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100%. We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. I think that information is

by dcow 3y ago

100%. We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. I think that information is also known to people making decisions and is why we’re seeing hybrid policies which essentially codify the pre-covid behavior of taking a WFH day. Pre-covid, having two or three company sanctioned WFH days was the dream. Let’s not forget. So what really annoys me at this point are the holdouts still arguing for 100% fully remote positions for every employee or the employer is essentially abusing them and just wants to creep on people working in desks and watch them type. I mean come on… fully remote just doesn't work for every employee, sorry. For every “I’m more productive at home” there’s an “I need face to face interaction with other humans to effectively collaborate”. That’s life. IMO, hybrid work policies are an incredibly positive and generous outcome of the pandemic. If you don't like even that then either become a fully remote employee after a discussion with your manager. Or go work for a place where it’s explicitly part of the policy/job/contract up front. Mostly sick of hearing whinny parroting of the same arguments ad nauseam.

judge2020 3y ago
The issue is that the employees that do love hybrid/on-site also have to force everyone else to become hybrid - otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building".
- mym1990 3y ago
  No one but management is forcing anyone to do anything. If I do well in person, then as a colleague I need to respect that other people might do well remote, and vice versa.
  - dcow 3y ago
    That’s why hybrid policies represent a compromise. If you’re more than 2 years old you understand the meaning of compromise. Nobody get’s exactly what they want, but the outcome aims to please both sides by offering affordances in both directions.
    - p0pcult 3y ago
      [dead]
    - mym1990 3y ago
      Where did I say hybrid was not a compromise? If you're more than 5 years old you should be able to read my comment and interpret it correctly.
      - dcow 3y ago
        Sorry that wasn't meant to be directed at you. I was responding to the thread of discussion. I think we agree, and I was just reiterating that because there are two sides people need to compromise. I was also expressing frustration that there are still people chiming in to the tune of "well I want to be at home all day every day and hybrid is bad for me so RTO and anybody who supports it is full of shit" without any ability to, well, compromise.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Sure, but these hybrid policies aren't just the result of management wanting to see busybodies typing, but people that still bother to come into the office making small talk like "yeah it's always empty" or "that onsite day was nice, wish my team was here more often". They likely still respect everyone's preference, but management needs to keep everyone happy, so hybrid is the compromise and it allows management to justify their multiple-million-dollar commercial real-estate investments.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  That hasn't been my experience. Given the option, most the people-needers congregate at work, while the slightly more introverted types work from home. Its not the screens during meetings that bother the extraverted ones, it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    > it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday. This is what bothers me, why should I lose an hour+ of MY day because some people like the feeling of others around them. I don't get that time back, I don't get the money for the wear and tear on my vehicle, all so someone feels warm and cozy, unrelated to the actual productivity of the work. Employers love to treat employees as numbers, but when employees say "Hey I'm a number, look at my productivity, don't make me participate in these rituals", people act like its childish. I don't owe anything to my employer, because they don't owe me anything except the legal compensation for the work.
    - dcow 3y ago
      The argument is that your team’s quality of work, whether you like it or not, suffers without some amount of human interaction. You need to address that, not just parrot the personal preference to be a good little Jira closing productive remote cog and not interact with anybody at all. Not that I don't agree that companies should do a better job understanding individual productivity, but that’s not the argument.
      - 8note 3y ago
        Where's the numbers to support that argument? The jira closer has tickets to point at
        dcow 3y ago
        Rate of Jira tickets closed does not equate to "quality product". It (optimistically) means "lots of work done". The numbers you're looking for would come from user product feedback and bug reports, but it also comes subjectively from the product owner/leader's assessment of the product's performance. That's the nuance that leadership deals with every day and which we often overlook as good little Jira closing robots.
- wbl 3y ago
  My boss is in Florida, I am in the bay, most of the rest of the team is in the other bay. We're not having an F2F.
  - dcow 3y ago
    Sounds like you have a good argument for being designated as a remote team/employee. I wish you luck.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building". The places that I and my friends worked at pre-pandemic were already like this. Meetings were held via videoconferencing even though everyone was in the office, people mostly interacted with each via chat and email, etc.
  - troebr 3y ago
    Same, and it was so dumb. The startup I worked for had an awesome office culture, with snacks, food deliveries, etc. Everybody was in the office unless and people stayed home if they needed to for something. When we got acquired by an older more corporate co, the office was terrible. Nicer looking, but white noise machines, cubicles (roomy and fancy, but still cubicles). The office was out of the way so people started wfh 2 days a week. I was working remotely from the office and ended up asking to go full remote. Also the coffee went from awesome to terrible.
- dcow 3y ago
  It’s not hybrid vs remote. It’s fully onsite vs fully remote. Hybrid policies are a compromise that aim to give both sides ground, while acknowledging that it’s not the perfect outcome for either. To say “hybrid is forcing me back into the office when I want none of it and screw those people who want to talk to me face to face” is wholly and completely the juvenile response that indicates you truly don't understand the concept of a compromise whatsoever.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Hybrid, even one day a week, is a compromise that enables the vast majority of what the RTO people want and almost nothing the WFH people want. Dress it up anyway you want, but there's a reason why so many recruiters hide hybrid behind the remote label until very late in the hiring process. Hybrid is simply unable to attract people who want WFH but is a favorite "we gave you 1% and we get 99%" compromise of the forced faux friends camp. No matter how many bottles of pretty sprinkles you put on a turd, it's still a turd.
    - dcow 3y ago
      That’s hyperbolic bullshit. Here I was thinking that WFH people didn't want to commute unnecessarily into the office, be able to work undistracted at home in their flow state, be home to meet the handyman in the afternoon if needed or do an errand that has to happen during business hours, eat lunch with their kids, etc. How does 1 day a week in the office kill all that, exactly? The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >How does 1 day a week in the office kill all that, exactly? You missed the "to live wherever the fuck I want" part that it absolutely kills...
        dcow 3y ago
        > The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person. No I didn't. That's called a remote job not WFH. If work from wherever the fuck I want is important to you then go work for a remote company or convince the one you work at that your roll can be performed remote, from wherever the fuck you want. Nobody is arguing against that.
- watwut 3y ago
  Not really. They meet other hybrid employees.
taeric 3y ago
I'm not fully convinced that there are two strong camps, on the merits. If there were, you wouldn't have to have policies requiring one over the other, as you would let it win on the merits. That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that. This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."
- dcow 3y ago
  Well that’s why hybrid is a compromise. I don't think it’s totally fair to say “well covid made things WFH so a hybrid policy is requiring RTO”. This thread is about Google’s hybrid policy not company X requiring 5 day RTO or GTFO. That would be a different discussion. Otherwise totally agree about doing more metrics based evaluation of performance, teams, and roles.
  - taeric 3y ago
    No? This article is clearly largely about a memo getting upset that folks aren't making it in the required 3 days a week. Yes, it mentions fully remote people with the hopes to get them to switch off fully remote. But the meat, as it were, is in the reminder to everyone else that absence factors into performance reviews. That is, they don't measure you by OKRs, but by attendance. (I can see an argument that it is "in addition to OKRs," but that doesn't change my challenge here. If those work, why have attendance?)
    - dcow 3y ago
      What about the part where you’re still remote for two days? Hybrid means in office part of the time, WFH the other part of the time. Yes you have to go into the office in a hybrid situation, but not 5 days a week, only 3. That’s my point, you shouldn’t complain “waaa hybrid makes me RTO” while conveniently ignoring that you also get non-RTO days… well unless you’re a completely uncompromising twig.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone. Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.
fumeux_fume 3y ago
Lol. You're getting exactly what you want and yet, still finding a way to bitch about it.
smarmgoblin 3y ago
This is where I get hung up every time. As a software engineer, “I cannot collaborate with someone unless I am physically next to their body” is just not a tenable position. We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.
- dcow 3y ago
  As a software engineer I have not ever worked at a company where I am only interacting with other software engineers.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  It depends on the type of work. No, I've never needed a face-to-ace with a PR, and it'd be less efficient to do it face to face because it often needs more than 1-2 people in office looking at it. But I have noticed that it's much harder to brainstorm ideas remotely. Where you want fast back and forth, everyone to speak their minds, notes to jot down. These aren't as efficient to do on a computer, at least not for my generation raised between tech and analog.
neon_electro 3y ago
I worked for a company pre-pandemic where I had more or less the best of all worlds. The company was already split between East Coast and West Coast, so meetings from conference rooms in the office were often the same quality as meetings from anywhere remotely, since Google Meet had always been there to connect both coasts. As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice. Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote. Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.
boring_twenties 3y ago
Hybrid, even if it were one day a week, removes the #1 advantage of fully remote work, which is being able to live anywhere you want.
coldtea 3y ago
>We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem. If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt forced servitude as the maximum productivity setup (which, they historically, and even today in many places, have adopted).
- dcow 3y ago
  I should have included product quality explicitly in the list of things to optimize, my bad. That's, at least, what I was trying to communicate I wrote the comment. But also, quality and productivity are not totally separate, let's not be coy. If you can't collaborate effectively then both productivity and quality can take hits.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Most companies operate (whether working from office or WFH) as not giving a flying fuck about product quality. There are so many corners cut, stuff added to increase the bottom line with shady crap to the detriment of the end product (and the user experience), blatant lack of passion for the result and so on. If the product suffers, it's not because they're working for home. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, or the famous old examples everybody loved to have Avid and Quark, have made no end of crap releases, or crapped on their priorly good products, while strictly working from an office. And that's with product oriented companies - corporate and government software is, of course, much much worse. Still, why optimize for product quality either? It's a bottomless pit. We should optimize for a decent product (that would already be an improvement), and work-life balance. Work is 1/3+ of daily life, and people's time is not something people should be forced to sacrifice (by piling up forced relocation or commuting time, open plan or cublicle farm environments, and lack of day contact with kids, spouses, ability to drop the kids to school or handle some chore over the week, and so on).

by dcow 3y ago

judge2020 3y ago

The issue is that the employees that do love hybrid/on-site also have to force everyone else to become hybrid - otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building".

mym1990 3y ago
No one but management is forcing anyone to do anything. If I do well in person, then as a colleague I need to respect that other people might do well remote, and vice versa.
- dcow 3y ago
  That’s why hybrid policies represent a compromise. If you’re more than 2 years old you understand the meaning of compromise. Nobody get’s exactly what they want, but the outcome aims to please both sides by offering affordances in both directions.
  - p0pcult 3y ago
    [dead]
  - mym1990 3y ago
    Where did I say hybrid was not a compromise? If you're more than 5 years old you should be able to read my comment and interpret it correctly.
    - dcow 3y ago
      Sorry that wasn't meant to be directed at you. I was responding to the thread of discussion. I think we agree, and I was just reiterating that because there are two sides people need to compromise. I was also expressing frustration that there are still people chiming in to the tune of "well I want to be at home all day every day and hybrid is bad for me so RTO and anybody who supports it is full of shit" without any ability to, well, compromise.
- judge2020 3y ago
  Sure, but these hybrid policies aren't just the result of management wanting to see busybodies typing, but people that still bother to come into the office making small talk like "yeah it's always empty" or "that onsite day was nice, wish my team was here more often". They likely still respect everyone's preference, but management needs to keep everyone happy, so hybrid is the compromise and it allows management to justify their multiple-million-dollar commercial real-estate investments.
jvanderbot 3y ago
That hasn't been my experience. Given the option, most the people-needers congregate at work, while the slightly more introverted types work from home. Its not the screens during meetings that bother the extraverted ones, it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  > it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday. This is what bothers me, why should I lose an hour+ of MY day because some people like the feeling of others around them. I don't get that time back, I don't get the money for the wear and tear on my vehicle, all so someone feels warm and cozy, unrelated to the actual productivity of the work. Employers love to treat employees as numbers, but when employees say "Hey I'm a number, look at my productivity, don't make me participate in these rituals", people act like its childish. I don't owe anything to my employer, because they don't owe me anything except the legal compensation for the work.
  - dcow 3y ago
    The argument is that your team’s quality of work, whether you like it or not, suffers without some amount of human interaction. You need to address that, not just parrot the personal preference to be a good little Jira closing productive remote cog and not interact with anybody at all. Not that I don't agree that companies should do a better job understanding individual productivity, but that’s not the argument.
    - 8note 3y ago
      Where's the numbers to support that argument? The jira closer has tickets to point at
      - dcow 3y ago
        Rate of Jira tickets closed does not equate to "quality product". It (optimistically) means "lots of work done". The numbers you're looking for would come from user product feedback and bug reports, but it also comes subjectively from the product owner/leader's assessment of the product's performance. That's the nuance that leadership deals with every day and which we often overlook as good little Jira closing robots.
wbl 3y ago
My boss is in Florida, I am in the bay, most of the rest of the team is in the other bay. We're not having an F2F.
- dcow 3y ago
  Sounds like you have a good argument for being designated as a remote team/employee. I wish you luck.
JohnFen 3y ago
> otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building". The places that I and my friends worked at pre-pandemic were already like this. Meetings were held via videoconferencing even though everyone was in the office, people mostly interacted with each via chat and email, etc.
- troebr 3y ago
  Same, and it was so dumb. The startup I worked for had an awesome office culture, with snacks, food deliveries, etc. Everybody was in the office unless and people stayed home if they needed to for something. When we got acquired by an older more corporate co, the office was terrible. Nicer looking, but white noise machines, cubicles (roomy and fancy, but still cubicles). The office was out of the way so people started wfh 2 days a week. I was working remotely from the office and ended up asking to go full remote. Also the coffee went from awesome to terrible.
dcow 3y ago
It’s not hybrid vs remote. It’s fully onsite vs fully remote. Hybrid policies are a compromise that aim to give both sides ground, while acknowledging that it’s not the perfect outcome for either. To say “hybrid is forcing me back into the office when I want none of it and screw those people who want to talk to me face to face” is wholly and completely the juvenile response that indicates you truly don't understand the concept of a compromise whatsoever.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Hybrid, even one day a week, is a compromise that enables the vast majority of what the RTO people want and almost nothing the WFH people want. Dress it up anyway you want, but there's a reason why so many recruiters hide hybrid behind the remote label until very late in the hiring process. Hybrid is simply unable to attract people who want WFH but is a favorite "we gave you 1% and we get 99%" compromise of the forced faux friends camp. No matter how many bottles of pretty sprinkles you put on a turd, it's still a turd.
  - dcow 3y ago
    That’s hyperbolic bullshit. Here I was thinking that WFH people didn't want to commute unnecessarily into the office, be able to work undistracted at home in their flow state, be home to meet the handyman in the afternoon if needed or do an errand that has to happen during business hours, eat lunch with their kids, etc. How does 1 day a week in the office kill all that, exactly? The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >How does 1 day a week in the office kill all that, exactly? You missed the "to live wherever the fuck I want" part that it absolutely kills...
      - dcow 3y ago
        > The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person. No I didn't. That's called a remote job not WFH. If work from wherever the fuck I want is important to you then go work for a remote company or convince the one you work at that your roll can be performed remote, from wherever the fuck you want. Nobody is arguing against that.
watwut 3y ago
Not really. They meet other hybrid employees.

taeric 3y ago

I'm not fully convinced that there are two strong camps, on the merits. If there were, you wouldn't have to have policies requiring one over the other, as you would let it win on the merits. That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that. This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."

dcow 3y ago
Well that’s why hybrid is a compromise. I don't think it’s totally fair to say “well covid made things WFH so a hybrid policy is requiring RTO”. This thread is about Google’s hybrid policy not company X requiring 5 day RTO or GTFO. That would be a different discussion. Otherwise totally agree about doing more metrics based evaluation of performance, teams, and roles.
- taeric 3y ago
  No? This article is clearly largely about a memo getting upset that folks aren't making it in the required 3 days a week. Yes, it mentions fully remote people with the hopes to get them to switch off fully remote. But the meat, as it were, is in the reminder to everyone else that absence factors into performance reviews. That is, they don't measure you by OKRs, but by attendance. (I can see an argument that it is "in addition to OKRs," but that doesn't change my challenge here. If those work, why have attendance?)
  - dcow 3y ago
    What about the part where you’re still remote for two days? Hybrid means in office part of the time, WFH the other part of the time. Yes you have to go into the office in a hybrid situation, but not 5 days a week, only 3. That’s my point, you shouldn’t complain “waaa hybrid makes me RTO” while conveniently ignoring that you also get non-RTO days… well unless you’re a completely uncompromising twig.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone. Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.

fumeux_fume 3y ago

Lol. You're getting exactly what you want and yet, still finding a way to bitch about it.

smarmgoblin 3y ago

This is where I get hung up every time. As a software engineer, “I cannot collaborate with someone unless I am physically next to their body” is just not a tenable position. We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.

dcow 3y ago
As a software engineer I have not ever worked at a company where I am only interacting with other software engineers.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
It depends on the type of work. No, I've never needed a face-to-ace with a PR, and it'd be less efficient to do it face to face because it often needs more than 1-2 people in office looking at it. But I have noticed that it's much harder to brainstorm ideas remotely. Where you want fast back and forth, everyone to speak their minds, notes to jot down. These aren't as efficient to do on a computer, at least not for my generation raised between tech and analog.

neon_electro 3y ago

I worked for a company pre-pandemic where I had more or less the best of all worlds. The company was already split between East Coast and West Coast, so meetings from conference rooms in the office were often the same quality as meetings from anywhere remotely, since Google Meet had always been there to connect both coasts. As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice. Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote. Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.

boring_twenties 3y ago

Hybrid, even if it were one day a week, removes the #1 advantage of fully remote work, which is being able to live anywhere you want.

coldtea 3y ago

>We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity. Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem. If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt forced servitude as the maximum productivity setup (which, they historically, and even today in many places, have adopted).

dcow 3y ago
I should have included product quality explicitly in the list of things to optimize, my bad. That's, at least, what I was trying to communicate I wrote the comment. But also, quality and productivity are not totally separate, let's not be coy. If you can't collaborate effectively then both productivity and quality can take hits.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Most companies operate (whether working from office or WFH) as not giving a flying fuck about product quality. There are so many corners cut, stuff added to increase the bottom line with shady crap to the detriment of the end product (and the user experience), blatant lack of passion for the result and so on. If the product suffers, it's not because they're working for home. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, or the famous old examples everybody loved to have Avid and Quark, have made no end of crap releases, or crapped on their priorly good products, while strictly working from an office. And that's with product oriented companies - corporate and government software is, of course, much much worse. Still, why optimize for product quality either? It's a bottomless pit. We should optimize for a decent product (that would already be an improvement), and work-life balance. Work is 1/3+ of daily life, and people's time is not something people should be forced to sacrifice (by piling up forced relocation or commuting time, open plan or cublicle farm environments, and lack of day contact with kids, spouses, ability to drop the kids to school or handle some chore over the week, and so on).