaurants did this too. They had video conferencing set up between kitchens on opposite coasts.
- j45 3y agoThe efficacy of remote/hybrid can often be a function of how well the company worked distributed across multiple office locations prior to the pandemic. Physical proximity (and being able to close a door) is a magnifier and multiplier in one way, and digital proximity (and disconnection) to be able to connect with someone is different. How well the company works in terms of systems and processes that work well remotely prior to the pandemic is a starting point. Being forced online/distributed at the pandemic doesn’t mean an organization is, or was any good at it. Offices must provide what the home can’t to remain an alternative. Offices (home or at work) should be helping me get more done with less effort compared to my home. Interruptions are an effect of culture, or lack of it. The fixed cost investment in better monitors, internet, seating and managing interruptions can go a long way to finding and keeping flow. While day to day tasks may be ok working remote, problem solving is generally more effective in person when others are involved. Onboarding of new team members goes much quicker with an in person component for the first few weeks before going hybrid or remote. Remote work may be ok for one person departments but many are starting to experience burnout after Covid. What’s next in life and career and finding who and what tot all to with hands on or shadowing has its value. In person is also a retention strategy of orgs, fewer opportunities to wander without more effort. Still organizations who lament about in person work are almost always guilty of falling prey to not reading the full study on open concept workspaces. And they’re free to demand in person work, they sign the checks and people can vote with their feet. Orgs can do better, especially for knowledge work, by providing a door to close - this is an immense offset against working remotely. Full time open concept working is not a productivity multiplier in most cases. I’ve worked remotely at a higher pace (more than 8 hr/day) for the better part of 2 decades, while having an office (with a door) nearly the entire time. In person always has its place. But I like flexibility in my life just as much. In the US, offices might mean longer commutes and less time with family but it’s not necessarily like that everywhere. It seems like some folks want to have their cake and eat it too. I have less than a 10 minute walk to my office, it won’t always be that way. Currently we are designing our new office to have all the concierge type services the current demographic needs. Among the top of the list is full access to extremely fast internet (10-30Gbit) that is snappy not available at home. Of course, it’s possible to solve problems remotely with some people more than others, which can be a function of how long you’ve worked together. I get to work with some of the same people for a long time, it offers unfair advantages like what is being described. Even in that case though, it’s faster in person than online. This is harder to talk about with some folks because they rarely have both feet in one job long enough (3-5y+) to go deep and wide on problems. To the extent an organization is mature and not innovating too much, remote or hybrid work can be much more feasible. The better their systems and processes, especially companies who have distributed offices. One reality is there are too many people who demand remote work and also have also taken unfair advantage of it more and more over time. They are then making it ok to offer their position off to the best value globally and not to just them. The role of telemetry of ones productivity or availability is a factor in this based on the tooling. While interruption is enemy of productivity - instead of being being interrupted by people at work, other distractions await at home. Emails and slack can be far worse interruptions. Many people can’t resist doing certain activities at home that are far beyond. Digital meetings that drone on for much longer online to overcommunicate can’t be more productive than being forced to stand up for 15 minutes to talk.
- Leynos 3y agoHistorically, people at work wanted to talk about anything other than work. They'd talk about football, politics, last night's Britain's Got Talent, or whatever; yet spend a whole day struggling with a task without asking their colleagues at the same desk for help. I'll take wfh, thanks.
- broast 3y agoOur remote teams have this culture that you say is impossible. They're in their chats or voice calls all day communicating, and measurably crush the in-office teams' productivity, maybe due to the efficiencies gained by going async, or maybe due to the type of people (people who find interactions through text more meaningful than in person or verbal, and insist upon it) The in office teams on the other hand seem to rely on synchronous work and so they block each other, and this seems to mean the group can only finish a small number of tasks per day, whereas our remote teams complete bigger work more frequently. I also find a lot of our juniors or quieter folk are a lot more confident talking to people in the remote setting.
- taneq 3y agoI've recently been finding that even where in-person meetings are an option, having everyone at their desk with full access to all their files, emails etc. along with the ability to quickly and easily share their screen is just more productive. There's far less need to make a list of things to follow up during the meeting because you can usually take care of these things as they come up.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. People repeat this like a mantra when defending open floor plans (usually managers), but I very much doubt it. Most people seem to hate open floor plans. The subject seems to have gone by the wayside with the pandemic (then it was a question of finding a quiet place to work in a house shared with other people). I'm sure it varies by occupation, but the cost of distraction relative to whatever benefit you might gain from conversation is like investing money in the lottery. Yeah, you might win something, but you mostly won't and the cost will be enormous. I sense a bit of classic FOMO opportunism motivating such rationalizations.
- ryandrake 3y agoLeaning in to "spontaneous conversations" as a benefit of office work is so weird. I count "spontaneous conversations" as close to the #1 downside of working in an office. Your ideation is my distraction. Also, championing in-person conversation as a way to communicate in the office often results in poor official communication: It's better to have clear, written communication of company/division decisions than relying on "Oh, I ran into Bill in the hallway and he said the team's now working on the FooBar project this quarter!" And poor internal documentation: How does this API work? "Talk to Erica" vs. "Read the internal wiki here"
- Macha 3y agoNot least of which is it leaves a paper trail for the next person when Bill or Eric decide to move on or get laid off.
- cmiles74 3y agoMaybe it varies by field. For myself, onboarding new developers has felt about the same as it did in person. I can't just stop by their desk but banging a message into chat and then starting a call if their response seems to far off track is not that much harder. A little friction but isn't it part of my job to get past that and make sure this person is productive as quickly as possible? Overall my team has improved with remote work. Before the pandemic it was a struggle to find developers, in large part because of our location (expensive New England college town) and the (unspoken but clear) requirement that people come to the office every day. Now my current team is comprised of developers from Toronto, Sweden, etc. We hit our targets and get work done. I wouldn't trade it for anything and I hope the pay grade above me realizes the concrete importance of the people and the work over this abstract idea of "community".
- berniedurfee 3y agoA sage mentor of mine, who was also a major proponent of remote work, said this about hiring remote: “Do you really want to limit your candidate pool to those within driving distance to your office? Why not your entire country? Time zone? Planet?”
- runsWphotons 3y agoI agree that onboarding remotely is terrible. From a junior perspective trying to figure out what is going on remotely is hard. Things happen like you get stuck with things and wait two hours for a slack response which still isnt great.
- lolinder 3y agoThis is a failure to design. You can't go remote but make no other changes in your org—effective remote requires you to be intentional about the things that you previously just hoped work. There are lots of different ways to make it work, but it sounds like your company hasn't done anything.
- sgarland 3y agoAt my last company, we had to go into the office once per week. The hellacious commute aside (I would arrive somewhere around 10:00, and leave somewhere around 15:00 to avoid rush hour - subtract lunch, and that’s not a lot of work getting done), it was just full of distractions. I don’t want to take regular breaks to go shoot the shit, or to go have a beer after lunch. I want to get work done, and I do that best with headphones on and not being bothered.
- eoerl 3y ago> It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments. There's no data on this, at the very least you could mention that it's only your personal impression ? IMO (and this is clearly a personal take) there are two competing effects: - higher bandwidth and easier to align face to face - more distractions, interruptions, more complicated to get things done If you're in a business or position where you have no IP or nothing hard to do per say, you'll see the first one dominate. If you're somewhere with IP and competitive advantages through smarts then I'd say (personal again) the second effect can come to dominate. Google pulling a "no remote" move means to me that their competitive advantage in terms of engineering and smarts is not a priority + using the fact that the market swung back towards employers vs. employees. But not general comment about "this take is obviously so much better", this is just intellectual lazyness I believe
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago> the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question This is an anti feature of offices. Usually that brief interruption costs about an hours productivity for anyone doing stuff like programming, etc, due to the massively high cost of context switching. It could have been an email/IM. > training is AWFUL remote. This implies that the training is lacking anyway, in most cases.
- lallysingh 3y agoThis is different for junior and senior engineers. If your work is a lot of smaller things and you need to ask a lot of questions, an office is useful. If you have deeper work and need to focus for hours, the open-plan office is terrible.
- EliRivers 3y agoYou also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me. training is AWFUL remote. Not even close Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).
- lolinder 3y agoAgreed! Companies were basically sticking a bunch of people in a primordial soup and then stepping back and hoping for abiogenesis. It turns out people are pretty creative, so you would often get it, but that doesn't make the primordial soup the be-all-end-all of company organization. At some point you have to develop self-awareness, you have to develop structures capable of improving intentionally. Those structures will dramatically outperform the primordial soup approach, but they do take work to build.
- BenisMaximus 3y agoAbsolutely nailed it. Remote work requires a bit more upfront involvement but the payoff is a more independent and healthy workforce (generally speaking). This will 100% highlight any failures in your current system/model. Our onboarding system has been terrible for as long as anyone here can remember. Remote just made it stand out but it was always shit.
- JohnFen 3y ago> In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me. Where I currently work (100% in the office, sadly), there is a coworker who did this to me regularly. He was causing a serious loss of productivity, and wouldn't stop. So I started doing the same to him, stopping by his cube a few times a day at random to ask some legitimate technical question. The end of the week I started doing that, he complained to me about my constantly interrupting him. It was causing him to fall behind in his work. I told him "Of course, I'll start messaging you instead of stopping by. Would you extend the same courtesy to me?" He stopped needlessly interrupting me.
- berniedurfee 3y agoHard disagree on this take. Working remote allows me to finish my thoughts, finish the task at hand or just take a breather when I need to. I think that’s the same for those who prefer remote work. Async communication is far better for a team that needs to get through a never shrinking pile of work. Remote work isn’t for everyone. It’s a preference, with zero impact on productivity or efficiency for those that prefer it. I will admit one major downside. It’s easier to move one’s career forward, especially in management if you’re able to chat with higher level decision-makers as-hoc and in person. For those that thrive off of connections to climb the ladder, remote is a much harder climb.
- netjiro 3y ago> a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart Hard numbers from 20+ projects over 20+ years say the exact opposite. Hard core tech R&D projects, small and large. When I compare the distributed all remote projects to those run in house, it is night and day difference.
- xwdv 3y agoDo NOT approach me to ask a question when I am sitting at my desk. I am trying to work. Send an email or some other message through another collaboration platform. Stay AWAY.
- pnt12 3y agoCounter argument: there's lots of ways to share knowledge remotely, some people just aren't used to it. Learning: presentations, pairing, questions via messages, asking for a quick call to clarify something. Also: document your shit. Ideation: set up ideation sessions before tackling a ticket. At the end of a daily scrum, ask people x and y to stay and trade some ideas.
- jasonjei 3y agoIf that’s true how is the Linux kernel project so successful with collaborators from all over the world not even working under the same roof?
- itsboring 3y agoUsing mailing lists no less. I would contend that the Linux kernel is the most successful and prolific piece of software in the world.
- snarfy 3y agoI have a hybrid schedule. I lose 2 hours/day commuting + 1/2 hour de-stress from driving through shit traffic. I get far more work done on my WFH days than I do my in-office days. I'm an IC and don't need to do much mentoring, and when i do it's always easier to do it remotely with screen sharing than to try and sit two chairs into the same office. The only reason I come into the office is to have lunch with my co-workers. I do NOT see them the entire rest of the day.
- BenisMaximus 3y ago>sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation Only thing I've ever gained this way were some bread-making tips (which admittedly were pretty good). Our office has handily addressed this problem by making communities of expertise that anyone can join, occasional icebreaker events, and monthly showcases of what we're working on or investigating (this usually is just a few minutes of presentation by each team and is optional). Make it easy for people to connect and they will do so. Meanwhile when I'm at the office, it's headphone-city and the open office format makes those random chats very distracting and frustrating.
- jason-phillips 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. Yikes. One would hope that the distance between our cubes is sufficiently punitive so as to discourage these excursions. Please, do not disturb while cogitating.
- tester756 3y agoDisagree, twice. >You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close. I've joined company that wasn't remote-native and yet they were well prepared They had training videos, documentation, presentations and introductory codebase walk - a lot of stuff I've been really quickly productive. So maybe training is as good as your effort put into that? >You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question I can send message to someone over chat way faster than you can get to his office room / desk.
- time_to_smile 3y agoStrong agree on the remote training being entirely possible. My first dev job was remote (long before the pandemic) and onboarding was not a problem at all. In fact because you need people to get set up remotely, I find the documentation tends to be better at all remote companies. In-Office companies sort of assume that you can just tap someone on the shoulder if you get stuck so there's more often, in my experience, gaps in the documentation. I particularly find this a strange claim since open source projects have been successfully onboarding new people remotely prior to there even being efficient ways to screen share/video chat etc.
- jxf 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. I can almost guarantee that this person doesn't want to be interrupted in their work at random by people "just walking over to ask a question".
- commandlinefan 3y agoAnd it's never "just a question", either. Social etiquette being what it is, nobody ever comes over and says, "what port does Postgres run on again?". They come over and say hello, and chat a bit, then they ask about ports, then they go off on a tangent about networking problems, then they chat about their kids for a while, then they finally say, "oh shoot I have a meeting in five minutes, got to go".
- whateveracct 3y agoI have spontaneous conversation and ideation daily at my remote job. In slack. Both with teammates in DMs and team channels, and in more general channels. I have never had trouble asking people questions. And I get asked them all the time. In fact, that the questions and answers are written and async is superior. When I was in the office, people would frequently take conversations to Slack (or say "could you Slack me what you just told me?") Personally too, I find written communication to be superior. I will do quick video calls with people but that's rare (and usually to the taste of the other person). We also have excellent training backboned by mentorship.
- andreygrehov 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question Isn't that the distraction people try to avoid? I don't think there is an expectation from anyone that people should walk over to someone's desk and ask questions. In fact, I believe it's the opposite of what's typically being welcomed – do your own research, dive deep into the problem, work with the problem from different angles, etc. I do not believe that remote training is awful. When someone's trained remotely, they can always record a meeting and come back to that recording many times in the future. If something is unclear, just send a message. Nobody's recording screenshares in the office, so training/onboarding material from your co-workers gets easily lost. This leads to distractions, such as walking over to someone's desk and asking follow up questions.
- grimjack00 3y agoI'd put more faith in the claims of valuing spontaneous conversation and just walking down the hall if companies actually had full teams in a single physical location, where this would be possible. I've been in the software industry (QA and dev) since 2000. Other than a short time with a startup, I have _never_ been on a team where everyone has been in the same state, never mind the same city.
- turdprincess 3y agoI think in-person collaboration helps, but with folks on the outside of your team. If you are on a small team or in a small startup, I don’t see a big impact of in person communication. You will be interacting with these same people so much that you will grow a close bond with them regardless. When I think about the small company projects I’ve done, it’s honestly hard to tell which were remote and which weren’t - the bonds formed and amount of teamwork was the same. For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways. There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.
- commandlinefan 3y ago> spontaneous conversation & ideation The company: All the magic happens face to face. Also the company: All your coworkers are in a different country on the other side of the world who are asleep when you're awake. Figure it out.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoYes, but you've already lost that by distributing people all across the world.
- ubercore 3y agoEasy to onboard in person but still work remote.
- sage76 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question Here's what typically happened in every company I worked at. I ask a question, they tell me to look at the documentation. I look it up, do what I needed to do, and at some point, it all unravels because the documentation is horribly out of date, and there was something else that needed to be done from the beginning, which this other guy knows about. Training is always awful, in person and remote. Nobody wants to help or give any info, even when you are asking questions specific to the company product. Things that can't be googled, or things that the team would be better off just telling rather than letting the new guy struggle for a week. No I'm not bitter at all.....
- ckdarby 3y agoThis is where feeding all written communication, tickets, docs, etc into a model solves this. The model provides that "Google search" experience, but for specific to the company.
- mejutoco 3y agoSometimes I do a sketch MR and share that code. Then other people can give advice and check some specific implementation. I found in general discussions are more productive when discussing specific things. This also shows to people that you did some work. In general it makes them more receptive.
- JohnFen 3y ago> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. That's a benefit to working from home. One of the worst things about office work is that it makes it easy for someone to come and interrupt your train of thought. It takes time to enter the flow, and almost no time to be shoved out of it, at which point you have to take time to get back into the flow. A quick question can cost a half hour or so that way. This is where IM or email shine. You can ignore it until you're in a place where answering it won't be so costly.
- no_wizard 3y agoNone these things are immutable laws of work though. They can all be fostered in a remote first environment, its just not the same thing. Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work). While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach. What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board. Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work. You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear. That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem