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Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to

Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Perhaps if everyone working from home were constantly available to screen-share/video chat it wouldn't be as bad, but my experience with WFH is people get distracted by kids/pets/etc and half the time I wait hours for a response required for me to continue my work. At one point during the pandemic I had 6 cascading tasks going in parallel based solely on needing something to do while I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online (we charge by the hour, so I can't just be idle and charge it). In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.

throwaway9191aa 3y ago
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not. If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different. I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers. [edit] > I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time. I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  Yeah I guess the difference is that at my workplace there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Even when there is a design document it often hasn't been updated or requires nuance to interpret that's only really in one or two peoples' heads. Often the question/discussions is about engineering priorities, some discovery was made during coding that would alter the design, and half the time simply bringing up the topic with them for 5 minutes brings new information to bear that produces a superior result. I try not to waste their time and develop my questions as much as possible on my own, but I'm not going to risk several hours of wasted work going down the wrong path when a 5 minute discussion with a SME would confirm something. And it is an RTO discussion, because in the office they're available to some degree. WFH that availability drops off a cliff, and these are questions about the inner-workings of proprietary software, if the answers were on Google there would be legal action.
  - gingerrr 3y ago
    That again sounds like a problem with your company's knowledge sharing culture, not with the industry at large. Silos exist even when every butt is in an office seat, that's a well-known issue that far pre-dates pandemic remote work moves. The answer isn't "make everyone defenseless to random interrupts from other people" but "learn how to actually document things so you're not a company full of points of failure". It seems like what you really want is for others to treat your emergencies as theirs. They're not, they're yours. If you can't wait 15 minutes for a ping back without being completely stuck, you aren't planning your work correctly. That's nobody else's fault.
  - trescenzi 3y ago
    So this is such a good example of why the office is actually a major liability. Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist and that tapping people on the shoulder is more efficient. Everyone will be better off if instead knowledge is shared efficiently. A good analogue is the culture of "the smoke break"(see the Friend's episode The One Where Rachel Smokes for a funny example). It's easy to say "the best decisions are made during smoke breaks therefore smoking is necessary for efficient businesses." Clearly that's absurd. It's not the smoking that makes good decisions, nor does the ability to tap people on the shoulder make for good documentation. Depending upon an accidental formation of office culture is never going to go well in the long run.
hotnfresh 3y ago
Chat’s my favorite. Leaves a record so you don’t have to take notes or immediately record whatever you talked about so you don’t forget. Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person. In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing. > In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management. One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.
- scottLobster 3y ago
  You seem to have missed my point that all of those options require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. With WFH, half the time people aren't. In the office they are. If WFH is going to be the future, then there should be uptime requirements with associated penalties so that someone is as available as they would be in the office. Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    > require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. No guarantee people will be at their office desk either to be frank. They could be hiding in the toilet, loitering at the water cooler, out on smoke break, getting coffee, ... etc.
    - scottLobster 3y ago
      Sure, but those activities typically won't last for hours. I've had to put tasks on hold because the SME wasn't available for several hours, without explanation or any communication whatsoever, to make a fundamental design decision in their area of expertise. And it wasn't a one-off or just one SME. People, at least my team, were getting constantly distracted. They essentially imposed their irregular and unpredictable schedules on the rest of us, despite being in positions of relative authority. I had to work nights I didn't plan to work because someone decided to respond at 8pm to a question asked at 1pm. That kind of delay would never happen at the office even if someone was slacking off. Which goes back to the principle that WFH is more beneficial for senior devs than juniors. If you lack the knowledge or authority to work independently for extended periods, then instead of everyone being on the same objective schedule the junior people are forced onto whenever the senior people want to work, and more specifically when they want to be available to answer questions that only they can answer. It's like only being able to do homework during a professor's office hours.
push-to-prod 3y ago
Walking over and talking? You can just jump on Zoom for a quick chat with a coworker. Text messages are low bandwidth, but Zoom calls are not. Everyone on my team is available for a Zoom call when they're at their laptops, which is for the majority of the working day. Just because your workplace didn't result in an ideal result doesn't mean that it's the norm.
- euniceee3 3y ago
  In person I can walk by the person and see if they are available for a quick chat. Typing a novel is a pain when a water cooler chat will work. IF the person is busy then you dont shoulder tap.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    I wonder how typing ability corresponds to wfh vs rto preference. I can type at about conversion speed without trying too hard, so “typing a novel”, as you put it, isn’t a big deal to me.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dleslie 3y ago
Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial. Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.
_cenw 3y ago
I guess it depends how load-bearing you are for your organization/team. If I and everyone else worked in the office in 2 out of the last 3 jobs I had, I'd have an interruption at least every once an hour, and maybe a queue at times. And yes, I should stop working with people that barely know how to work Git or Bash or the package manager for the language they use (even those I don't even use; if I indulge a request for help I often just become a glorified interface to Google). People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times. Platform engineers are for some reason always implicitly responsible for every engineering question that's not specific to the company's product.
- npsimons 3y ago
  > People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times. A good tactic is to ask them about rubber duck debugging when they come to you with a problem. If they don't know what that is, have them Google it. If they still come back after that, hopefully they actually have a problem worth more than one person's attention. Otherwise, they should find another job.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    Quite often it's just a mix of laziness and knowing that I probably know better. I'm not sure if that's better than them building broken pipelines and custom kubernetes shenanigans that I have to catch later anyway. For instance, we recently found some developer started using some very traefik-specific annotations and CRDs in our clusters (and they can only deploy manifests that don't pass through our renderer with a hack anyway). While we were migrating ingress controllers... It just seems like there's quite a shortage of developers, so hiring standards aren't the greatest. Or maybe I should have a higher tier job. But I already have to work 4 days a week because while I get more done than my peers, I absolutely can not work for more than 1-2 hours a day if I get bored. And fixing people's shitty designs tends to be only somewhat engaging.
enraged_camel 3y ago
>> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. Says who? And for whom? I personally dislike being subject to disruptions on the whims of others. If they need something, they can ping me on Slack and I’ll respond when I feel like. If it’s truly urgent, they can call me over Slack (and I’ll answer if I feel like).
JSavageOne 3y ago
> an office is superior for productivity. If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality. If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice. There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.
runako 3y ago
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. This is an example of a local maximum. This form of communication is better for the person doing the walking, but worse when looked at through most other frames: - worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment. - worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition - ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices And all that's before considering the "worse" that comes from having your staff spend 5 hours a week (average in the US) commuting to the office. In effect, the person walking over is burdening the other party and the organization rather than spend a little more time to craft a question in writing. Weak written communication skills are at the root of why so many organizations are bad at remote work. If oral communications is all that works at your org, then remote is going to be really tough for you (and your inter-office communication is also probably terrible and you should put the whole company in a single building).
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  > - worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted Generally, only in terms of personal output. I find that the organization benefits overall. Of course, this is problematic when performance/compensation is tied strictly to personal output, but that is a separate discussion > - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment. Which is why working at the office is important. > - worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees. > - ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial.
  - runako 3y ago
    > Which is why working at the office is important. I'm so glad you opened up this avenue for follow-up. Even when working at the office, people are not at their desks 100% of the time. People are still human beings and are out of the office for any number of legit reasons that have nothing to do with remote working: dental appointments, work travel, interviewing candidates, vacation, sick leave, etc. Regardless of how you organize your workplace or what mandates you set, people are going to be out all the time. So your knowledge sharing is among the best who are available right now, not necessarily the best sources. > Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees. The key again is the degrees. An organization can choose to bias toward using modern tools or not. "Modern tools" here also broadly includes "writing" because it provides so many advantages over synchronous conversations for knowledge sharing. > This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial. Here I call your attention to geography. There are any number of reasons for staff to be located where they are, and staff don't typically work on a single project over their careers. This means they will change teams from time to time. Combine these facts and you're going to end up with teams composed of people who live in different places, where it might not make sense to relocate staff (e.g. project only lasts a year). An example might be: implementation consultants for a software company based in Chicago working onsite at a client in Germany. I suppose you could move the whole software company to Germany, but that only scales to one client. Which also highlights that people are often on multiple teams at the same time. These concerns are most salient in the most hierarchical organizations, which tend to be the largest and have the largest geographic footprints.
Scarblac 3y ago
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. Hard disagree. That not only distracts that person, but also the six+ sitting around them. Most questions are fine as a chat message. We found people starting asking more questions to colleagues when Covid wfh started because they were afraid to earlier, communication actually improved. The office is imo necessary for quite some things (onboarding new people, coaching juniors, people without a good place to work at hone, people who like the social aspect of the office) but walking up to someone for a quick question isn't it.
thibran 3y ago
> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Depends on the type of work you do. In my last job almost all communication was remote via video call (except a meeting with the CEO every two weeks). Commuting just to sit in front of a computer to talk to others made no sense -> I lost way too many hours of my life to driving needlessly around. I'm all for meeting in person, if there is a clear benefit. Otherwise it's like with all the other bullshit, stop doing it!
ncallaway 3y ago
> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. If that’s the standard then the commute time should be billed to the employer. That way they can weigh the full benefits of the productivity gain of in person communication, against the dramatic efficiency loss of 100 employees commuting to work. If employers want the productivity benefit of in office communication, they can pay employees for their drive/walk/transit time.
- _cenw 3y ago
  "8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will" taken seriously
- gedy 3y ago
  If you are on salary (as most devs are), I think it's pretty reasonable to include commute time in "workday" and not assume 8-9 hours in office on top of that.
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    I think that’s reasonable, but most management for most workers that are pushing RTO would not describe it as reasonable. I’d encourage everyone to have the conversation with their manager so the expectations are consistent.
spacemadness 3y ago
It sure doesn’t stop these same leaders in shipping jobs all over the planet for cheaper wages though where face to face contact isn’t happening without jumping on a plane.
sneak 3y ago
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Nope! All this does is break the concentration of the person you're interrupting. This is precisely the "bullshit" viewpoint called out in the headline. I commonly find these sorts of views espoused by people who can't type very fast. For most people who aren't Really Good With Computers, it's much easier for them to speak to someone than it is to type to someone. I make all of my staff that don't know how to touch type learn to type their first week. It's essential.
- eschneider 3y ago
  When I need to talk to someone, it's easy enough to message them requesting a quick video call and screen share to discuss "X" and if it's inconvenient, we just setup a time for later and it's done. The rest of the time, we've got a nice, quiet environment to work in. Ideal, if you ask me.
flkiwi 3y ago
This is so weird to me. I’ve worked in wildly successful global companies to which I have contributed wildly successful work collaborating with people I have never once met in person, over years of working with them. I am, emphatically, not questioning your perspective, but I have literally never, over 3 decades, found a need for in person collaboration that could not be satisfied electronically. If anything, post-COVID norms such as Zoom/Teams replacing conference calls have improved my daily work immeasurably, even with much less shared space work. I actually go to the office a fair amount but, far from a shared collaboration space, it’s largely a refuge for people who specifically want not to be bothered (by the dog, the kids, the neighbor’s leaf blower, etc.).
Phrodo_00 3y ago
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. It's a very good way to stop the person you're talking to from being productive too.
somsak2 3y ago
Have you seen some of the virtual reality from FB? I think it's getting close to the point where it's just as good as talking to someone in person, with the obvious benefit that not everyone has to be in the same physical office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg
Zigurd 3y ago
Debatable. For example, software mediated interaction can transcribe, store, and share the results of conversations with little or no effort on the part of their participants. You could of course wire up your workplace to do the same thing. But that would be creepy and intrusive.

throwaway9191aa 3y ago

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not. If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different. I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers. [edit] > I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time. I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.

scottLobster 3y ago
Yeah I guess the difference is that at my workplace there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Even when there is a design document it often hasn't been updated or requires nuance to interpret that's only really in one or two peoples' heads. Often the question/discussions is about engineering priorities, some discovery was made during coding that would alter the design, and half the time simply bringing up the topic with them for 5 minutes brings new information to bear that produces a superior result. I try not to waste their time and develop my questions as much as possible on my own, but I'm not going to risk several hours of wasted work going down the wrong path when a 5 minute discussion with a SME would confirm something. And it is an RTO discussion, because in the office they're available to some degree. WFH that availability drops off a cliff, and these are questions about the inner-workings of proprietary software, if the answers were on Google there would be legal action.
- gingerrr 3y ago
  That again sounds like a problem with your company's knowledge sharing culture, not with the industry at large. Silos exist even when every butt is in an office seat, that's a well-known issue that far pre-dates pandemic remote work moves. The answer isn't "make everyone defenseless to random interrupts from other people" but "learn how to actually document things so you're not a company full of points of failure". It seems like what you really want is for others to treat your emergencies as theirs. They're not, they're yours. If you can't wait 15 minutes for a ping back without being completely stuck, you aren't planning your work correctly. That's nobody else's fault.
- trescenzi 3y ago
  So this is such a good example of why the office is actually a major liability. Being in person allows you to get away with creating a culture where documentation doesn't really exist and that tapping people on the shoulder is more efficient. Everyone will be better off if instead knowledge is shared efficiently. A good analogue is the culture of "the smoke break"(see the Friend's episode The One Where Rachel Smokes for a funny example). It's easy to say "the best decisions are made during smoke breaks therefore smoking is necessary for efficient businesses." Clearly that's absurd. It's not the smoking that makes good decisions, nor does the ability to tap people on the shoulder make for good documentation. Depending upon an accidental formation of office culture is never going to go well in the long run.

hotnfresh 3y ago

Chat’s my favorite. Leaves a record so you don’t have to take notes or immediately record whatever you talked about so you don’t forget. Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person. In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing. > In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management. One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.

scottLobster 3y ago
You seem to have missed my point that all of those options require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. With WFH, half the time people aren't. In the office they are. If WFH is going to be the future, then there should be uptime requirements with associated penalties so that someone is as available as they would be in the office. Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. No guarantee people will be at their office desk either to be frank. They could be hiding in the toilet, loitering at the water cooler, out on smoke break, getting coffee, ... etc.
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Sure, but those activities typically won't last for hours. I've had to put tasks on hold because the SME wasn't available for several hours, without explanation or any communication whatsoever, to make a fundamental design decision in their area of expertise. And it wasn't a one-off or just one SME. People, at least my team, were getting constantly distracted. They essentially imposed their irregular and unpredictable schedules on the rest of us, despite being in positions of relative authority. I had to work nights I didn't plan to work because someone decided to respond at 8pm to a question asked at 1pm. That kind of delay would never happen at the office even if someone was slacking off. Which goes back to the principle that WFH is more beneficial for senior devs than juniors. If you lack the knowledge or authority to work independently for extended periods, then instead of everyone being on the same objective schedule the junior people are forced onto whenever the senior people want to work, and more specifically when they want to be available to answer questions that only they can answer. It's like only being able to do homework during a professor's office hours.

push-to-prod 3y ago

Walking over and talking? You can just jump on Zoom for a quick chat with a coworker. Text messages are low bandwidth, but Zoom calls are not. Everyone on my team is available for a Zoom call when they're at their laptops, which is for the majority of the working day. Just because your workplace didn't result in an ideal result doesn't mean that it's the norm.

euniceee3 3y ago
In person I can walk by the person and see if they are available for a quick chat. Typing a novel is a pain when a water cooler chat will work. IF the person is busy then you dont shoulder tap.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I wonder how typing ability corresponds to wfh vs rto preference. I can type at about conversion speed without trying too hard, so “typing a novel”, as you put it, isn’t a big deal to me.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dleslie 3y ago

Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial. Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.

_cenw 3y ago

I guess it depends how load-bearing you are for your organization/team. If I and everyone else worked in the office in 2 out of the last 3 jobs I had, I'd have an interruption at least every once an hour, and maybe a queue at times. And yes, I should stop working with people that barely know how to work Git or Bash or the package manager for the language they use (even those I don't even use; if I indulge a request for help I often just become a glorified interface to Google). People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times. Platform engineers are for some reason always implicitly responsible for every engineering question that's not specific to the company's product.

npsimons 3y ago
> People just don't seem to value my time over their convenience a lot of times. A good tactic is to ask them about rubber duck debugging when they come to you with a problem. If they don't know what that is, have them Google it. If they still come back after that, hopefully they actually have a problem worth more than one person's attention. Otherwise, they should find another job.
- _cenw 3y ago
  Quite often it's just a mix of laziness and knowing that I probably know better. I'm not sure if that's better than them building broken pipelines and custom kubernetes shenanigans that I have to catch later anyway. For instance, we recently found some developer started using some very traefik-specific annotations and CRDs in our clusters (and they can only deploy manifests that don't pass through our renderer with a hack anyway). While we were migrating ingress controllers... It just seems like there's quite a shortage of developers, so hiring standards aren't the greatest. Or maybe I should have a higher tier job. But I already have to work 4 days a week because while I get more done than my peers, I absolutely can not work for more than 1-2 hours a day if I get bored. And fixing people's shitty designs tends to be only somewhat engaging.

enraged_camel 3y ago

>> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. Says who? And for whom? I personally dislike being subject to disruptions on the whims of others. If they need something, they can ping me on Slack and I’ll respond when I feel like. If it’s truly urgent, they can call me over Slack (and I’ll answer if I feel like).

JSavageOne 3y ago

> an office is superior for productivity. If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality. If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice. There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.

runako 3y ago

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. This is an example of a local maximum. This form of communication is better for the person doing the walking, but worse when looked at through most other frames: - worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment. - worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition - ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices And all that's before considering the "worse" that comes from having your staff spend 5 hours a week (average in the US) commuting to the office. In effect, the person walking over is burdening the other party and the organization rather than spend a little more time to craft a question in writing. Weak written communication skills are at the root of why so many organizations are bad at remote work. If oral communications is all that works at your org, then remote is going to be really tough for you (and your inter-office communication is also probably terrible and you should put the whole company in a single building).

Ferret7446 3y ago
> - worse for the person being asked, who was interrupted Generally, only in terms of personal output. I find that the organization benefits overall. Of course, this is problematic when performance/compensation is tied strictly to personal output, but that is a separate discussion > - worse for the people who weren't privy to that conversation but perhaps could have learned or contributed except that they were OOO that moment. Which is why working at the office is important. > - worse for the organization because knowledge shared this way is ephemeral & siloed by definition Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees. > - ineffective in large organizations, where teams often span offices This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial.
- runako 3y ago
  > Which is why working at the office is important. I'm so glad you opened up this avenue for follow-up. Even when working at the office, people are not at their desks 100% of the time. People are still human beings and are out of the office for any number of legit reasons that have nothing to do with remote working: dental appointments, work travel, interviewing candidates, vacation, sick leave, etc. Regardless of how you organize your workplace or what mandates you set, people are going to be out all the time. So your knowledge sharing is among the best who are available right now, not necessarily the best sources. > Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees. The key again is the degrees. An organization can choose to bias toward using modern tools or not. "Modern tools" here also broadly includes "writing" because it provides so many advantages over synchronous conversations for knowledge sharing. > This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial. Here I call your attention to geography. There are any number of reasons for staff to be located where they are, and staff don't typically work on a single project over their careers. This means they will change teams from time to time. Combine these facts and you're going to end up with teams composed of people who live in different places, where it might not make sense to relocate staff (e.g. project only lasts a year). An example might be: implementation consultants for a software company based in Chicago working onsite at a client in Germany. I suppose you could move the whole software company to Germany, but that only scales to one client. Which also highlights that people are often on multiple teams at the same time. These concerns are most salient in the most hierarchical organizations, which tend to be the largest and have the largest geographic footprints.

Scarblac 3y ago

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. Hard disagree. That not only distracts that person, but also the six+ sitting around them. Most questions are fine as a chat message. We found people starting asking more questions to colleagues when Covid wfh started because they were afraid to earlier, communication actually improved. The office is imo necessary for quite some things (onboarding new people, coaching juniors, people without a good place to work at hone, people who like the social aspect of the office) but walking up to someone for a quick question isn't it.

thibran 3y ago

> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Depends on the type of work you do. In my last job almost all communication was remote via video call (except a meeting with the CEO every two weeks). Commuting just to sit in front of a computer to talk to others made no sense -> I lost way too many hours of my life to driving needlessly around. I'm all for meeting in person, if there is a clear benefit. Otherwise it's like with all the other bullshit, stop doing it!

ncallaway 3y ago

> So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. If that’s the standard then the commute time should be billed to the employer. That way they can weigh the full benefits of the productivity gain of in person communication, against the dramatic efficiency loss of 100 employees commuting to work. If employers want the productivity benefit of in office communication, they can pay employees for their drive/walk/transit time.

_cenw 3y ago
"8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will" taken seriously
gedy 3y ago
If you are on salary (as most devs are), I think it's pretty reasonable to include commute time in "workday" and not assume 8-9 hours in office on top of that.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  I think that’s reasonable, but most management for most workers that are pushing RTO would not describe it as reasonable. I’d encourage everyone to have the conversation with their manager so the expectations are consistent.

spacemadness 3y ago

It sure doesn’t stop these same leaders in shipping jobs all over the planet for cheaper wages though where face to face contact isn’t happening without jumping on a plane.

sneak 3y ago

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. So unless you have a job that requires minimal communication on a day-to-day basis, an office is superior for productivity. Nope! All this does is break the concentration of the person you're interrupting. This is precisely the "bullshit" viewpoint called out in the headline. I commonly find these sorts of views espoused by people who can't type very fast. For most people who aren't Really Good With Computers, it's much easier for them to speak to someone than it is to type to someone. I make all of my staff that don't know how to touch type learn to type their first week. It's essential.

eschneider 3y ago
When I need to talk to someone, it's easy enough to message them requesting a quick video call and screen share to discuss "X" and if it's inconvenient, we just setup a time for later and it's done. The rest of the time, we've got a nice, quiet environment to work in. Ideal, if you ask me.

flkiwi 3y ago

This is so weird to me. I’ve worked in wildly successful global companies to which I have contributed wildly successful work collaborating with people I have never once met in person, over years of working with them. I am, emphatically, not questioning your perspective, but I have literally never, over 3 decades, found a need for in person collaboration that could not be satisfied electronically. If anything, post-COVID norms such as Zoom/Teams replacing conference calls have improved my daily work immeasurably, even with much less shared space work. I actually go to the office a fair amount but, far from a shared collaboration space, it’s largely a refuge for people who specifically want not to be bothered (by the dog, the kids, the neighbor’s leaf blower, etc.).

Phrodo_00 3y ago

> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication. It's a very good way to stop the person you're talking to from being productive too.

somsak2 3y ago

Have you seen some of the virtual reality from FB? I think it's getting close to the point where it's just as good as talking to someone in person, with the obvious benefit that not everyone has to be in the same physical office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg

Zigurd 3y ago

Debatable. For example, software mediated interaction can transcribe, store, and share the results of conversations with little or no effort on the part of their participants. You could of course wire up your workplace to do the same thing. But that would be creepy and intrusive.