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After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to e

by extr 3y ago

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next". For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.

majormajor 3y ago
Your experience matches mine, where yeah, it could work even in situations where it commonly fails if there was "just" better management... but... well, yeah. EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.
maerF0x0 3y ago
I'm curious if you've considered that there is a pretty major cost difference between the two options? (at least for the company) Would you conclude that In Person is much better , in excess of the additional costs ?
- karmasimida 3y ago
  This doesn't make OP's point invalid. If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market.
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    >If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market. Can you please expand? I'm not understanding.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Weirdly, companies don't seem to care about this kind of cost. I don't think I've ever seen "we're going remote first to save costs"? More likely is the "prestige HQ" which is deliberately made more expensive than it needs to be for status.
  - twic 3y ago
    That's the trend in commercial real estate - prestigious, luxurious, eye-wateringly expensive class A space is doing well, but the bottom has fallen out of the market for practical, cost-effective class B space: https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-class-b-office-owners-take-what-you-can-and-run/ https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-cla...
- marcinzm 3y ago
  The cost difference is probably rather small. CoWorking spaces in large cities charge something like $500/desk/month which we can assume is a reasonable cost of office space. That comes out to $6k/year/employee. Google's median employee pay is around $300k so we're talking a 2% difference in cost.
squegles 3y ago
Wow, this is matches my exact experience too. Just had never thought of it in these terms.
RHSeeger 3y ago
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
foogazi 3y ago
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build Not everyone is the same office - it’s a joke
andrei_says_ 3y ago
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Or sharing a zoom session. Bonus is that I don’t have to commute to an office on another continent to engage in this second modality - more than half of my teammates are in other cities and I don’t see a benefit in the standing next to each other.
beoberha 3y ago
I think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding. Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people. To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.
- extr 3y ago
  Yes, I am going through this right now as a new hire onboarding to a boutique codebase. As soon as you are 100% reliant on internal docs, you realize just how large the gap is between them and mainstream OSS libraries. I think a decent middle-ground between "Document everything" and "Organically relay all information" is to just write "doc-stubs". Just a list of everything out there with no real content. It gives people a jumping off point to ask questions and lets them know what they don't know.
  - throwaway173738 3y ago
    I’m also a big fan of having new people document things they wish they had known starting out.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  I am at the point where remote works better for me for a lot of what are ostensibly team / collaborative activities. For example, incident handling has been lot more efficient for us with the team looking at different aspects and sharing on a call/huddle than what we often used to naturally do (involving a gaggle forming around 1 person's computer with different people offering suggestions of varying usefulness). Demos and knowledge sharing I find also work better remote now than they used to in person now that people are used to the tooling. I slightly prefer onboarding remote also, but that is because I'm the kind of person who gets distracted by wondering if I'm sitting too close or maybe I have not enough or too much deodorant etc. The only thing that suffers remotely for me at this point is engagement. There's something about physically being with other people that makes their problems and desires seem more important to me, and I don't have any good hacks for giving more of a &"@$.
turdprincess 3y ago
With your Meta experience I am curious - would the people you had to talk to been in the office near you anyways, even if everyone was in office? It seems like with a huge global company the people who would be hard to get context from (so not the people you might have a video standup with daily or weekly) might be in a different office or building requiring a video call anyways
- extr 3y ago
  Not everyone, but there would have been enough people around to have dramatically improved my experience. The problem there was Meta does not have a strong culture of documentation, and I didn't know what I didn't know. It was common to spend 2-3 days working on something only to find out on a random zoom call there was an entire team working on the same thing. Discoverability didn't exist. I found the environment untenable for doing anything of value.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    At a large unnamed subsidiary of Microsoft, I saw four different teams working on a MSP solution. All of them crash and burned because each were run with 60+ engineers and not a single team talked to each other and they all reproduced the wheel (ignored federated systems and rolled their own)
tikhonj 3y ago
My best experiences working remotely—both during the pandemic and with folks in other locations before that—has been with research-oriented work. The reason? We had the time and space to work and communicate the way that made sense to us. We had plenty of shared pair/group sessions to work out design ideas and experiments, iterate on the system, debug trickier issues... etc. Everything else we could do well asynchronously. Since this was longer-term, more speculative work, we didn't have to worry about tickets or product/management breathing down our necks every day. On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect. So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.
- majormajor 3y ago
  I think you're using different phrasing to describe the same effect. Autonomy and the org knowing what it wants to do/needs to do go hand in hand. In your long-term speculative research oriented work, you had autonomy because you knew what you were working on - not what it was in terms of tickets per se, but it sounds like you knew your scope and your objectives. At 10+ person org sizes, most people can't have long-term scope and autonomy if the management don't know what it wants/needs, since they're just going to change their mind in a week or two. Once those decisions are made you can start delegating responsibility for execution. The easy thing to do is to blame this all on poor management, but I think that's too pat. I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem... and one that's often an ongoing, Sisyphean task, where high-bandwidth, low-latency communications are incredibly useful.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ? For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient. Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace. Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.
- extr 3y ago
  I wouldn't call it brainstorming. More like "alignment". Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. You can do this quickly if you have an experienced and disciplined PM guiding the discussion, but most people don't, so they just have long conversations. Which works fine IRL, but it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    > Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. This is a part that probably varies a lot individually...I'm a slow thinker, and have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help. If it's random brainstorming it doesn't matter a lot. If it's an actually important topics, it feels like a DDOS on your brain when you actually want to take time to understand the implications. Then sure, some situations require speed, but I don't see that many of them in day to day life. "What you think about moving to X framework for our metrics ?" can probably wait for 30 min. and not be a realtime exchange. > it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time. I've finding these meetings way more comfortable in remote...someone can be rambling for as long as they need, the effect on everyone's productivity is that much reduced. Same for people who speak very slowly actually, it's a lot less stress IMO and easier to engage when paradoxically you don't need to be 100% looking at them in the eyes.
bb88 3y ago
I might be reading your statements wrong. But it sounds like what you're saying it sounds like is: * Remote work is better if the management has a common goal and everyone can swim towards it. * In-person work is better if the management is adversarial or competitive with each other, or doesn't have a common goal to work towards. In either case, it seems like the problem is management, not the work location. Am I wrong here?
swellguy 3y ago
Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      I don't like the "trim fat" methaphor. Layoffs are more or less random. There is no good, from the company perspective, selection.
      - grepfru_it 3y ago
        Now is the time for managers and directors to find reasons to let go of the employees they don’t like. Some people don’t like eating fat, others will suck on it all day. Personally I trim a bit of fat off my meats before smoking them
    - wepple 3y ago
      Perhaps that’s me, the fat? If I were let go tomorrow there wouldn’t be any negative consequences for probably at least a year. I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter. But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was. Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically
locopati 3y ago
having worked for a fully remote company that was successfully acquired for a decent sum by a much larger respectable company, remote depends on the top levels of management communicating the vision regularly and being transparent about direction, changes in direction, and reasons for changes. add in someone skilled whose responsibility is for facilitating remote culture and you have a recipe for success. the problem is there is a ton of terrible leadership out there who want to rule by fiat, ignore their employees, and don't trust their employees (who they either directly or indirectly hired) to so their jobs.
bart_spoon 3y ago
I don’t think in-person is better if you don’t know what you need to build. I’ve experienced teams where people were totally without direction despite being in-person. I think in-person just makes it easier to look like you are busy when you have no direction, and remote lays the fact bare.
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion, it isn't decisive. When people are having zero ground during the meeting, it won't provide any meaningful result no matter what you do. And if it resulting in something, usually it'll be bad. What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. And that doesn't need to be in person
  - extr 3y ago
    > What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. This is exactly what I was getting at by referencing a benevolent dictatorship. When remote, it's just easier if one person is providing direction by fiat rather than trying to collect everyone's input and communally make a decision.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion Yes, that's why before WHF, people really loved meetings and brainstorm sessions at work /s In person during brainstorm discussion usually means endless time-wasting and bikeshedding.
m463 3y ago
what is PMF? NGMI?
- extr 3y ago
  Product Market Fit and Not Gonna Make It. The former is established startup product terminology, the latter is slang.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
refurb 3y ago
I would assume the importance of in-person versus remote also depends on the role. More team work versus individual work?
72f988bf 3y ago
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. true. > For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2 Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say? No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO... So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves. Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself. Take the call from your desk then? No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  > No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding. But at the same time it's perfectly okay to just come up to your busy colleague and pester them about something, because collaboration.
  - __oh_es 3y ago
    Establishing working relationships and setting boundaries is a professional skill
  - gotaran 3y ago
    It isn’t okay, but there’s enough nonverbal cues you can use to determine whether someone is busy at their desk.
    - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
      I can be just as busy at a watercooler away from my screen. That’s not the point. I think that all of the arguments in this conversation, whether they are valid or not, are not at all relevant to the purpose of the conversation. I have this wild guess that if a significant number of companies cut their leases on all those monstrous office spaces that are kept being built all the time, it could hurt some people with important companies a fucking lot, and the ripple effect could prove to be immense and disastrous. Spice must flow, and the fact that there are parties interested in those office spaces running and bringing money in has diddly to do with whether there are any actual productivity advantages of bringing the office workers back to the office or not. For enough dough you can buy enough experts and pundits and other talking heads that will overflow the information space with thinkpieces and analyses that go either way. Meanwhile, the only actual productivity boost is when you have a private office with a closable door within walking distance from your living place. But it’s not like anybody would give you _that,_ plebeian.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". Do you mind sharing the job title for something like this? Sounds like a dream job.
- loarabia 3y ago
  Currently I’m a GTPM at Meta and this is the expectation we have for onboarding to a new team unless you’re early in career. I’ve seen this be the case for SWE and other roles in the technical domain. Typically you have an expertise area and at least on my team a starter project or 2 with a tangible deliverable to get you going on something while you ramp and meet others and figure things out. Meta is a big place though so could be other expectations in other organizations.
- suzzer99 3y ago
  I transferred within my company to the much bigger company that bought us out and this is basically what my boss told me. Actually his exact words were "you need to create your own job." I hated it. Give me a freaking task, don't make me network and sell myself (remotely of course, no one I worked with was anywhere near me) just for something to do. I created my own job, just with a startup. For a year I had two ostensibly full time jobs. By the end the startup wasn't doing much either and I considered going for three full time jobs.
  - meinheld111 3y ago
    You seem to be doing something right. Imo most ppl are overworked and underpaid
- saagarjha 3y ago
  It’s less a job title (I’m a “software engineer” like everyone else) but the scope of the problem your role is aiming to solve. Look for places that 1. have an unsolved hard problem with 2. no real direction on where to go with it and 3. buy-in from someone to get it solved.
- extr 3y ago
jedberg 3y ago
In person makes no sense for any FAANG, because they are geographically distributed. All you do is come into the office to sit on video calls all day with people in other locations, unless you're at a very low level and your influence is very limited to just your team.
- commiepatrol 3y ago
  I see where you’re going with this but pretty much all L3s and L4s mostly deal with just their team. That’s more than 50% of the company if I’m not mistaken.
angarg12 3y ago
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. My anecdotal evidence is different. I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person. However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day. So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.
forgingahead 3y ago
This is a good insight, but the interesting counter-weight to the reality you describe is that many people who want "remote" and the independence of work, don't really want the same "benevolent dictatorship" either.
abhaynayar 3y ago
> "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute." Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above. While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.
godelski 3y ago
> * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. > * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase. I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.
onion2k 3y ago
In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build.. Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful. The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.
- chii 3y ago
  > ...etc happened without a big office while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    I'm not calling any of them solo productions. Linux and the internet were both massively collaborative projects built by many people who met up maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not all of them at once ever. They were globally distributed. Being in an office together was not necessary for the success of those things, which were some of the hardest technical research projects ever, so I'm questioning if people really need to be in-person to make YouTube or GMail. (I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >i dont think you can call the internet a solo production No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Is your average company made of some of the most brilliant and driven and experienced people in the world in their fields? Do they have no actual business goals but a wide open field to just do something big and different and impactful? If so then literally nothing else matters except not getting in their way. But there's very few cases like this.
ttul 3y ago
My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s Dilemma” - once a company has found product market fit and is generating profits, everything is fine-tuned for that purpose. The company’s reason for existing is to generate profits from that one thing that really worked out. Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale. If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.
_8j50 3y ago
Office work is nice for teams that actually benefit from open area desk layout. Teams that can work fine in cubicles and offices do great WFH. For me, the extroverts that insist in socializing, gossiping and politicking in person make office work an unproductive nightmare.
eecc 3y ago
> You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)
datadeft 3y ago
I totally agree. I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Beyond the practical scope of this point, we also find the need for mentoring (building a sustainable team).
Etheryte 3y ago
I think that's only one of many models where remote work works out. The other that I've seen function well across many companies is remote work where team members are highly skilled and have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on. This essentially lets every domain expert identify what the biggest pain points are in their field and then figure those out. You don't need top down dictatorship for this to work, but you do need a clear vision of where you want to be.
moonchrome 3y ago
How often are entire teams at the same building ? Like the other person mentioned - you're going to meet in conference rooms with video - this was norm pre COVID. I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity. 2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.
- paulcole 3y ago
  There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You prefer remote work This always gets to be such a dogmatic discussion that will to someone claiming anyone who likes working in an office has no social life. It’s just a preference. Remote work is not overall objectively better than office work (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true). Office work is not the right choice (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true).
  - brookst 3y ago
    For an autonomous IC who does not need to lead or contribute to thinks like whiteboarding, strategy discussions, client visits, etc, that is true. There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop. Remote can be accommodated, but it is not always exclusively about what the employee prefers.
    - paulcole 3y ago
      > There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop Well yeah a surgeon should be working in person, you got me there.
rco8786 3y ago
That description of Meta sounds like a high level of disfunction that has nothing to do with remote or in person.
- Tade0 3y ago
  The only other place where I encountered such a "system" was in one (small) company, where the CEO's dress code did not include pants and I wish I never went there in the first place.
Stranger43 3y ago
I suspect what your describing is less the cause but a symptom of the real case. In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be. And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.
XorNot 3y ago
> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. I'm curious how often anyone actually finds this situation to happen and improve the feedback loop. I feel like it's more of an illusion of productivity then actual productivity because it's a pile of constant interruptions. Like the given example with Meta doesn't seem like it would be better in-person, it sounds broken regardless.
achow 3y ago
Or in other words what business problem one is solving 0-1, 1-10 or 10-100. For first two remote is non-starter. Similarly, what career stage one is in? Young workers who are in 0-1, and to certain extent 1-10, remote really does not work.
- jen20 3y ago
  The first part of this is patently untrue. The most successful startup I worked at (defined as having IPO’d, and having their products effectively everywhere) was fully remote. This was very much 0-1, 1-10 type work. The only requirement to ever physically be in a given place was when visiting a customer. The FAANG I work for now similarly has lots of 0-1, 1-10 type work (at least for my team), and a fully remote team. It works fine too. The part about more junior employees is _more_ valid, though we had no problem on boarding juniors in either of those two situations. Ultimately whether remote work is successful depends on whether the people doing the work have sufficient self-discipline to get the job done, and whether the hypothetical office alternative is set up for success. Most offices are not remotely set up for success, but optimize instead for middle management (toxin or cancer? [1]) being able to view their fifedoms. [1]: https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-management-scaling-organizations-by-scaling-engineers-bryan-cantrill https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-manag...
- danaris 3y ago
  My wife worked for several years for a company with only about a half-dozen employees. It was full remote. She left there in 2011, after rising through the ranks to the level of division director. They did almost all their business over email and Skype, because at the time, Skype was still the best voice/video conferencing software available without dedicated hardware. If it was possible then for a small group of non-tech-focused people, it's certainly possible now, over a decade later and with an entire pandemic forcing the rapid improvement of all sorts of remote-work technology. That doesn't mean it's for everyone, but boldly stating that it's a "non-starter" is just unsupportable.
mcv 3y ago
> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. That just sounds like poor leadership to me. If you've got a holistic sense of what needs to be done, please share it with the people who need to be doing it. That, or cut it up into concrete chunks and tell people to build that. But telling people to "figure it out" and then not sharing the overall vision, sounds incredibly dysfunctional to me.
gabereiser 3y ago
I have the same conclusions as well however, in-person collaboration can be done remotely but it requires less professionalism and more trust. You have to allow for unforeseen moments and allow each participant to have their time to weigh in. Take breaks. It’s a 2.5x time slog vs in-person but it can be done with whiteboard tools and open honest communication. It’s the ones that expect excellence that struggle with remote’s imperfections.
Nimitz14 3y ago
Fantastic summary
ghaff 3y ago
Seniority is another factor. People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.) But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in. If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities. And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.
    - danaris 3y ago
      From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace. Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move. One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work. Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.
kodah 3y ago
Tech pays Industrial Psychologists, I don't know why we don't put them to work on this. I restarted my software career doing remote work. I didn't have a problem finding things to do because my responsibilities were clear (read: I had a good manager) and I was self-taught so I already had a muscle for seeking knowledge on my own. I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is and how much you innately know about what things your role is responsible for which can be propped up or replaced by seniority. I also suspect that new grads don't have muscles for finding/seeking internal and external information on their own, which feels powerless. There's ways to solve all these things without treating all of these folks the same. Frankly, I think these are all the problems you and I relate to, but what's really solved for the business by returning to an office isn't productivity or happiness. It's a real estate problem.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is I suspect the people on here who like to hate on managers either have a bad one or just don't realize how much crap they're being shielded from--a lot of which is inevitable in a large organization (where you can't tell everyone "hey figure it out on your own").
  - kodah 3y ago
    That could explain some situations, but I very well doubt it's as simple as "managers are unappreciated". Some managers are given wide latitude in controlling their teams work. Some managers execute on that, others don't. Some managers are given a lot of control over hiring. Some execute on that, other don't. Some managers are given wide latitude over reviews. Some managers execute on that while others don't. The reason managers are perceived to be less useful in tech usually, in my experience, boils down to where they spend their time and political capital. They either spend it on their team and enabling them or on themselves and enabling themselves. All of the above are ways that could go either way and the feeling is generally an accumulation of those decisions over time. I guess I could surmise that there's just a lot of "bad" managers in tech, but I don't think that's a useful sentiment without knowing why.
zingababba 3y ago
Probably the best distinction I have seen tbh...
jacooper 3y ago
What are PMF and NGMI?
x86x87 3y ago
I don't think it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days. There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold. IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.
- rhtgrg 3y ago
  Not to mention that even in-person workplaces (especially at large companies) still involve plenty of remote interaction due to the global nature of the workforce. Plenty of Googlers being required to be in-office will actually be working alone in-office, with their teammates far away...
- pandaman 3y ago
  If this is true then there is no need to worry: companies with thriving WFH developers will surely overcome the stuck in the old ways ones. Not only their developers have same or greater performance due to constant thriving but their expenses will be much less so they will be able to offer better compensation and steal the talent from the in-office dinosaurs.
  - x86x87 3y ago
    This is going to happen in the medium/long term. The only reason big corporations have a chance of pulling this off is the overall state of the economy. Once we see recovery their RTO antics will fail if the shift is not completely done.
    - pandaman 3y ago
      We will see. Has not happened in the past so I see a little reason to happen in the future.

by extr 3y ago

majormajor 3y ago

Your experience matches mine, where yeah, it could work even in situations where it commonly fails if there was "just" better management... but... well, yeah. EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.

maerF0x0 3y ago

I'm curious if you've considered that there is a pretty major cost difference between the two options? (at least for the company) Would you conclude that In Person is much better , in excess of the additional costs ?

karmasimida 3y ago
This doesn't make OP's point invalid. If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  >If you are talking about cost, then the only factor here is the market. Can you please expand? I'm not understanding.
pjc50 3y ago
Weirdly, companies don't seem to care about this kind of cost. I don't think I've ever seen "we're going remote first to save costs"? More likely is the "prestige HQ" which is deliberately made more expensive than it needs to be for status.
- twic 3y ago
  That's the trend in commercial real estate - prestigious, luxurious, eye-wateringly expensive class A space is doing well, but the bottom has fallen out of the market for practical, cost-effective class B space: https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-class-b-office-owners-take-what-you-can-and-run/ https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-cla...
marcinzm 3y ago
The cost difference is probably rather small. CoWorking spaces in large cities charge something like $500/desk/month which we can assume is a reasonable cost of office space. That comes out to $6k/year/employee. Google's median employee pay is around $300k so we're talking a 2% difference in cost.

squegles 3y ago

Wow, this is matches my exact experience too. Just had never thought of it in these terms.

RHSeeger 3y ago

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. In-person has benefits in those situations, but whether or not it's better varies a lot based on the person and the office. I find it VERY distracting to have people talking around me. As such, I get a lot less done when in an office, because I can't concentrate as well. When you add in the other negative (commute time, in person interruptions, etc), going into an office for work can far outweigh any benefits of being around the people you work with.

deleted 3y ago

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foogazi 3y ago

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build Not everyone is the same office - it’s a joke

andrei_says_ 3y ago

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Or sharing a zoom session. Bonus is that I don’t have to commute to an office on another continent to engage in this second modality - more than half of my teammates are in other cities and I don’t see a benefit in the standing next to each other.

beoberha 3y ago

I think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding. Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge. In my experience, having such barriers to doing these things makes new hires much less likely to reach out and put themselves into the situations where they can learn, no matter how much they are told it’s ok to bother people. To me, this is why remote works so much better at smaller companies with less bespoke tooling and legacy code. There’s no better way to learn than in person and there is a huge productivity boost when doing so. That said, personally, I’m willing to deal with the lower productivity in my work life to get the higher productivity in my real life by being able to do laundry during the day and not sit in traffic.

extr 3y ago
Yes, I am going through this right now as a new hire onboarding to a boutique codebase. As soon as you are 100% reliant on internal docs, you realize just how large the gap is between them and mainstream OSS libraries. I think a decent middle-ground between "Document everything" and "Organically relay all information" is to just write "doc-stubs". Just a list of everything out there with no real content. It gives people a jumping off point to ask questions and lets them know what they don't know.
- throwaway173738 3y ago
  I’m also a big fan of having new people document things they wish they had known starting out.
xyzzy123 3y ago
I am at the point where remote works better for me for a lot of what are ostensibly team / collaborative activities. For example, incident handling has been lot more efficient for us with the team looking at different aspects and sharing on a call/huddle than what we often used to naturally do (involving a gaggle forming around 1 person's computer with different people offering suggestions of varying usefulness). Demos and knowledge sharing I find also work better remote now than they used to in person now that people are used to the tooling. I slightly prefer onboarding remote also, but that is because I'm the kind of person who gets distracted by wondering if I'm sitting too close or maybe I have not enough or too much deodorant etc. The only thing that suffers remotely for me at this point is engagement. There's something about physically being with other people that makes their problems and desires seem more important to me, and I don't have any good hacks for giving more of a &"@$.

turdprincess 3y ago

With your Meta experience I am curious - would the people you had to talk to been in the office near you anyways, even if everyone was in office? It seems like with a huge global company the people who would be hard to get context from (so not the people you might have a video standup with daily or weekly) might be in a different office or building requiring a video call anyways

extr 3y ago
Not everyone, but there would have been enough people around to have dramatically improved my experience. The problem there was Meta does not have a strong culture of documentation, and I didn't know what I didn't know. It was common to spend 2-3 days working on something only to find out on a random zoom call there was an entire team working on the same thing. Discoverability didn't exist. I found the environment untenable for doing anything of value.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  At a large unnamed subsidiary of Microsoft, I saw four different teams working on a MSP solution. All of them crash and burned because each were run with 60+ engineers and not a single team talked to each other and they all reproduced the wheel (ignored federated systems and rolled their own)

tikhonj 3y ago

My best experiences working remotely—both during the pandemic and with folks in other locations before that—has been with research-oriented work. The reason? We had the time and space to work and communicate the way that made sense to us. We had plenty of shared pair/group sessions to work out design ideas and experiments, iterate on the system, debug trickier issues... etc. Everything else we could do well asynchronously. Since this was longer-term, more speculative work, we didn't have to worry about tickets or product/management breathing down our necks every day. On the other hand, the projects that suffered the most were the ones where folks had less scope and autonomy. If you can't unilaterally make decisions for anything that spans more than a day, and you're forced into some ticket-oriented process where everyone has "their" task to do, communication naturally suffers. If you're all in the office, there's a bit more slack to talk quickly and informally outside your immediate silo; remotely, this takes more intentionality, so the friction imposed by your culture and process has an outsize effect. So my conclusion has been, pretty much, the opposite: remote works better when people have real scope, independence and autonomy. If engineers and small teams can make decisions over longer time-frames, they'll have the space to adapt and work effectively. They might need somebody to set the example or foster the right habits, but it's fundamentally healthy and effective. The frictions with remote work come up when it's thrust against a less flexible culture that makes it harder for folks to adapt.

majormajor 3y ago
I think you're using different phrasing to describe the same effect. Autonomy and the org knowing what it wants to do/needs to do go hand in hand. In your long-term speculative research oriented work, you had autonomy because you knew what you were working on - not what it was in terms of tickets per se, but it sounds like you knew your scope and your objectives. At 10+ person org sizes, most people can't have long-term scope and autonomy if the management don't know what it wants/needs, since they're just going to change their mind in a week or two. Once those decisions are made you can start delegating responsibility for execution. The easy thing to do is to blame this all on poor management, but I think that's too pat. I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem... and one that's often an ongoing, Sisyphean task, where high-bandwidth, low-latency communications are incredibly useful.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. I have a hard time grasping this one. Is it brainstorming ? For things like pair programming or specification of a product, having separate screens and independent access to the same documents makes things a lot faster and efficient. Same way meetings tend to go smoother all participants can access whatever data they need independently from the presenter, and move through the docs at their own pace. Basically a mix of synchronous communication and access to all needed resources seems to me to perform better than IRL binding of two or more people looking at each other.

extr 3y ago
I wouldn't call it brainstorming. More like "alignment". Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. You can do this quickly if you have an experienced and disciplined PM guiding the discussion, but most people don't, so they just have long conversations. Which works fine IRL, but it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  > Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. This is a part that probably varies a lot individually...I'm a slow thinker, and have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help. If it's random brainstorming it doesn't matter a lot. If it's an actually important topics, it feels like a DDOS on your brain when you actually want to take time to understand the implications. Then sure, some situations require speed, but I don't see that many of them in day to day life. "What you think about moving to X framework for our metrics ?" can probably wait for 30 min. and not be a realtime exchange. > it's very uncomfortable to be on a zoom call for more than about 45 minutes at a time. I've finding these meetings way more comfortable in remote...someone can be rambling for as long as they need, the effect on everyone's productivity is that much reduced. Same for people who speak very slowly actually, it's a lot less stress IMO and easier to engage when paradoxically you don't need to be 100% looking at them in the eyes.

bb88 3y ago

I might be reading your statements wrong. But it sounds like what you're saying it sounds like is: * Remote work is better if the management has a common goal and everyone can swim towards it. * In-person work is better if the management is adversarial or competitive with each other, or doesn't have a common goal to work towards. In either case, it seems like the problem is management, not the work location. Am I wrong here?

swellguy 3y ago

Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.

ryandrake 3y ago
Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I don't like the "trim fat" methaphor. Layoffs are more or less random. There is no good, from the company perspective, selection.
    - grepfru_it 3y ago
      Now is the time for managers and directors to find reasons to let go of the employees they don’t like. Some people don’t like eating fat, others will suck on it all day. Personally I trim a bit of fat off my meats before smoking them
  - wepple 3y ago
    Perhaps that’s me, the fat? If I were let go tomorrow there wouldn’t be any negative consequences for probably at least a year. I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter. But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was. Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically

locopati 3y ago

having worked for a fully remote company that was successfully acquired for a decent sum by a much larger respectable company, remote depends on the top levels of management communicating the vision regularly and being transparent about direction, changes in direction, and reasons for changes. add in someone skilled whose responsibility is for facilitating remote culture and you have a recipe for success. the problem is there is a ton of terrible leadership out there who want to rule by fiat, ignore their employees, and don't trust their employees (who they either directly or indirectly hired) to so their jobs.

bart_spoon 3y ago

I don’t think in-person is better if you don’t know what you need to build. I’ve experienced teams where people were totally without direction despite being in-person. I think in-person just makes it easier to look like you are busy when you have no direction, and remote lays the fact bare.

fendy3002 3y ago
Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion, it isn't decisive. When people are having zero ground during the meeting, it won't provide any meaningful result no matter what you do. And if it resulting in something, usually it'll be bad. What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. And that doesn't need to be in person
- extr 3y ago
  > What I found to be the best approach is one or two people already established a concept at what to make or at least the image of it, and the discussion can move to the details and implementation plan. This is exactly what I was getting at by referencing a benevolent dictatorship. When remote, it's just easier if one person is providing direction by fiat rather than trying to collect everyone's input and communally make a decision.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Agree that though it's better in person during brainstorm / discussion Yes, that's why before WHF, people really loved meetings and brainstorm sessions at work /s In person during brainstorm discussion usually means endless time-wasting and bikeshedding.

m463 3y ago

what is PMF? NGMI?

extr 3y ago
Product Market Fit and Not Gonna Make It. The former is established startup product terminology, the latter is slang.
deleted 3y ago
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refurb 3y ago

I would assume the importance of in-person versus remote also depends on the role. More team work versus individual work?

72f988bf 3y ago

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. true. > For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2 Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say? No, this is FAANG. You're in MTV, but the people you need to collaborate are in NYC, LAX, SEA, AUS, SFO... So your in-person experience is you booking a room just for yourself so you can video conference all those people who also booked a room for themselves. Because every other team is in same situation, finding a meeting room is a challenge in itself. Take the call from your desk then? No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
> No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding. But at the same time it's perfectly okay to just come up to your busy colleague and pester them about something, because collaboration.
- __oh_es 3y ago
  Establishing working relationships and setting boundaries is a professional skill
- gotaran 3y ago
  It isn’t okay, but there’s enough nonverbal cues you can use to determine whether someone is busy at their desk.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    I can be just as busy at a watercooler away from my screen. That’s not the point. I think that all of the arguments in this conversation, whether they are valid or not, are not at all relevant to the purpose of the conversation. I have this wild guess that if a significant number of companies cut their leases on all those monstrous office spaces that are kept being built all the time, it could hurt some people with important companies a fucking lot, and the ripple effect could prove to be immense and disastrous. Spice must flow, and the fact that there are parties interested in those office spaces running and bringing money in has diddly to do with whether there are any actual productivity advantages of bringing the office workers back to the office or not. For enough dough you can buy enough experts and pundits and other talking heads that will overflow the information space with thinkpieces and analyses that go either way. Meanwhile, the only actual productivity boost is when you have a private office with a closable door within walking distance from your living place. But it’s not like anybody would give you _that,_ plebeian.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". Do you mind sharing the job title for something like this? Sounds like a dream job.

loarabia 3y ago
Currently I’m a GTPM at Meta and this is the expectation we have for onboarding to a new team unless you’re early in career. I’ve seen this be the case for SWE and other roles in the technical domain. Typically you have an expertise area and at least on my team a starter project or 2 with a tangible deliverable to get you going on something while you ramp and meet others and figure things out. Meta is a big place though so could be other expectations in other organizations.
suzzer99 3y ago
I transferred within my company to the much bigger company that bought us out and this is basically what my boss told me. Actually his exact words were "you need to create your own job." I hated it. Give me a freaking task, don't make me network and sell myself (remotely of course, no one I worked with was anywhere near me) just for something to do. I created my own job, just with a startup. For a year I had two ostensibly full time jobs. By the end the startup wasn't doing much either and I considered going for three full time jobs.
- meinheld111 3y ago
  You seem to be doing something right. Imo most ppl are overworked and underpaid
saagarjha 3y ago
It’s less a job title (I’m a “software engineer” like everyone else) but the scope of the problem your role is aiming to solve. Look for places that 1. have an unsolved hard problem with 2. no real direction on where to go with it and 3. buy-in from someone to get it solved.
extr 3y ago

jedberg 3y ago

In person makes no sense for any FAANG, because they are geographically distributed. All you do is come into the office to sit on video calls all day with people in other locations, unless you're at a very low level and your influence is very limited to just your team.

commiepatrol 3y ago
I see where you’re going with this but pretty much all L3s and L4s mostly deal with just their team. That’s more than 50% of the company if I’m not mistaken.

angarg12 3y ago

> * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. My anecdotal evidence is different. I've spent the last 2 years building a large, complex, and ambiguous system working almost exclusively remote, and half of it from another continent. For the first year I never met a colleague in person. However, all this time I have been working closely with another engineer. Both of us are senior and very tenured, got good rapport and were highly aligned and motivated. We were able to execute efficiently, sometimes spending hours huddling in Slack per day. So my feeling is that remote works in some scenarios and not others, particularly involving new or junior engineers.

forgingahead 3y ago

This is a good insight, but the interesting counter-weight to the reality you describe is that many people who want "remote" and the independence of work, don't really want the same "benevolent dictatorship" either.

abhaynayar 3y ago

> "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute." Hard relate. Had my first internship WFH at Big Tech during the pandemic. I had expected work to be more on the lines of: there's always a lot of work to be done, and people will let you know about that. Instead it was the opposite, exactly as quoted above. While it meant I had more freedom, I would have preferred if someone just doled out concrete tasks to me. I felt a bit lost. But then again, grass is greener on the other side.

godelski 3y ago

> * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. > * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. This is why the other day I ranted about how my actual preference is in office but having a door that I can close. Realistically we shift between these two modes. In the first mode I need to reduce distractions and isolate myself. This is hard with slack and hard with an open office or cubicles. In person let's me even ignore slack as someone can knock on my door if it is urgent! But that's not all the time, so I open the door and communicate that it is collaboration and discussion phase. I don't know why companies have become so allergic to doors. They are amazing and can let employees be in control of the chaos of work schedules. They'll know far better than anyone else if they're more productive that day/hour/minute in isolation or in collaboration. Micromanaging doesn't help, a door does.

onion2k 3y ago

In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build.. Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and millions of examples of projects from company offices that are awful. The physical geography of the team is not an indicator of success.

chii 3y ago
> ...etc happened without a big office while linux or git was created relatively sololy by a single person (at least at the beginning), i dont think you can call the internet a solo production.
- onion2k 3y ago
  I'm not calling any of them solo productions. Linux and the internet were both massively collaborative projects built by many people who met up maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not all of them at once ever. They were globally distributed. Being in an office together was not necessary for the success of those things, which were some of the hardest technical research projects ever, so I'm questioning if people really need to be in-person to make YouTube or GMail. (I don't know the history of git, maybe that too though.)
- ghaff 3y ago
  >i dont think you can call the internet a solo production No, although there were certainly co-located or nearby individuals and teams that contributed specific chunks--certainly parts that were hardware or depended on hardware.
marcinzm 3y ago
Is your average company made of some of the most brilliant and driven and experienced people in the world in their fields? Do they have no actual business goals but a wide open field to just do something big and different and impactful? If so then literally nothing else matters except not getting in their way. But there's very few cases like this.

ttul 3y ago

My experience leading an older startup is that category two is hard to escape whether or not you’re working in person. It has more to do with the “Innovator’s Dilemma” - once a company has found product market fit and is generating profits, everything is fine-tuned for that purpose. The company’s reason for existing is to generate profits from that one thing that really worked out. Some companies are able to add great new products over time, but I sense that it’s more common for companies to have one great play, after which they either die or merge with another to enjoy better economies of scale. If you’re big enough and rich enough, you tend to burn a ton of money on internal research groups, but very little of what gets researched is ever a successful product. Doing this as a smaller organization is nearly impossible, which is why I think so many startups just exit rather than finding entirely new things to build.

_8j50 3y ago

Office work is nice for teams that actually benefit from open area desk layout. Teams that can work fine in cubicles and offices do great WFH. For me, the extroverts that insist in socializing, gossiping and politicking in person make office work an unproductive nightmare.

eecc 3y ago

> You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. OTOH, from personal experience working on-site hasn't really ever helped particularly well in that scenario (which I'mm all too familiar with.)

datadeft 3y ago

I totally agree. I used to work for Amzn and the management was totally idiotic about remote work. We had to go to the office to be on call for datacenters 1000kms from the office. Makes perfect sense right?

heresie-dabord 3y ago

Etheryte 3y ago

I think that's only one of many models where remote work works out. The other that I've seen function well across many companies is remote work where team members are highly skilled and have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on. This essentially lets every domain expert identify what the biggest pain points are in their field and then figure those out. You don't need top down dictatorship for this to work, but you do need a clear vision of where you want to be.

moonchrome 3y ago

How often are entire teams at the same building ? Like the other person mentioned - you're going to meet in conference rooms with video - this was norm pre COVID. I would say biggest benefits of in office is spontanious meet/discussion, assisting less senior coworkers etc. If I have a heavy day of work to plow through alone I avoid the office. If I need to sync or work on something with others in-person beats all the tools.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have problems with home life going to office to work can help with productivity. 2. Remote work is much better if you are a person who is motivated by love of what you are doing and you actually love what you are doing, if you start to not love what you are doing but you have not left the company yet etc. there can be some slight loss of productivity, not because intentionally goofing off so much but because like #1 above working remotely makes it harder to get focused on something one does for money and not love if you are a love focused worker.

paulcole 3y ago
There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You prefer remote work This always gets to be such a dogmatic discussion that will to someone claiming anyone who likes working in an office has no social life. It’s just a preference. Remote work is not overall objectively better than office work (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true). Office work is not the right choice (but you can create a set of goals for which this is true).
- brookst 3y ago
  For an autonomous IC who does not need to lead or contribute to thinks like whiteboarding, strategy discussions, client visits, etc, that is true. There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop. Remote can be accommodated, but it is not always exclusively about what the employee prefers.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    > There are jobs where in-person is just better, full stop Well yeah a surgeon should be working in person, you got me there.

rco8786 3y ago

That description of Meta sounds like a high level of disfunction that has nothing to do with remote or in person.

Tade0 3y ago
The only other place where I encountered such a "system" was in one (small) company, where the CEO's dress code did not include pants and I wish I never went there in the first place.

Stranger43 3y ago

I suspect what your describing is less the cause but a symptom of the real case. In my experience(i have worked from branch offices most my career) the differentiating factor is literacy, ie how comfortable/confident are the organization with recorded text vs private spoken word and the more the organization writes the more effective the remote staff will be. And one of the side effect of a written culture is that a lot of the informal conventions/conversations become formal structure so the same level of top down planning can look very differently based on weather the culture for disseminating it is literate or oral.

XorNot 3y ago

> In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. I'm curious how often anyone actually finds this situation to happen and improve the feedback loop. I feel like it's more of an illusion of productivity then actual productivity because it's a pile of constant interruptions. Like the given example with Meta doesn't seem like it would be better in-person, it sounds broken regardless.

achow 3y ago

Or in other words what business problem one is solving 0-1, 1-10 or 10-100. For first two remote is non-starter. Similarly, what career stage one is in? Young workers who are in 0-1, and to certain extent 1-10, remote really does not work.

jen20 3y ago
The first part of this is patently untrue. The most successful startup I worked at (defined as having IPO’d, and having their products effectively everywhere) was fully remote. This was very much 0-1, 1-10 type work. The only requirement to ever physically be in a given place was when visiting a customer. The FAANG I work for now similarly has lots of 0-1, 1-10 type work (at least for my team), and a fully remote team. It works fine too. The part about more junior employees is _more_ valid, though we had no problem on boarding juniors in either of those two situations. Ultimately whether remote work is successful depends on whether the people doing the work have sufficient self-discipline to get the job done, and whether the hypothetical office alternative is set up for success. Most offices are not remotely set up for success, but optimize instead for middle management (toxin or cancer? [1]) being able to view their fifedoms. [1]: https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-management-scaling-organizations-by-scaling-engineers-bryan-cantrill https://www.talkfrom.com/video?name=leadership-without-manag...
danaris 3y ago
My wife worked for several years for a company with only about a half-dozen employees. It was full remote. She left there in 2011, after rising through the ranks to the level of division director. They did almost all their business over email and Skype, because at the time, Skype was still the best voice/video conferencing software available without dedicated hardware. If it was possible then for a small group of non-tech-focused people, it's certainly possible now, over a decade later and with an entire pandemic forcing the rapid improvement of all sorts of remote-work technology. That doesn't mean it's for everyone, but boldly stating that it's a "non-starter" is just unsupportable.

mcv 3y ago

> My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. That just sounds like poor leadership to me. If you've got a holistic sense of what needs to be done, please share it with the people who need to be doing it. That, or cut it up into concrete chunks and tell people to build that. But telling people to "figure it out" and then not sharing the overall vision, sounds incredibly dysfunctional to me.

gabereiser 3y ago

I have the same conclusions as well however, in-person collaboration can be done remotely but it requires less professionalism and more trust. You have to allow for unforeseen moments and allow each participant to have their time to weigh in. Take breaks. It’s a 2.5x time slog vs in-person but it can be done with whiteboard tools and open honest communication. It’s the ones that expect excellence that struggle with remote’s imperfections.

Nimitz14 3y ago

Fantastic summary

ghaff 3y ago

Seniority is another factor. People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.) But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.

BlargMcLarg 3y ago
A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in. If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities. And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.
  - danaris 3y ago
    From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace. Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move. One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work. Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.

kodah 3y ago

Tech pays Industrial Psychologists, I don't know why we don't put them to work on this. I restarted my software career doing remote work. I didn't have a problem finding things to do because my responsibilities were clear (read: I had a good manager) and I was self-taught so I already had a muscle for seeking knowledge on my own. I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is and how much you innately know about what things your role is responsible for which can be propped up or replaced by seniority. I also suspect that new grads don't have muscles for finding/seeking internal and external information on their own, which feels powerless. There's ways to solve all these things without treating all of these folks the same. Frankly, I think these are all the problems you and I relate to, but what's really solved for the business by returning to an office isn't productivity or happiness. It's a real estate problem.

ghaff 3y ago
>I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is I suspect the people on here who like to hate on managers either have a bad one or just don't realize how much crap they're being shielded from--a lot of which is inevitable in a large organization (where you can't tell everyone "hey figure it out on your own").
- kodah 3y ago
  That could explain some situations, but I very well doubt it's as simple as "managers are unappreciated". Some managers are given wide latitude in controlling their teams work. Some managers execute on that, others don't. Some managers are given a lot of control over hiring. Some execute on that, other don't. Some managers are given wide latitude over reviews. Some managers execute on that while others don't. The reason managers are perceived to be less useful in tech usually, in my experience, boils down to where they spend their time and political capital. They either spend it on their team and enabling them or on themselves and enabling themselves. All of the above are ways that could go either way and the feeling is generally an accumulation of those decisions over time. I guess I could surmise that there's just a lot of "bad" managers in tech, but I don't think that's a useful sentiment without knowing why.

zingababba 3y ago

Probably the best distinction I have seen tbh...

jacooper 3y ago

What are PMF and NGMI?

x86x87 3y ago

I don't think it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days. There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold. IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.

rhtgrg 3y ago
Not to mention that even in-person workplaces (especially at large companies) still involve plenty of remote interaction due to the global nature of the workforce. Plenty of Googlers being required to be in-office will actually be working alone in-office, with their teammates far away...
pandaman 3y ago
If this is true then there is no need to worry: companies with thriving WFH developers will surely overcome the stuck in the old ways ones. Not only their developers have same or greater performance due to constant thriving but their expenses will be much less so they will be able to offer better compensation and steal the talent from the in-office dinosaurs.
- x86x87 3y ago
  This is going to happen in the medium/long term. The only reason big corporations have a chance of pulling this off is the overall state of the economy. Once we see recovery their RTO antics will fail if the shift is not completely done.
  - pandaman 3y ago
    We will see. Has not happened in the past so I see a little reason to happen in the future.