8 ms·

I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of pe

I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow. For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue. I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric. There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity. This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.

J_Shelby_J 2y ago
This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
- simonbarker87 2y ago
  For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person. We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years? I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
  - sph 2y ago
    People adapted pretty well to being glued to a screen and reading order of magnitudes more than they were used to... or do most people just spend 12h in front of phones just scrolling pictures and watching videos? I honestly don't know.
  - dustingetz 2y ago
    hunter gatherers vs universities. one of these groups is dirt poor the other unimaginably wealthy in comparison
    - analog31 2y ago
      Written communication, and in-person interaction, are force multipliers, and universities have very high levels of both.
  - _gabe_ 2y ago
    I really don’t understand what you’re saying here. Letters have existed for literally thousands of years at this point and people were able to communicate effectively through that. Several countries were founded and destroyed with coordination through written communication. I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last 20 years has led to a massive decrease in the effectiveness of written communication because people don’t have to be clear or concise anymore.
    - simonbarker87 2y ago
vbezhenar 2y ago
It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom as companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without
  - Roark66 2y ago
    Show me one example of this.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      I was just referencing ops statement about how wfh is better even if it’s less efficient. I love wfh. I miss it.
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      Why do you think bosses overwhelmingly want RTO? I think they want it because they fear productivity losses that mean lower profits, and ultimately lead to the threat of becoming uncompetitive. If you agree with that, is your position that these fears are irrational (because in your view, no such productivity loss would occur)?
      - shinryuu 2y ago
        At the same time if they get worse talent because of it they could get lower productivity because of it
        akoboldfrying 2y ago
wiether 2y ago
I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic. But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is : > I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow. Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad. It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.
Roark66 2y ago
It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations. The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.
DrBazza 2y ago
WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few. On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones. One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans. Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving. (edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.
- nox101 2y ago
  Documentation is not a complete fix. So you have 1000 pages of documentation. Which page has the answer to your question? At work you ask your coworker with more experience "Can you tell me how X works?" and get an answer immediately. On remote you type in to chat "Can you tell me how X works?" you get an answer in 5 seconds, or 30 or 5 minutes, or 10 or 3hrs later, or never. Where as in the WFO example you were back to work immediately with little to no context switching, in the remote example you might have to just go work on something else (30-60 minute context switch) while you wait for an answer, then once you get it do another 30-60 minute context switch to get back into whatever it was you were doing. Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works? It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never. People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.
bromuro 2y ago
What is an “IC work” and what does it mean “being an IC”? Can’t get the acronym.
- newswasboring 2y ago
  It is my understanding that IC is individual contributor. So basically devs who are making their own parts of the code.
  - strken 2y ago
    IC is usually meant in contrast to manager, meaning ICs are the engineers without anyone reporting to them. The difference between "not a manager" and "working on their own part of the code" is important when you're talking about positions with a lot of seniority like staff or principal engineers, because those ICs are still expected to work on massive projects involving a lot of cat-herding and leadership that touch large chunks of a company's code, they just aren't doing it as the manager of a team.
    - newswasboring 2y ago
      Yup, you said it better than me.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  Individual Contributer.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
benterix 2y ago
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few). The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?
- mellosouls 2y ago
  The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
  - sumeno 2y ago
    If most people choose full time remote if given the option then it's pretty selfish to demand they all go to the office because you prefer it.
    - mellosouls 2y ago
      Its not as simple as a democratic choice, that was my point. Work isn't like that.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    A bunch of reluctantly-at-the-office coworkers isn't going to be the collaboration utopia you're hoping for. If you end up with an empty office because everyone chose WFH, switch companies. Eventually things will balance out, with people in companies that have the right balance for them.
    - mellosouls 2y ago
j7ake 2y ago
When figuring out precisely what problem to work out, in person meetings are critical, and WFH is a huge obstacle towards progress. Once a problem is well defined, WFH is more productive.
IshKebab 2y ago
Funny you mention whiteboard work. I agree that is one of the things that sucks remotely, but I also think it's because whiteboard support in video calls is universally awful. Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc). We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.
xnx 2y ago
Agree. I don't think there's enough discussion about how bad remote collaboration tools are beyond "Teams sux". We need low latency, large screen, high resolution tools like Google's Project Starline, which is a good step in that direction. Voice cloning and deepfakes offer a plausible route to achieve very high fidelity in low bandwidth, but I think Zoom et. al. may be reluctant to explore that path because of its [currently] creepy perception.
steveBK123 2y ago
Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC. For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it. For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours. Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing. COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive. Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
- mattpallissard 2y ago
  I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned. You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked. It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus. For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others. They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others. Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.
Unbeliever69 2y ago
I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.
Fanmade 2y ago
I agree it's not a black-and-white problem, but I don't fully agree with your statement about collaboration. I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation. I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person. However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound. Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer. Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking. When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them. I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later. But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

J_Shelby_J 2y ago

This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

simonbarker87 2y ago
For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person. We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years? I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
- sph 2y ago
  People adapted pretty well to being glued to a screen and reading order of magnitudes more than they were used to... or do most people just spend 12h in front of phones just scrolling pictures and watching videos? I honestly don't know.
- dustingetz 2y ago
  hunter gatherers vs universities. one of these groups is dirt poor the other unimaginably wealthy in comparison
  - analog31 2y ago
    Written communication, and in-person interaction, are force multipliers, and universities have very high levels of both.
- _gabe_ 2y ago
  I really don’t understand what you’re saying here. Letters have existed for literally thousands of years at this point and people were able to communicate effectively through that. Several countries were founded and destroyed with coordination through written communication. I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last 20 years has led to a massive decrease in the effectiveness of written communication because people don’t have to be clear or concise anymore.
  - simonbarker87 2y ago

vbezhenar 2y ago

It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.

CalRobert 2y ago
Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom as companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without
- Roark66 2y ago
  Show me one example of this.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    I was just referencing ops statement about how wfh is better even if it’s less efficient. I love wfh. I miss it.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Why do you think bosses overwhelmingly want RTO? I think they want it because they fear productivity losses that mean lower profits, and ultimately lead to the threat of becoming uncompetitive. If you agree with that, is your position that these fears are irrational (because in your view, no such productivity loss would occur)?
    - shinryuu 2y ago
      At the same time if they get worse talent because of it they could get lower productivity because of it
      - akoboldfrying 2y ago

wiether 2y ago

I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic. But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is : > I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow. Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad. It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.

Roark66 2y ago

It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations. The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.

DrBazza 2y ago

WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few. On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones. One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans. Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving. (edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.

nox101 2y ago
Documentation is not a complete fix. So you have 1000 pages of documentation. Which page has the answer to your question? At work you ask your coworker with more experience "Can you tell me how X works?" and get an answer immediately. On remote you type in to chat "Can you tell me how X works?" you get an answer in 5 seconds, or 30 or 5 minutes, or 10 or 3hrs later, or never. Where as in the WFO example you were back to work immediately with little to no context switching, in the remote example you might have to just go work on something else (30-60 minute context switch) while you wait for an answer, then once you get it do another 30-60 minute context switch to get back into whatever it was you were doing. Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works? It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never. People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.

bromuro 2y ago

What is an “IC work” and what does it mean “being an IC”? Can’t get the acronym.

newswasboring 2y ago
It is my understanding that IC is individual contributor. So basically devs who are making their own parts of the code.
- strken 2y ago
  IC is usually meant in contrast to manager, meaning ICs are the engineers without anyone reporting to them. The difference between "not a manager" and "working on their own part of the code" is important when you're talking about positions with a lot of seniority like staff or principal engineers, because those ICs are still expected to work on massive projects involving a lot of cat-herding and leadership that touch large chunks of a company's code, they just aren't doing it as the manager of a team.
  - newswasboring 2y ago
    Yup, you said it better than me.
MattPalmer1086 2y ago
Individual Contributer.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

benterix 2y ago

> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few). The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?

mellosouls 2y ago
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
- sumeno 2y ago
  If most people choose full time remote if given the option then it's pretty selfish to demand they all go to the office because you prefer it.
  - mellosouls 2y ago
    Its not as simple as a democratic choice, that was my point. Work isn't like that.
- lolinder 2y ago
  A bunch of reluctantly-at-the-office coworkers isn't going to be the collaboration utopia you're hoping for. If you end up with an empty office because everyone chose WFH, switch companies. Eventually things will balance out, with people in companies that have the right balance for them.
  - mellosouls 2y ago

j7ake 2y ago

When figuring out precisely what problem to work out, in person meetings are critical, and WFH is a huge obstacle towards progress. Once a problem is well defined, WFH is more productive.

IshKebab 2y ago

Funny you mention whiteboard work. I agree that is one of the things that sucks remotely, but I also think it's because whiteboard support in video calls is universally awful. Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc). We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.

xnx 2y ago

Agree. I don't think there's enough discussion about how bad remote collaboration tools are beyond "Teams sux". We need low latency, large screen, high resolution tools like Google's Project Starline, which is a good step in that direction. Voice cloning and deepfakes offer a plausible route to achieve very high fidelity in low bandwidth, but I think Zoom et. al. may be reluctant to explore that path because of its [currently] creepy perception.

steveBK123 2y ago

Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC. For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it. For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours. Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing. COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive. Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.

mattpallissard 2y ago
I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned. You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked. It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus. For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others. They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others. Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.

Unbeliever69 2y ago

I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.

Fanmade 2y ago

I agree it's not a black-and-white problem, but I don't fully agree with your statement about collaboration. I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation. I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person. However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound. Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer. Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking. When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them. I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later. But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.

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