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Executives at pretty much every organization offer the same sensible reason. Working in an office together greatly reduces the cost of collaboration, which is v

Executives at pretty much every organization offer the same sensible reason. Working in an office together greatly reduces the cost of collaboration, which is valuable in its own right as well as leading to more inventiveness and better mentorship. The problem is that, as you can see a bit upthread, a lot of ICs don't notice or don't care about the collaborative aspects of their job. To someone who feels that writing out lots of code is their real job, that sensible reason sounds like a weird deflection, since "reduces the cost of collaboration" means by definition that I'm getting interrupted or distracted when I could be heads-down programming.

kj4211cash 2y ago
There's very little in the way of evidence demonstrating your "sensible" hypothesis. On the other hand, a lot of ICs have experience working in office and at home and have noticed we do better work at home.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  The question is what you mean when you say "better work". Are you able to unblock new grads more quickly at home? Are you able to achieve consensus on a new product direction more quickly at home? Or are you able to write code better at home, because you can keep the the new grads and product managers in your Slack backlog for as many hours as you need to maximize code throughput? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but every time I've had this conversation in the past it's been that last option.
  - dumbledoren 2y ago
    What you will be doing in your office environment will be unblocking that new grad in 20 minutes and then putting your noise-canceling headphones on and concentrating on your screen for the rest of the day. And if new grads and product managers are actually able to easily disrupt an IC who is concentrating, that is a sh*tty workplace.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      Well, right, that's what it usually comes back to. If you expect to spend all but 20 minutes of your day concentrating on your screen doing solo work, remote work is definitely the best model. The managers pushing RTO want ICs to spend more time collaborating than that.

kj4211cash 2y ago

There's very little in the way of evidence demonstrating your "sensible" hypothesis. On the other hand, a lot of ICs have experience working in office and at home and have noticed we do better work at home.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
The question is what you mean when you say "better work". Are you able to unblock new grads more quickly at home? Are you able to achieve consensus on a new product direction more quickly at home? Or are you able to write code better at home, because you can keep the the new grads and product managers in your Slack backlog for as many hours as you need to maximize code throughput? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but every time I've had this conversation in the past it's been that last option.
- dumbledoren 2y ago
  What you will be doing in your office environment will be unblocking that new grad in 20 minutes and then putting your noise-canceling headphones on and concentrating on your screen for the rest of the day. And if new grads and product managers are actually able to easily disrupt an IC who is concentrating, that is a sh*tty workplace.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    Well, right, that's what it usually comes back to. If you expect to spend all but 20 minutes of your day concentrating on your screen doing solo work, remote work is definitely the best model. The managers pushing RTO want ICs to spend more time collaborating than that.