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>> Office workers dont "make" anything. i know that sounds rude but i cant think of another way to describe it...office workers "work" is all between their ears

>> Office workers dont "make" anything. i know that sounds rude but i cant think of another way to describe it...office workers "work" is all between their ears? For some projects the entire scope can fit inside a single head, but as the scope and complexity increase the work happens between the brains. This is where the issue lies. Collaboration is critical for most projects of any real significance. This is where offices are helpful. If you simply think about an individual’s work and not the team’s collective output, then offices don’t make sense. I see a lot of people focusing on management in this thread, but in my experience collaboration is the responsibility of everyone. From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be generally unpleasant. People would routinely engage in sandbagging, delays and it would be difficult to understand why things are blocked. I found that trust was lower, and people were far less collegial. This is true to some extent of remote teams as well, so I think there is just something in how the brain works that doesn’t click with taking orders from a television. There are many instances where being at home heads down is much better for getting work done and strict rto mandates are generally unhelpful in these instances. But ultimately the conversations around this typically end up trying to talk past the point or gloss over the bigger issues which is that a healthy and productive team is what matters.

ethanbond 3y ago
Good point to identify collaboration as the more important variable, but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. In fact, almost every org that achieves moderate scale will have to figure that out. > From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be… What was your control group?
- khendron 3y ago
  > but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that. No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Where’s the work on converging the two so (ideally) it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office or not? I spend half my work time in a chem lab and half not in the lab. I would benefit if the two environments were not so disjoint. > No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. Sad to say this is very true (with a minescule number of lucky exceptions IME). There is a lot of effort going into trying to narrow the gap but no breakthroughs yet that I have seen. But there seems to be no work on the opposite. For example these days it’s pretty routine to have automatic transcripts and recordings of zoom calls posted in the appropriate slack channels so you can catch up on parts (or all) you missed, refer to a discussion that might not have felt significant at the time, and so on. That stuff doesn’t exist in meatspace meetings. The random asynchronous slack remark in the middle of the night can be transformative (most of course are useless). The same is true running into someone at the coffee machine. We’re a startup but every morning we have a deliberately agendaless, unstructured call (late enough that kids are at school and you’ve had time to catch up on things if you want). Sometimes it’s 20 minutes and sometimes three hours. We ended up doing a major technology pivot as a result of this. But this doesn’t scale.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Of course plenty of orgs are able to collaborate effectively remotely. But in my experience these orgs are the exception. My experience is that most companies, especially as they get larger, are unable to facilitate a strong collaborative environment while remote.

ethanbond 3y ago

Good point to identify collaboration as the more important variable, but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. In fact, almost every org that achieves moderate scale will have to figure that out. > From an IC’s perspective, I found working at a remote company to be… What was your control group?

khendron 3y ago
> but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote. Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that. No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.
- gumby 3y ago
  Where’s the work on converging the two so (ideally) it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office or not? I spend half my work time in a chem lab and half not in the lab. I would benefit if the two environments were not so disjoint. > No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. Sad to say this is very true (with a minescule number of lucky exceptions IME). There is a lot of effort going into trying to narrow the gap but no breakthroughs yet that I have seen. But there seems to be no work on the opposite. For example these days it’s pretty routine to have automatic transcripts and recordings of zoom calls posted in the appropriate slack channels so you can catch up on parts (or all) you missed, refer to a discussion that might not have felt significant at the time, and so on. That stuff doesn’t exist in meatspace meetings. The random asynchronous slack remark in the middle of the night can be transformative (most of course are useless). The same is true running into someone at the coffee machine. We’re a startup but every morning we have a deliberately agendaless, unstructured call (late enough that kids are at school and you’ve had time to catch up on things if you want). Sometimes it’s 20 minutes and sometimes three hours. We ended up doing a major technology pivot as a result of this. But this doesn’t scale.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Of course plenty of orgs are able to collaborate effectively remotely. But in my experience these orgs are the exception. My experience is that most companies, especially as they get larger, are unable to facilitate a strong collaborative environment while remote.