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I get the sentiment but this reads more like an angry tirade than anything. I would probably be better off with my five minutes back. But now i feel obligated t

by elhudy 3y ago

I get the sentiment but this reads more like an angry tirade than anything. I would probably be better off with my five minutes back. But now i feel obligated to respond. As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate. There are productive discussions that happen which simply would not have otherwise happened. Teams become closer as they better understand each other and get to know what motivates one another (not always the paycheck, as in OP case). You become more empowered to take a step back out of your daily work and give consideration to the bigger picture when you’re surrounded by other groups. I’ve worked remotely most of my life and am a proponent of it. I also think moving someone who was hired as a remote employee, to an in-person role, is a huge dick move. But to pretend like there are no benefits to occasionally being in-person seems like naivety bordering ignorance (For most team based roles which require strategic thinking). Hiring can become a bigger challenge when your competition allows fully remote work, and companies should expect to increase compensation in one form or another, or otherwise lose talent. For some companies, e.g. mine, those steps have been worth taking. Small price to pay to preserve our awesome culture.

danw1979 3y ago
To further your point about new team members benefiting from RTO: I’m six months into a mostly remote contract gig (2 days a week in the office) at a large financial services company, in a team that was very well distributed across the country even before the pandemic. I’m based out of an office that would have been peripheral to most of the team anyway, even if we were fully onsite. It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had. The total lack of face-to-face with any of the team means I can’t get to know anyone else, there’s no cooperation whatsoever and zero knowledge transfer… getting time to chat with your colleagues requires booking a meeting in their well-stuffed calendar weeks in advance. We get a half-hour slot per week with the Tech Leads to ask questions, which means I’m blocked frequently, and any other comms with them is through MS Teams, where you’re lucky to get a reply that day. I suggested more frequent scheduled time with the leads but that was knocked back immediately. This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team. It’s a prime candidate for a centralised office with a mostly onsite policy, in my humble opinion…
- winrid 3y ago
  I was at a place with the exact same problems that was in-office pre-pandemic. It was even worse: you couldn't book time with architects OR product managers. For PMs you had to add your questions to a document and join a sometimes daily 30min meeting and hope they got to your questions. This isn't an office vs remote problem. It's a hiring not enough people and pretending that doing no planning is okay, problem. and this was an insurance company. Hardly a "move fast and break things" industry.
  - blub 3y ago
    Not hiring enough people is a chronic problem for all companies. Being remote makes it worse though, since WFH tends to amplify personnel and culture problems… The only thing WFH solves really is long commutes and noisy offices. It also makes it easier for families to organize their day, which is why a lot of parents like it.
  - danw1979 3y ago
    I think we may be talking about the same insurance company.
    - winrid 3y ago
      haha maybe. do they call their employees hippos? :)
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Opposite anecdote, I was hired remotely at AWS during Covid and I only met anyone on my team a year and half in. There was a well organized onboarding process which was a combination of Amazon indoctrination, AWS indoctrination, and team specific tasks including who I should schedule a 1x1 with. There were tasks specifically geared toward getting to know the internal tooling. Admittedly when I started at my current company fully remote - a much smaller company - right when we were hiring rapidly for a new project, it was on me to get up to speed about knowing what my role involved, who to schedule 1x1s with and create my own onboarding itinerary.
- 3y ago
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
Extremely well put, I don’t often see a comment matching my perspective / experience so closely in these discussions. I believe that the challenge of onboarding for remote teams in more fundamentally difficult than is acknowledged. I’m not so sure that the best remote-first culture and process can ever match a good in-person onboarding experience.
- Olreich 3y ago
  Do everything the in-person one does, and ensure there’s a team meet up sometime in their first month, with a cultural emphasis on getting to know the new folks. It’s fundamentally difficult to onboard. What makes “remote” onboarding hard is the same things that makes in-person hard: you basically need to hover over the new hire and ensure that they aren’t getting stuck on anything and that they are getting comfortable with asking for help and that existing team members are helping them. The thing that makes remote more difficult is that it’s harder for a team lead to see if the new hire is getting helped: passive surveillance is harder when you aren’t sitting nearby. I think you can easily mitigate that by being a good leader and making sure to have routine check ins throughout the onboarding, starting at twice or three times a day for the first couple of days and slowing down over the first couple of weeks until you hit a weekly cadence or the new hire is thriving.
scarface_74 3y ago
> As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate Well, you know who doesn’t benefit? Me with your constant interruptions. With remote work, I’m able to control when I want to respond and when I want to do deep work.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Even when working in office, when I have questions, I always ping my colleagues on IM first, instead of directly walking to their desk or shouting at them. It's respectful and could be turned into a policy.
  - hoffs 3y ago
    Not really, also what kind of office setup you have where you don't sit next to your colleagues? Ambient interruptions also are a thing
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Yes we're next to each other, but if the person has his headphones on I don't want to disturb him so I write first a message.
- blub 3y ago
  Based on previous comments, I think you’re in a sort of architecture / lead role. Interruptions are part of the job description :)
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Yes, at n-3 and n-2 job I was the dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” and it was mostly in office. When I wanted to do “deep work”, I would either come in late and do my deep work from home or find some place to hide at the office and set my status to “doing deep work”, close Outlook and Slack. I would check my messages at least once an hour. If there is ever an emergency that only I could handle, I was doing my job wrong. My n-1 job was at AWS working in Professional Services. There everyone was juggling multiple projects, on customer calls, in planes, on-site with a customer, etc. No one expected an immediate response. Almost every interaction was either asynchronous or you would ask someone a question and the answer would be “my calendar is up to date. Send me a meeting request”. I also first learned the concept of “office hours” there where the lead would just block off time on the calendar where the people could just join an open Chime (does anyone outside of Amazon use Chime?) if they had any questions. I don’t know what things are going to be like at my current company once things fully ramp up. But I suspect as the person who is responsible for cross team architectural guidance, I will need to be able to handle the chaos using what I learned from my past three jobs.
rakoo 3y ago
I think too many people are misunderstanding what we're talking about and creates confusion. It's not about RTO. It's cool if you find it better for you and your team, if your team also likes it better; as others, on some occasions I want to just work and don't want to be bothered by others every 5 min. It's about mandatory RTO. It's about forcing employees to do something, without asking them, without including them in the discussion, without explaining why the decision is taken ("it's better" is wrong; it's better for some, worse for others. It needs more explanation) We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees. If it was about work then let the people who actually do it manage themselves: they're grownups engineers, surely they can work it out. But it's never about work, and employees are right to protest the decision and to demand transparency.
- blub 3y ago
  Are work contracts somehow deficient in the US? In the EU countries I know, each contract has an office location specified. Alternatively, it specifies that the job is remote. Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time. If you don’t like that folks, then stop whining and unionize please.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    A lot of this stuff was done outwith contract, in both places, during the pandemic. > Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time Well, yes, and this is why people are getting mad. People should also be much more explicit about the cost of their commute; you can argue back and forth about the benefits of being in the office, but almost all commutes are deadweight loss and some are both miserable and expensive.
- cauch 3y ago
  > We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees. Do you have any objective elements proving this? I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else. They were really happy to work from home, though, thinking they were doing great, doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were. The mess and difficult job they were creating around them was not their problem. When asked to come back in the office, they used exactly those arguments. I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist, but HN is naturally biased towards devs and against management, and of course, everyone thinks they can manage themselves and that if it does not work, it's the others' fault. I wonder how much grain of salt I should add to these affirmations and if there are more objective analyses of the situation (for example some that acknowledge the two possibilities).
wkat4242 3y ago
One of the issues in my company is that since the pandemic we have only hotdesks. So bouncing ideas off team members is hard as they're usually somewhere else in the building. Before we had fixed desks and departments so you would know where to find someone. We have this terrible booking app called Planon that doesn't offer any way to locate someone. And it's horrible to use (every time you use it you have to sign in with a 3 step MFA process). So most people just ignore it and it causes a lot of conflicts between people that booked a desk and people that just grabbed one. It's a total mess. At the same time I'm sitting beside all sorts of noisy annoying sales goons that are on the phone all day so I get nothing done. All it's accomplishing now is that I thoroughly hate the company and its 'leadership'.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  I much prefer the office and think the only issue with RTO is when promises are not kept, but: screw hot desking. I've only had to do it for a few weeks but I hated it. I prefer much cubicle with high walls and good natural lighting to WFH, but prefer anything to hot desking. I'd rather work out of a hotel room.
throwthrow5643 3y ago
I find now even in the office, people are so busy switching between being glued to their Slack or or video chat, then switching back to work, that it is harder to walk up to people and interrupt them casually. So I don't feel the quick bounce of an idea off someone is as smooth as it used to be, in my case, where my workplace has one thousand slack channels going all day. Also we don't have telephones, which I believe makes communication harder.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
The unavoidable fact is that this guy took an ON-SITE job, and is now whining because he has to go back for TWO out of the FIVE days he originally agreed to. There are plenty of people who will gladly replace this entitled, unprofessional crybaby.

by elhudy 3y ago

danw1979 3y ago

To further your point about new team members benefiting from RTO: I’m six months into a mostly remote contract gig (2 days a week in the office) at a large financial services company, in a team that was very well distributed across the country even before the pandemic. I’m based out of an office that would have been peripheral to most of the team anyway, even if we were fully onsite. It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had. The total lack of face-to-face with any of the team means I can’t get to know anyone else, there’s no cooperation whatsoever and zero knowledge transfer… getting time to chat with your colleagues requires booking a meeting in their well-stuffed calendar weeks in advance. We get a half-hour slot per week with the Tech Leads to ask questions, which means I’m blocked frequently, and any other comms with them is through MS Teams, where you’re lucky to get a reply that day. I suggested more frequent scheduled time with the leads but that was knocked back immediately. This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team. It’s a prime candidate for a centralised office with a mostly onsite policy, in my humble opinion…

winrid 3y ago
I was at a place with the exact same problems that was in-office pre-pandemic. It was even worse: you couldn't book time with architects OR product managers. For PMs you had to add your questions to a document and join a sometimes daily 30min meeting and hope they got to your questions. This isn't an office vs remote problem. It's a hiring not enough people and pretending that doing no planning is okay, problem. and this was an insurance company. Hardly a "move fast and break things" industry.
- blub 3y ago
  Not hiring enough people is a chronic problem for all companies. Being remote makes it worse though, since WFH tends to amplify personnel and culture problems… The only thing WFH solves really is long commutes and noisy offices. It also makes it easier for families to organize their day, which is why a lot of parents like it.
- danw1979 3y ago
  I think we may be talking about the same insurance company.
  - winrid 3y ago
    haha maybe. do they call their employees hippos? :)
scarface_74 3y ago
Opposite anecdote, I was hired remotely at AWS during Covid and I only met anyone on my team a year and half in. There was a well organized onboarding process which was a combination of Amazon indoctrination, AWS indoctrination, and team specific tasks including who I should schedule a 1x1 with. There were tasks specifically geared toward getting to know the internal tooling. Admittedly when I started at my current company fully remote - a much smaller company - right when we were hiring rapidly for a new project, it was on me to get up to speed about knowing what my role involved, who to schedule 1x1s with and create my own onboarding itinerary.
3y ago

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

Extremely well put, I don’t often see a comment matching my perspective / experience so closely in these discussions. I believe that the challenge of onboarding for remote teams in more fundamentally difficult than is acknowledged. I’m not so sure that the best remote-first culture and process can ever match a good in-person onboarding experience.

Olreich 3y ago
Do everything the in-person one does, and ensure there’s a team meet up sometime in their first month, with a cultural emphasis on getting to know the new folks. It’s fundamentally difficult to onboard. What makes “remote” onboarding hard is the same things that makes in-person hard: you basically need to hover over the new hire and ensure that they aren’t getting stuck on anything and that they are getting comfortable with asking for help and that existing team members are helping them. The thing that makes remote more difficult is that it’s harder for a team lead to see if the new hire is getting helped: passive surveillance is harder when you aren’t sitting nearby. I think you can easily mitigate that by being a good leader and making sure to have routine check ins throughout the onboarding, starting at twice or three times a day for the first couple of days and slowing down over the first couple of weeks until you hit a weekly cadence or the new hire is thriving.

scarface_74 3y ago

> As someone new to my organization and team I’ve greatly benefited from a partial rto mandate. There’s something about being able to quickly bounce ideas or questions off a team that physically sits around you that slack can’t quite emulate Well, you know who doesn’t benefit? Me with your constant interruptions. With remote work, I’m able to control when I want to respond and when I want to do deep work.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Even when working in office, when I have questions, I always ping my colleagues on IM first, instead of directly walking to their desk or shouting at them. It's respectful and could be turned into a policy.
- hoffs 3y ago
  Not really, also what kind of office setup you have where you don't sit next to your colleagues? Ambient interruptions also are a thing
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Yes we're next to each other, but if the person has his headphones on I don't want to disturb him so I write first a message.
blub 3y ago
Based on previous comments, I think you’re in a sort of architecture / lead role. Interruptions are part of the job description :)
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Yes, at n-3 and n-2 job I was the dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” and it was mostly in office. When I wanted to do “deep work”, I would either come in late and do my deep work from home or find some place to hide at the office and set my status to “doing deep work”, close Outlook and Slack. I would check my messages at least once an hour. If there is ever an emergency that only I could handle, I was doing my job wrong. My n-1 job was at AWS working in Professional Services. There everyone was juggling multiple projects, on customer calls, in planes, on-site with a customer, etc. No one expected an immediate response. Almost every interaction was either asynchronous or you would ask someone a question and the answer would be “my calendar is up to date. Send me a meeting request”. I also first learned the concept of “office hours” there where the lead would just block off time on the calendar where the people could just join an open Chime (does anyone outside of Amazon use Chime?) if they had any questions. I don’t know what things are going to be like at my current company once things fully ramp up. But I suspect as the person who is responsible for cross team architectural guidance, I will need to be able to handle the chaos using what I learned from my past three jobs.

rakoo 3y ago

I think too many people are misunderstanding what we're talking about and creates confusion. It's not about RTO. It's cool if you find it better for you and your team, if your team also likes it better; as others, on some occasions I want to just work and don't want to be bothered by others every 5 min. It's about mandatory RTO. It's about forcing employees to do something, without asking them, without including them in the discussion, without explaining why the decision is taken ("it's better" is wrong; it's better for some, worse for others. It needs more explanation) We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees. If it was about work then let the people who actually do it manage themselves: they're grownups engineers, surely they can work it out. But it's never about work, and employees are right to protest the decision and to demand transparency.

blub 3y ago
Are work contracts somehow deficient in the US? In the EU countries I know, each contract has an office location specified. Alternatively, it specifies that the job is remote. Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time. If you don’t like that folks, then stop whining and unionize please.
- pjc50 3y ago
  A lot of this stuff was done outwith contract, in both places, during the pandemic. > Anything else is an informal benefit and can be taken away at any time Well, yes, and this is why people are getting mad. People should also be much more explicit about the cost of their commute; you can argue back and forth about the benefits of being in the office, but almost all commutes are deadweight loss and some are both miserable and expensive.
cauch 3y ago
> We know why companies don't give explanations: it's not about productivity, it's not about employees working better, it's about real estate and the company not wanting to lose money on its properties, it's about managers who feel useless if they are not seen, it's about the direction fundamentally mistrusting employees. Do you have any objective elements proving this? I have witnessed a dev colleague who worked from home. They were unable to document and communicate, and it screwed everyone else. They were really happy to work from home, though, thinking they were doing great, doing all the tickets and all the new tickets that appeared because of how badly designed for purpose their solutions on the previous ticket were. The mess and difficult job they were creating around them was not their problem. When asked to come back in the office, they used exactly those arguments. I'm sure bad management and bad direction exist, but HN is naturally biased towards devs and against management, and of course, everyone thinks they can manage themselves and that if it does not work, it's the others' fault. I wonder how much grain of salt I should add to these affirmations and if there are more objective analyses of the situation (for example some that acknowledge the two possibilities).

wkat4242 3y ago

One of the issues in my company is that since the pandemic we have only hotdesks. So bouncing ideas off team members is hard as they're usually somewhere else in the building. Before we had fixed desks and departments so you would know where to find someone. We have this terrible booking app called Planon that doesn't offer any way to locate someone. And it's horrible to use (every time you use it you have to sign in with a 3 step MFA process). So most people just ignore it and it causes a lot of conflicts between people that booked a desk and people that just grabbed one. It's a total mess. At the same time I'm sitting beside all sorts of noisy annoying sales goons that are on the phone all day so I get nothing done. All it's accomplishing now is that I thoroughly hate the company and its 'leadership'.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
I much prefer the office and think the only issue with RTO is when promises are not kept, but: screw hot desking. I've only had to do it for a few weeks but I hated it. I prefer much cubicle with high walls and good natural lighting to WFH, but prefer anything to hot desking. I'd rather work out of a hotel room.

throwthrow5643 3y ago

I find now even in the office, people are so busy switching between being glued to their Slack or or video chat, then switching back to work, that it is harder to walk up to people and interrupt them casually. So I don't feel the quick bounce of an idea off someone is as smooth as it used to be, in my case, where my workplace has one thousand slack channels going all day. Also we don't have telephones, which I believe makes communication harder.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

The unavoidable fact is that this guy took an ON-SITE job, and is now whining because he has to go back for TWO out of the FIVE days he originally agreed to. There are plenty of people who will gladly replace this entitled, unprofessional crybaby.