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You make a compelling argument for RTO. I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one buildi

• anotherhue 2y ago
  Agreed, I saw the same in literal cubicle farms at Intel. When there is Bad Communication, whether due to zoom or timezones or whatever, it's like every interaction is a cache miss, for both parties. When it's good people can basically wink and grunt at each other and it's enough to convey the meaning.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
    It seems entirely reasonable some teams will work well remotely, others in person. It maybe be context dependent, and it may be that some people prefer different structures for different projects in different places over time. There is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces.
    • rubicon33 2y ago
      Collaboration in person is a force multiplier. The problem is corporations and CEOs are the ones getting all the benefit from that. The average employee is no better off in RTO, so why would you expect them to want that? For the record, I prefer being in office so I'm not arguing from my perspective. I'm merely trying to take the position of someone who advocates for remote work. It's not hard to understand why they might.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
        Agreed.
• bongodongobob 2y ago
  You guys were super efficient because you had whiteboards? You don't think people develop relationships with people they work with closely remotely? Time for bed grandpa.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    I agree with your assessment - “okay boomer” - and I’m 50 and started my career programming on mainframes. I went full remote in 2020 and have no trouble leading projects remotely. Occasionally I’ll do a business trip during the initial kickoff or handover. Half of my job is sales adjacent and the other half is leading implementations. If I can adjust to working remotely anyone can
  • lostdog 2y ago
    Funny. Whiteboarding, for me has always been the fastest way to discuss complex ideas. I've never been able to replicate this speed with remote people (and I've tried several tools).
    • ghaff 2y ago
      We used an open source collaborative text tool earlier, the name of which eludes me, but during COVID, I think we generally realized that shared Google Workspace docs actually worked pretty well for a lot of things we used to use big whiteboards for. For certain things, aspects of being able to have a hallway conversation easily were absent. But really we adapted pretty well IMO.
    • ziofill 2y ago
      Same. I’m 100% remote in a very technical field, and the thing I miss the most is to work out a problem with my colleagues at a whiteboard.
      • politelemon 2y ago
        I have tried every tool that gets recommended to me as a substitute for in person whiteboarding, and nothing comes close to the tactility of IRL ones. I've always found the online versions become a one person show rather than actually collaborative and handing pens back and forth.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  I’m 50 and started working in 1996. I started working remotely in consulting in mid 2020. I’ve led multiple medium to large consulting projects over the past 4.5 years where the entire team and the customer are in different locations. There are all sorts of remote white boarding tools and even something as simple as two people working on a shared LucidChart.
  • notyourwork 2y ago
    I’d love to learn about more tools you use to collaborate productively in a virtual arrangement.
    • eisa01 2y ago
      Especially if anyone has tips for getting Zoom-like annotation support in Teams!
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        Yeah, if you are using Teams, I assume you are working for a “Big Enterprise” company. I work for a company that was born working remotely. We use GSuite which has great support for annotations.
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      Nothing really special that we use now. They are all SaaS tools we login to via SSO. GSuite, Notion, and LucidChart are all great for collaboration. Of course Slack and Zoom.
    • anotherhue 2y ago
      Honestly, an actual telephone would go a long way. It was how the 90's ran.
  • JediPig 2y ago
    I too hit the 50. For the last 8 years I been 100% remote and seen the office ONE time only and that was just to hug a buddy happy retirement. Later on I found out his wages were cut and he found a new job. I quickly joined him with a competitor. The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.
• greenchair 2y ago
  After downsizing trends, many teams are now fullstack and do not collab anyway. Each feature is worked by single dev for the most part.
  • 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
    This is a far bigger problem than wfh ever was. Everyone has their own thing to do and there is no incentive to work as a team. I saw it in several companies. I remember better times, working in teams that actually worked like teams, together on solving the same problems, all day. I don't think it had anything to do with being in the same room. The trend towards "everyone has their own jira ticket to work on and the only thing anyone cares about is how fast they can complete that one thing, so working together with others is just a waste of time" started years before the pandemic. It will not be solved by going back to the office.
• stego-tech 2y ago
  And this has been my pushback against RTO, ironically enough. Team camaraderie is important, yes, but so is independence and comfort. I found that a single week or two a year, with my global team sharing a conference room, three square meals a day, and even non-work activities like volunteering or offroading, built a stronger working relationship than simply cohabiting a space together five days a week or working entirely remotely. We knocked out big room planning and upwards of eighteen months of work scheduling in that brief week. We executed successfully on everything we planned for that entire year. Teams absolutely need to meet in-person at regular intervals to remain effective, but they don’t need to be full-RTO. By making such meetups focused and organized, they become important events we want to sink our time and energy into. We relish the next opportunity to meet one another and build better stuff as a result.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Yeah. Latterly, some of the economic headwinds in tech led to a lack of in-person meetings even after the worst of COVID was over. I pretty much just gave up even knowing who most of the people on my extended team were because I just wasn't invested in it.
  • sys_64738 2y ago
    You're a work colleague, and nothing more. I certainly have no interest in engaging with work colleagues outside of work. I have a life.
    • draebek 2y ago
      But what if you also like the people you work with? Or, to flip that around a bit, what if you hire people who are both competent and interesting/pleasant to be around?
    • ghaff 2y ago
      And occasional face to face team meetings are part of that work at many companies. If you don't want to participate you're probably better off finding a company that doesn't have such an expectation.
• conartist6 2y ago
  I don't doubt that most engineers are hugely unproductive, but I'd wager it has less to do with where they physically are and more to do with the fact that most companies have carefully, almost clinically undercut their employees' faith and independence. Do you know how long it's been since I even saw a single job listing that was searching for an exceptionally strong candidate?
• notyourwork 2y ago
  Cannot agree more. Human interaction in person is far superior to virtual. Younger developers have never experienced this so they don’t appreciate the lack of it. However, I notice their delayed and glacial pace of growth. All of this is due to lack of discrete interaction which is where the real learning, team development and software development processes can thrive.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Never a full-time developer but I had a ton of in-person interacting in the early years of my career--even though I've had significant remote (admittedly mixed in with a good bit of traveling for a long time). Maybe it's a lack of imagination but I can't imagine how working more or less full-time out of my apartment for my early career years would have worked.
  • backtobasix 2y ago
    Yes, you can see the development plateaus earlier in recent decades. Teams that I've managed that are collocated are more nimble and ramp faster because in-person feedback loops all day long. I'm doing a bad job communicating this, and it is disappointing to see so much "well, i'm special and can learn on my own" which is something I've encountered so many times over the years (hint, it is a very small %age). The self-sabotaging isolation is astonishing. But as I said before, forcing people to commute far distances in cities with gawd-awful public transport is both on the OEM and on the car-centric USA. But I digress... All I know is: teams that are in the same building are 2-3x more effective than teams that are fragmented across the globe.
• rubicon33 2y ago
  It's very easy to have rose colored glasses when remembering the 90s. I'm not trying to discount your entire point, but rather, argue that what was true in that economic climate might not be the same today. Do I believe people were enthusiastic, collaborative, and highly productive when it seemed nothing could go wrong and the economy was booming? Absolutely. It's a lot harder to pull everyone together and knock out projects at an "insane" rate when the backdrop is the post-2007, post-covid climate. Stock market aside, there's something off about the purchasing power of the dollar and most young people feel it deeply. It's demotivating to say the least. I think that's why you're seeing such a strong resistance to RTO. If massive wealth growth isn't an option like it was in the 90s, then give me comfort.
  • jemmyw 2y ago
    Nothing wrong with the dollar, things are cheap, food is cheap, even after the last couple of years inflation. What's broken is housing. People in the 90s had fewer toys but much more affordable housing.
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      I agree. I had my first house built in a new subdivision - 2800 square feet 4/2 - for $170K in south metro Atlanta in 2002. I was only making $60K at the time. I even had my second house built in 2016 in north metro Atlanta in the “good school system” - 3100 square feet 5 bed /3.5 bath for $335K and only put around $12K down. I sold it last year for $670K after moving to a condo in Florida that cost $340K. I could never move to the state tax free Florida with not many local tech jobs if it weren’t for remote work
  • backtobasix 2y ago
    Except I also work with my local divisions, and the teams that work on the same floor near the same cubes are vastly more productive. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm here to burst the echo chamber bubble that "RTO is evil greed". There is literally merit to it, but if you haven't had broad perspective managing and delivering successful and unsuccessful projects, it will be invisible to you. Some people just want to sit in a cube in code forever and ever. Awesome, that's great. But don't pretend you have insight into the larger processes above you if you don't take time to learn and experience them.
• florbo 2y ago
  I think lack of in-person collab is the biggest drawback to remote work, but only because a lot of people still haven't adapted to or accepted the tools available. > If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it In my experience, the younger people tend to adapt faster and more readily use the tools. It's easier to form a good working relationship with them as a result.
• deleted 2y ago
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