As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial when I started out.
My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role, across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.
In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental model for how businesses "work", why they're organized how they are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that I'm still in touch with to this day.
As a remote, older professional now, I don't necessarily "need" these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the general socialization. But I do feel like they're an essential "ladder" that every subsequent generation of professionals should be able to access, and that it's a moral obligation for me to "pay it forward".
For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.
I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas about what they want to extract out of employees
They always start with return to office = productivity, which people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football. Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. If we're talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at home for most
But you're right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and socializing as a whole
The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do less head down work at the office
There's another problem in that the modern office is not optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some idea way up in the clouds about free communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this.
When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration space.
I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even private in that sense, I just don't like people standing behind me.
Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH).
When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?
I actually had a private office with walls and a door for about a month. We moved to a new building and picked our own seats in a pre-determined area in order of seniority. Being a former boy scout I oriented myself to the map before making my selection. For whatever reason the map was oriented with north to the left. None of the people in front of me noticed this and picked desks on an undesirable side of the building. That left an office available to me, a junior engineer. My manager was unhappy with his window looking at a brick wall instead of the lake and was especially unhappy with me having an office and not him. So he put in a maintenance request and had my office walls torn down and converted to a open cube.
Wow, a similar thing happened to me in one of my first jobs as a junior. We moved office and could choose our seats. Because I hate having people behind me (mentioned above) I chose a seat with my back to the wall.
The managers clicked on to what had happened on the first day and moved me. Infuriating! I am much more confident now but I just accepted it at that time.
My first job out of undergrad was doing CAD stuff making like $12/hour and I had an office. I don't remember if it had a door that shut, but it definitely had 4 real walls. I didn't know it then, but that was the best work environment I've ever had. That was about 20 years ago.
From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I’m class of ‘93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone having them.
I then went back to private offices for most of 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I hated.
I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated.
It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason.
How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.
Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
Those metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula.
Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.
Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.
I've seen the transition from offices to open space in Microsoft first hand. The management basically made this same argument - "sure, you might not like it, but we did studies and most employees who participated in them think it's better! give it a chance!"
Somehow, those happy employees were never in my circles. Or in my colleagues' circles. Like, pretty much every time this subject come up in any context, the overwhelming sentiment was that there's no way the purported upsides are worth the obvious and unavoidable major downsides.
They moved ahead with it anyway, of course. And it sucked as much as everybody was expecting. Out of several dozen colleagues, I think there was a grand total of two who didn't mind it, and they were already doing the whole "roam around with a laptop" thing anyway.
Nobody likes that either, at least not sober. But that's where the music is, the people are, the dancing is.
source: bartended in a VIP space in a casino while doing fiber splicing on the side. the number of people who bought into the VIP "because it's not as loud" was very high; I heard some permutation of "it's nicer in here, quieter, I can actually talk to people" every shift.
I like socializing in bars with people and I like doing work in quiet isolation. I also sleep in a bedroom but cook in a kitchen. There’s nothing inconsistent about that. Different settings are appropriate for different things.
Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6 coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and probably 30+ people in the same open space.
I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5 jobs.
Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil cup and succulents every day.
> It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open workspace.
Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since they're never removable lol.
If we're going to all sit together at a big table we might as well see each other lol.
Many companies don't look kindly to unauthorized changes to their office infrastructure, even more so for agile desks.
And even if the relevant people are ok with you, you might piss off a power hungry middle manager that doesn't like someone standing out (had that happen to me).
That seems incredibly short-sighted given the price in (ironically) lost productivity.
Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money? How exactly do we create value without investment? I think there's an enormous opportunity out there for a company that actually treats their employees with respect and pays attention to their needs. That includes saying "we are big enough".
> Is there some new school of philosophy among the management class that doesn't believe in spending money to make money?
Yeah! Your salary scales with the number of underlings you command while the number of underlings depends on what task was assigned to the department. You can't add in some fully unproductive people nor can you assign someone to be unproductive thus therefore and so on the hip choice is to gradually lower everyone's productivity. You might see a pattern of counter productive measures if you look for it.
I work in an environment which has rooms for 3-4 desks, maybe 2 or 5 in some. This results in good communication and collaboration within a project team without the excessive noise of a full pen office, and if you have just a couple colleagues there then you also get a "feel" for when they need to focus and when a discussion would be good.
I agree that "in office" culture implicitly values informal, face-to-face interactions that happen "for free" if you are in office. The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc).
I also find the casual interactions in-office valuable - but I'm not going to "eat" the cost of enabling them for the good of the company. If someone actually offered me an in-office position that took the time I spent enabling those interactions seriously (i.e. compensated me for them) - I would be a lot more receptive to returning!
Instead, companies tend to want it both ways: they want their employees to donate the time to get the benefits of working in-office, then they want to use the same employees lower raw productivity stats to fire them down the line. I'm old enough to recognize such an obvious trap.
>The problem, in an increasingly globalized world, is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee commutes (and buys lunch, etc).
Maybe this needs to be changed then. Employers should be paying commuting expenses anyway: here in Japan, this is the norm. And large employers could also be providing free lunch as well.
Having a free zone between home and work was somewhat of a perk in Tokyo, but I don't know if you can really quantify it as a perk anymore now that WFH is common and you don't have to waste time on a crowded train.
Maybe pay a higher salary to compensate for time during the commute as well as the paid for PASMO.
In Brazil transportation and food allowances are also pretty common benefits (at least for office workers). Back when I worked there it was transitioning from paper tickets to cards.
It's so common to the point where an employer not offering those are seen as extremely cheap ones that you should avoid.
In conversations I've have, cost-of-living is generally described as a way of adjusting your pay to "keep up" with overall inflation. I've never had a conversation about how onerous it is to get into the office and how expectations or compensation might be adjusted in response.
The present messaging accurately reflects how managers are seeing the situation (they think employees goof off when they aren't being watched, and don't have the metrics necessary to tell that's not true), replacing it with "messaging" about career development is essentially lying just to get people to go along with RTO. If they really cared about young professionals that wouldn't be "changing the messaging."
I goof off a lot more working from home through the day, but at the same time I get more done at night and on weekends. The best part about working from home is that I don't have to sit in front of a screen from 9-5 from Mon-Fri, I can sit down anytime I get the motivation to do so and get my work done. I guarantee that if I were in an office, I would have been burnt out and quit my job by now, but instead I'm able to just not work much for several days if it doesn't suit me, then finish up my work in a 20-hour blast on a Saturday. What's it matter to my boss or company when I get work done as long as it is complete prior to the due date? Probably those managers that hate "goofing off" don't realize that's not the same as not doing your work. When I was in the Navy, my sailors would goof off all the damn time, but I let them because telling sailors not to goof off goes against their nature! They still got the work done.
The 2 hour lunches are actually useful once a week. Sitting at your desk is even less a guarantee anyone is working. Its a fools errand to try to micromanage that.
I'm an older professional now working in a hybrid arrangement, but I very much concur with the parent comment. I can't imagine how my early career would have gone without being able to put in the time in the office. Its a cliche, but work culture really does exist, and it's about social cues and rules of courtesy. These mores are not taught in school but are absolutely essential to working effectively in an office. I would suspect this socialization is even more important for people who perhaps come from families where no parent was a white-collar office worker. I was lucky to start out at places where it was common for teams to eat lunch together. These unofficial interactions were just as important as regular work interactions in helping me to understand the psychology of my more experienced colleagues, what was polite, and what was taboo.
Managing remote workers is a skill that many managers are finding out they don't have right now. I wasn't in the same office as my manager when I started out. I was lucky to have good managers over time who were able to foster these types of discussions you're talking about, without ever being collocated with everyone involved.
It's kinda sad, because this isn't a new problem. Whether you're remote because you're working from home, or you're remote because you're in Belgium and the rest of your team is in North Carolina, the managerial issues are roughly the same, but we've had multinational companies for a while now...
Managing any workers is a skill that many managers have never had, especially in companies where the only way to progress (in terms of salary and status) is to become a team manager.
But there exists 100% remote companies, even before Covid. In such companies this “lunch culture” doesn’t exist (never existed). We should learn from such companies because I think remote work is more about finally putting more emphasis on the “life” part of “work-life balance”
I’ve worked at many styles of company, including 2 that were fully remote pre-Covid.
The secret to success is, we have like a 8-1 senior to junior ratio. That’s the only way they get enough specific attention to stay effective, not get lost in the shuffle, get the training they need.
The company that I worked at which transitioned to remote during Covid… didn’t go so well
This is what I have observed when I was looking for remote jobs before covid. They all had extremely high standards and wanted people who could just work solo without any learning required.
I work for a (pre-covid) 100% remote company with a decent company culture. What worked for us is two whole-company meetups per year plus some smaller trips for teams and departments. It really boosts the team spirit to spend a week somewhere nice with plenty of time to just chat to mates and random people that I wouldn't otherwise meet.
We also have some online social activities during the year but it doesn't work as well. The participation is low. Teams have regular online (paid-for) lunches together which is nice but a bit awkward. People generally prefer to focus on getting the job done and having a good work-life balance. This works as long as we get to see each other in person a couple of times a year.
That said, with the recent economic down-turn, the company meetups got put on hold. The company grew and it's now very expensive to organise transport and accommodation for everyone. I can already see the negative effects of the decision.
,,For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.''
If you are older and more experienced, you should know that life isn't fair.
But at the same time I see lot of young people want to start working remotely and want to do software development _because_ it can be done remotely, but fail to understand that it's an advantage for them.
Sadly social media is full of good sounding bad advice for young people.
I am totally for remote work but this is absolutely a real problem, and I see my junior engineers suffer tremendously from it. One asked me what made me so successful at my job, and there were many factors but being in the office really did help me. Success here doesn’t just mean solving chunks of problems from jira tickets but creating entirely new products and solutions which have then gone on to become important parts of the organizations offerings. This was only possible because of my initial years where I was constantly absorbing and brainstorming with folks in the office on a daily basis. We really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment.
One of the ideas I’m thinking about is to hire only within a metropolitan area, but keep remote. Every month we just organize a 3 day retreat where everyone’s expected to attend it, which could be in a resort or a hotel even. This might satisfy the interaction and brainstorming itch while still keeping everyone happy with their remote arrangements.
I saw similar results when we first started hiring after moving full remote.
The group that had worked together in the office handled remote work spectacularly. New hires tended to flounder a bit compared to what we were used to.
We achieved some better results once we realized this and started putting some more specific mentorship time in with new hires.
Like in the first week their manager/lead should be meeting with them multiple times a day, then ramping down to at least once a day with screen sharing / pair programming etc. when they have questions. Plus inclusion and involvement in meetings that help provide a bigger picture of how the product works, customer needs, etc. And making sure they are introduced to many team members and know where to ask questions for the best feedback.
Of course this depends on the team, the new hire, and how things are going. But it seemed like the default case for many people was to spend hours silently not progressing when they were stuck on a problem, from dev machine setup to their first assigned tasks. Getting dumped into a Slack instance with dozens of channels and hundreds of people can certainly be overwhelming and being guided through these first steps seemed to help a lot.
I think it’s completely possible to give a new dev the same kinds of experience and mentorship, but with remote work that has to be done more deliberately. In a close office environment a lot of that happened via natural interaction and osmosis without anything needing to be scheduled on a calendar.
This is the main thing I've noticed - the people who talk about how there is something lost in how work gets done haven't changed how work gets done.
You can't just move to being remote without rethinking how you do everything. People were forced to be remote with COVID, but corporate essentially just tried to port the way things were done to remote, and on realizing it didn't work as well, want to move back.
A few places are doing things correctly and building specifically for remote work.
I honestly believe this is why we have such stark disparity in studies.
100% this.
I've been remote since covid. First job was transitioned and I mentored and onboarded people. It was alot of screen sharing, and messaging back and forth. This was no different (but better) then onsite where they would cram into my cube and try to take notes. Remote made this 100% better.
Next company, I was the new guy and there were issues getting up to speed. Nobody really owned the onboarding process and this "remote first" environment had alot of technical debt and poor documentation.
Now I'm at another remote first company, and it's great. I know who to ask and I get answers real-time or asynchronous, depending on what needs to happen. People are responsive and regular meetings keep us on the same page.
Documentation is stressed and kept up to date.
We're 100% remote and this is absolutely key. You need to be deliberate about designing your operational processes around remote work. That means when you onboard someone you don't just dump them in a slack account and tell them to follow a doc. You pair them with someone until they're ramped up.
Personally, I grew up on the internet, learning from people in chatrooms and forums which were strong communities where most of my personal adult relationships have come from (many of whom I've not met in 20 years of knowing them).
From what I've seen, if your seniors and your juniors are both from this era and culture, your remote team will excel without missing a beat. I think it's the people used to the "old ways" that will suffer, for having expensive requirements like an office to capture the same value.
On the other hand, plenty of people going through college are exposed to a culture that you should work on a problem set for a good long time before resorting to the professor's office hours (which are probably only once a week anyway) and that asking a peer is practically cheating.
And indeed, when filing bugs in open source projects - there is often a culture that you should have exhausted every other option before bothering the nice volunteers.
I also grew up on the internet, but disagree strongly: the challenge of onboarding remotely is real, and more challenging the equivalent on-site experience.
And to be very precise: I don't think that remote vs in-office onboarding is simply different, or even that it simply requires more intentional efforts, but that it is on the whole entirely more complex in non-trivial ways (in time, effort, and attention by all parties - aka: more cost).
that is an interesting connection, the habit of chat in general. I never considered my days in the chat rooms as prepping me for life in chat. I occasionally see various critiques and complaints at work with some folks getting disoriented and frustrated working in slack and I never quite get where they're struggling or coming from. Could it be just general inexperience in chats like AOL, IRC, yahoo, MSN, hangouts, or whatever the medium was. Keyboard chatting is definitely different from mobile chatting for sure with the keyboard and speed. Maybe individuals haven't spent earlier years in their youth in the chatrooms quite possibly.
Yeah this is so true. I casually type like 110-130wpm and didn't think anything of it... it wasn't until I got into the business world that I realized this isn't too common, even among other career programmers. Huh, didn't everyone stay up until 3am chatting on [IRC/etc.] and then fall asleep in class the next day? haha ;)
> Huh, didn't everyone stay up until 3am chatting on [IRC/etc.] and then fall asleep in class the next day? haha ;)
Chaotic many-users chatrooms (including, but not exclusively, IRC) and text chat in video games. You have to get fast at typing to use either—in the former, if you're too slow, you'll drop out of the flow of conversation, and in the latter, speed is key because being slow makes you vulnerable in the game, and if you're not pretty damn fast you can't really afford to use it at all.
I learned the basic mechanics of typing from Mavis Beacon, but I got fast because of those.
Right? If you can learn how to get good at Elden Ring from a fan wiki and a couple YouTube videos, I’m pretty sure you can learn how to do most office jobs with basic documentation and some video chats…
Funny thing is, promotions in your career are very rarely about your pure skill at something. Hard pill to swallow for the Just Log On And Deliver crowd but it's more like (skill * how much your boss likes you * social connections in the team where others vouch for you).
Which some of us are way better at making online text-only relationships than face-to-face ones, which is how my career accelerated, and where most of my closest and longest lasting relationships in life have come from.
I wonder if there might be some asymmetry in how others perceived those online-only relationships? I think it's probably true that some manager might feel a person is more "the right one for this post" simply because they've had in person interactions, for example. Whilst those who, perhaps, find online or IRL engagements to have a similar worth might not perceive that there is an asymmetry for others.
Find you niche and none of that matters, I imagine.
Would it not be better if promotions were made on the basis of skill and accomplishments instead of looks/talks like/kisses the ass of the boss? You’re essentially defending an arcane social hierarchy where you have to sycophantically jockey for your position. If remote work demolishes even a small part of that, all the better.
But I also got a promotion last year that nearly doubled my pay by just logging on and delivering, so I admit to being a little biased.
You're thinking of the worst case. The reality is, in a large company, every promotion probably has 2+ people who have the skills and accomplishments. The determining factor ends up being if your boss likes you/wants to work more closely with you.
Yes, there are terrible managers and nepotism type environments, but on par most bosses wants to look good to higher ups which means promoting skills which helps the boss look good. Exactly what happened in your case.
> most bosses wants to look good to higher ups which means promoting skills which helps the boss look good.
…which is how you end up with stagnant cultures like Meta and Google, who just sit around and wait for their lunch to get ate by their competitors. If you instead reward delivering the goods in whatever context, you don’t run into these problems! The company should maximize for being a successful business, not stroking its managers egos.
Not just promotions, but jobs. After my second job, every job I've ever had I got because I knew someone who liked working with me and could vouch for my ability. I've never taken a coding test as part of a job interview. I did have to take one on the job once when a new manager came in. I left that job fairly soon after, as I found the whole process and attitude around it to be insulting.
On face value you'd think that but you also remember the rest of the team and the manager also has to spend hundreds of hours a year with that person so it's way easier if you like them and enjoy that time rather than someone mega skilled who causes you stress and you don't like being around.
Video Games are environments that are designed to teach you how to master them. That includes very hard video games; I don’t feel like video games are a good point of reference. YouTube is also pretty good at teaching you how to change the headlights on your car, but it’s not so good at teaching you a foreign language. I’m not sure where a basic office job like programming falls on that continuum.
I also grew up on the internet, most of folks at my workplace grew up with the internet and... everyone noticed that during covid you miss out on a lot of growth and interesting conversations from unplanned meetings, I think it's a bit silly to assume there's nothing to gain from having a shared space at the office, the same way it's silly to think there's no cost in having to go to an office either.
What you say is true, but on the other hand remote work (usually) brings benefits to your “non-work” life. I definitely wouldn’t like to trade the niceties of the office (not many, but not zero either) with the niceties of remote work (which are many, from my point of view). So, honest question: you wouldn’t mind trading them?
> So, honest question: you wouldn’t mind trading them?
Hybrid is obviously the best of both worlds? I'd never want to work fully remote, there's a lot of benefits both for me and for the company in having in-person time.
In an ideal world, yes hybrid is the best. But hybrid becomes easily non-realistic when 99% of job offers in country X come from city Z and you live in town W (which is not close to Z).
In an ideal world, I would love to go to the office every now and then, just by crossing the street. In the real world, it’s either moving to the city and paying a high price for a tiny apartment so that you can go commute once or twice per week to the office, or it’s living in a big house in a decent town working 100% remotely. There middle-point options, of course, but those are rather less likely to occur.
The internet has existed since before I was in college, so I also "grew up" on the internet. But you're vastly overestimating what you can learn from randos in chatrooms and forums. Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.
Will this work for low-value piecework, or learning how to use an API? Yes, for a while. But this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior. In order to grow in your career, the broader context, business knowledge, connections and intangibles you gain from being around senior colleagues are invaluable.
I say this from hard experience. At the start of my career, I thought I could learn everything I needed to know on the internet. I was wrong. Even if most of the technical details were there (they weren't) and correct (they aren't), in every career, your accomplishments are based on your personal relationships. Always. I can't emphasize this enough.
It's hard enough to make those relationships, even when you're in the office every day. Trying to do it all by video call is just living life on hard mode.
---
Edit: people seem to keep interpreting this comment as "it's impossible to grow in a remote career". That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just going to respond once here:
a) I don't know if it's "impossible" to form strong personal relationships remote-only, but it's much harder.
b) Obviously, everyone defines success differently, and maybe your definition is different than my own, but
c) In my experience, all other things being equal, the more time you spend around other people, the better your career will be.
I didn't make a "personal swipe". I assume you're speaking about this?
> But this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior.
I was referring to myself here, which I elaborated in the third paragraph.
> I say this from hard experience. At the start of my career, I thought I could learn everything I needed to know on the internet. I was wrong. Even if most of the technical details were there (they weren't) and correct (they aren't), in every career, your accomplishments are based on your personal relationships. Always. I can't emphasize this enough.
I was referring to "[you] don't know what you don't know." It's patronizing and comes across as dismissive to tell someone what they don't know.
Re-reading your comment I think you perhaps didn't mean the "you" as specifically the person you were talking to. So I can see how it wasn't intended as personal attack. Unfortunately it ended up coming across that way both to the GP and to me when I first read it, so probably to others as well.
On the plus side, I appreciate that you were simply trying to share your personal experience and the conclusions it has led you to. That's totally valid. On the minus side, you reacted to people objecting to what they felt was dismissive in your comment by getting into a flamewar-style spat about what you did and didn't say. That kind of thread just slowly degrades.
As you know, I've been asking you to adjust to HN more in the intended spirit of curious conversation for years now. I genuinely appreciate how much better your comments have gotten at that. You contribute a lot of good things when you do. But if you could calibrate say 10% further in the same direction, that would be helpful.
I grew up in a small dusty town in the middle of an African desert. I taught myself everything I know from the web, IRC and forums. I was top of numerous IS and CS classes at university. In my professional career, I've learned the most from colleagues who happened to be overseas. I almost never do video calls.
I make sure to spend a lot of time mentoring via screen share and encourage recordings (many times this is way more useful than an in-person session where the details are forgotten).
High quality learning relationships can be entirely remote and text/screen-share based.
I agree with this. Screen sharing is a very effective way to transfer knowledge — I have had a lot of success by hopping onto a screen share and walking others through things. There is lots of room for questions and they can record/review the meeting too.
However, this requires a culture where impromptu calls are expected and normalized. The more friction there is from scheduling, waiting for people to respond, etc the less likely these kind of fast information transfer sessions are to happen.
Tldr, I think people can learn very effectively in a remote environment, it just requires that people put the same kind of time into communicating that they would in an office.
> Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.
With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process.
A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way. In fact, open source software development hinges on distributed development.
Now, what I do agree on is that interpersonal connections with other, more experienced folks, is key. Most engineers seem to quickly plateau on their soft skills. I always say that coding is the easy part of software engineering. You can teach anyone to code. It's strategic and critical thinking and how to present and communicate those ideas that make you stand out.
However, it's very much possible to get those connections in a remote world. But it means deliberately operating in a way conducive to getting that face time. I wouldn't say it's much harder. But the company needs to actively focus on this.
> With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process. A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way
This has nothing to do with what I wrote. Whether or not people work "in a distributed fashion" is unrelated to whether or not those people have a team they see in person on a regular basis, contribute to public forums and chatrooms, or advance in their careers via collaboration with colleagues.
For what it's worth, most professional developers don't contribute to open-source on any regular basis. The ones that do often work in big companies, which then choose to open-source their work. Regardless, working in "a distributed fashion" is not the same thing is posting to forums that other people can see. And it's a rare company where everything you need to know is captured in public code. Usually that's just the table stakes -- the most valuable engineers are walking around with encyclopedic business knowledge in their heads.
The core fallacy I am rebutting here is that everything you need to know is just out there, freely available on the internet. Even in the open-source world, that isn't true.
This actually has nothing to do with public forums. That was your insertion. The point is that the way we interacted with public or private niche communities on the internet informs how we interact with our private always-online work-chat. We're learning from and working with highly qualified coworkers aligned on the same problems, not randos.
> I grew up on the internet, learning from people in chatrooms and forums which were strong communities where most of my personal adult relationships have come from
^ you. I didn't "insert" it. You're saying that most of your "personal adult relationships" came from chatrooms and forums.
Now, OK, maybe your point really was that you're somehow better at all of this because you "grew up on the internet" and the rest of us didn't, but I'm just going to go back to what I originally wrote: I also did that, and still, all of the best things in my career came from seeing people, in person.
There's no magical set of forum skills I'm lacking that makes up the difference; it's just a case where the camaraderie of working closely with someone, in real life, outweighs the virtual.
Sorry for any implied snark. I don't think it's a special set of skills, just a different default and preferred mode of experiencing human connection that some of us ended up with.
Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my experience. We work on complicated technical high value things and my juniors are very fast learners. And we learn from each other and not necessarily from the internet.
We also don't need video calls. I have never met them, and rarely have I seen their faces. Kind of like my life long friends on the internet, we didn't have video calls then either. We can connect through text just fine. We sometimes play games together to blow off the steam, and we collaborate on meaningful work problems.
> Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my experience.
It's not "dismissive" to tell you that I think you're wrong. I'm trying to explain something that you clearly haven't experienced yet. There's no way to do that without actually saying that you haven't experienced it.
I understand why you believe what you do. I believed the same things, but I was wrong.
I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships. For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.
Normie here, and I've always thought this was the biggest benefit of remote work. No more emphasis on what you look and act like. Only the value you add counts.
This has got to be good for racial, gender, etc forms of discrimination. In a wheelchair? Black? Female? Ideally nobody would care because they wouldn't even know.
I'm a couple of years older than you and I agree with most of this. Never had a "mentor" though lip service was paid to the concept in a few places, it never really happened in the tech positions.
"Team-building" stuff -- outings, retreats, games, that all the business folks seemed to love were painfully awkward experiences that seemed to be totally contrived. I tried to fake that I was enjoying it but pretty sure I never pulled it off very well.
I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored.
It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring someone. “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?”
I can’t imagine how I’d setup an in-person work arrangement to avoid mentoring.
> “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.”
Don't ever talk to one another during debugging sessions. Pick up your bug ticket, fix it, close the ticket. Everyone else has their own work to do so they are not interested in watching you pilot your heavily-customized IDE setup, and the boss doesn't make them.
> “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.”
Don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture. If you must, definitely don't invite juniors. In fact, nobody actually writing code to implement the change will be in the meeting at all. We are architects and managers, they are merely developers. They'll write what we tell them to write. In many organizations, even the people called "architects" are left out of these meetings, and probably even line managers. These are Director Level Decisions, after all.
> “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?”
Easiest of the three. Just never ever have anybody "shadow" anyone for any reason. They have their own work to be doing.
I'm not saying these behaviors are good, but they are pretty much the default behavior in corporate jobs AFAICT.
It’s the normal, default state of affairs when you have seniors and managers who feel they are competing with each other and so hoard knowledge and techniques, and assign themselves all the interesting work while juniors are left bored doing rite work. In several workplaces when I’ve tried to organize shared spaces like a commons, lunch-and-learns, etc., management had been actively hostile. I had one asshole manager who would even shut down any water-cooler conversation. I finally wound up mentoring a co-worker who needed help with C++ entirely off-site during lunches.
I mean...there are a lot of anti-social developers who truly want to believe.
But really, people are just going out of their way to resolve the cognitive dissonance: they know that important intangible collaboration is lost in a world of remote work, but they prefer it anyway, so they convince themselves that the human aspect doesn't matter.
Also, don't forget that HN is filled with junior engineers. It's true that a lot of what you do when you're a junior engineer can be done in isolation, and when you get to a self-sufficient junior level ("senior engineer" in modern parlance; achieved in about 3-5 years), it's easy to ignore all the times that someone with more experience made a one-off comment that saved hours of labor or headed off a thorny problem. They forget the number of times that someone wandered over to chat, "interrupted" them, and changed everything.
The sibling comment is a great illustration. I can't tell if it's parody, but it reads like it: "just don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture," indeed. Whiteboard diagramming obviously never happens at every company, ever.
I can see that because I've experienced it. That said, at most places I've worked at over the decades, there was a lot of mentoring, both formal and informal. One place I worked at, however, was just depressing. No one communicated except via emails. Informal discussions about how the system never happened. No one even went out to eat together No one was hostile... it was just... cold. To me, it was just weird and I got out of there ASAP -- but I suspect many there liked it that way.
> For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't
Please don't speak for all of us. I used to think exactly like you, but turns out I was just on bad teams in bad companies. My recent teams have mostly been composed of and managed by like minded programmers and the camaraderie, lunch conversation, and ad hoc collaboration that ensue massively help both my happiness and productivity. I'm as neurodivergent as you will see in public.
Fair enough - I’m 55 and describing the bulk on my career to date. Lately the culture of a couple companies I’ve been in have been much more welcoming to neurodivergent folks but this is post-COVID. I’m not planning to do in-person work in the near future; I already have long COVID and risk factors that make me want to make sure my family and I never get infected again.
I've a little younger than the OP and I've never had a proper mentor either. I had one guy I argued with a lot that I learned some tricks from that I use to this day, but that's about it.
I've never worked in a company with any type of formal mentoring that everyone talks about. The "let me take you under my wing and show you the ropes, kiddo," never existing in my world, it was sink or swim. I spent countless hours reading books (I'm old) and scouring the web for solutions. If I could debug it, I could figure out the problem, I just didn't always know what it was supposed to do. I did all this because I didn't want to fail. Do junior people still do this, or is it more, "I can't figure it out in 5 minutes, do it for me."
There are also plenty of us who struggle to reach out and benefit _greatly_ from a slow build up of relationships that form from in-person interactions, facilitated by coworkers.
There isn't a single remote versus meatspace answer, and it's incredibly frustrating to hear almost everyone pretend that there's a Single Right Solution and that anything chosen will be easy to implement.
> they can't bully and abuse us
Without at all denying that this happen, this is still a gross (in both senses of the word) generalization and insult.
>> Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.
I'm not sure how remote somehow replaces social interaction in your world, but it sure sounds like you might have other factors at play as well, like categorizing every who's not in the group with which you identify as an abusive bully. I've never worked with you remote or in person, and the only conclusion you've let me make is you're difficult and unpleasant.
> the only conclusion you've let me make is you're difficult and unpleasant.
Is it, though? The _only_ conclusion? Really? And not that I’ve often had terrible managers and worked in stressful, toxic workplaces with self-serving co-workers, in work cultures that did not allow collaboration or mentoring to take place, and even wound up with PTSD?
My conclusion is different: that OP read about someone being bullied and did what so many people do, and concluded: "it must be your fault."
Your explanation is not much more than "trust me, I'm right". That is quite dismissive. Maybe you if you were in person you could give him examples or a better explanation of why he's wrong. /s
You are claiming "This thing never works (and therefore your own experience is wrong)."
The person making a categorical claim has a higher burden of proof than the one making an individual one, especially when the former is attempting to invalidate the lived experience of the latter.
You may not feel like that's what you're doing, but lines like
> you're vastly overestimating what you can learn
> highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms
> don't know what you don't know
...are all very condescending and attempt to generalize your experience to infinity. They absolutely attempt to invalidate other people's experience—they're not even just saying "what you're saying is impossible"; they're outright saying "(unlike me, who's smarter and/or more experienced) you don't realize that the learning you claim to have gotten was crap."
Well, you're misquoting me. Here is what I actually wrote:
> You're vastly overestimating what you can learn from randos in chatrooms and forums. Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know
These are simple facts. They're not "condescending", and more importantly, you wouldn't know if you were wrong, because you're getting a biased sample. That's the point. You don't see or hear from the people who don't post.
But, see, here's the thing: you also wouldn't know if you're wrong, because you'd be getting just as biased a sample, only from the other side—if you're just in the wrong chatrooms and forums.
Furthermore, what you are doing is absolutely, unquestionably, telling other people "I don't know what you learned from these people, and furthermore, I don't have to know, because my experience, which is universal and unassailable in all possible ways, tells me that it must not be enough. If you think you learned enough from these people to be a good mid-to-upper-level programmer, you're wrong. No one can learn to be that good from this. Again, with the only evidence given being that I was unable to do that in this way."
> you also wouldn't know if you're wrong, because you'd be getting just as biased a sample, only from the other side—if you're just in the wrong chatrooms and forums.
Of everywhere I have ever worked and everyone I have ever worked with -- including some big, extremely well-known names -- only a tiny percentage of those people were active contributors online. Moreover, the most experienced, productive, highest-ranking people contributed less, for a variety of practical reasons, ranging from "PR risk" to "I don't want to get fired from my job" to "don't have the time".
This is consistent with an entire career working on the web, where the pattern is always that the vast majority of people lurk.
Could my sample be horribly misrepresentative? I suppose, but it isn't likely.
And if you were coming into a discussion with people saying "I think this thing happens", and you said "No, I don't think this thing happens, based on my personal experience," that would be one thing.
You're not.
You're coming into a discussion with people saying, "I have experienced this thing happening to me," and you're saying "I don't think this thing happens, based on my experience", which means you are trying to use your non-universal experience to tell other people that their experience didn't happen.
The impression you gave me matches that quote you dismiss relatively well.
Perhaps you should also re-read it, you may have carried less of the nuance you intended into the actual text. What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts. If nothing else this heavily insinuates those you're conversing with are incapable and inexpert.
> What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts.
Like I said, it's hard to frame "you don't have this life experience yet" in any other way. I did use these words:
> this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior
...in reference to learning stuff online. I stand by that, because even if you are fully remote for your entire career, you're going to need some level of mentoring to level up. That's just a fact. Reductio ad absurdum: suggesting that you can become John Carmack or Jeff Dean by reading Stack Overflow.
But I also explicitly put an edit on the end of it where I disclaim the generalization you're making -- before you made your comment.
You can become better than
Jeff Dean or John Carmack without mentoring in fact mentoring is negatively associated with self learning which you will need to blaze a new trail.
I personally have experienced it, but my team has only seen greater success since going remote, and filling our roles with good remote fits.
I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years or haven't treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
Been there, done that, both 12 years ago and again during the pandemic. I loved it at first and later grew to hate and resent it. The advantages are immediate and the disadvantages take a little while to manifest.
> I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years and treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
See, this is dismissive. You're assuming something about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I have, and I'm trying to share that experience.
When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent, that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But the best things in my own career, without exception, have come from in-person relationships.
But just to add - it's a misconception to see remote work as a "new way" of working for someone like me. For someone like me, who used chatrooms and forums to collaborate with people on programming and similar projects, remote work is returning back to my natural way of doing things. Going to the office for 10 years was unnatural. We have now cut out a lot of overhead of learning how to manage office life, which is only relevant if you have an office, and which was a hard part of my life (I'm ugly).
And my experience is simply the opposite of yours. My strengths and my teammates strengths have only come to shine since going remote. I only became a Team Lead and then Engineering Manager since we've gone fully remote, and I think it is largely in part thanks to the speed and effectiveness my remote teams achieve in on-boarding members, collaborating, and delivering valuable work. Every retro my team members put "Great teamwork!" on the board, and this only started since we've gone remote.
> And my experience is simply the opposite of yours.
We keep talking past each other. This is the last reply I'm going to make, but hopefully it will add something: please consider that your experience is not opposite of mine, but instead, that you haven't run into the problems yet.
Maybe, for all of your success and advancement, you haven't yet reached the limits I'm talking about. Just consider it.
I'll also ask that you consider the possibility that you haven't experienced overcoming this limit yet. After all, what do we need to learn about our work that can't be represented as text
Or that this limit might be qualitatively different for different people, and that some people are better at online text-only relationships than face-to-face ones. Our teams may have faced limits in real life that only got solved by going remote. (For example, I do believe that when we were in person, we wrote lower quality software, less well-tested, with less communication and collaboration, at a much slower pace, than we do now (you can imagine why - likely we used to rely on informal processes more than we thought or wanted to))
I did mention that I've seen other teams (anecdotally, on less technical areas of the product) face problems with being fully remote- but that was usually fixed with staffing... or a remote leader inheriting the team... We've had many people in our org exclusively remote for the last 20 years as well - these people became the remote leaders on our teams and led by example. It all depends on the remote fit.
"Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums."
Chatrooms, forums, IRC, and mailing lists are how the vast majority of open source software is developed. Usenet used to be big for this sort of thing as well. Most of the people working on open source are also employed in the industry.
Are these people going to spoon feed you everything you need to know? Of course not. The vast majority of insightful information I've learned about software engineering has come from books and people online. My current employer briefly employed some well known people in the Ruby community, but for the most part, most of us work with people who just see this as a job, and these sort of people seem determined to relearn every lesson and reinvent every wheel.
Putting millions of people within driving distance of one another, and then jumping through various hoops to make that ridiculous urban plan work, and demanding people spend 5-15 hours a week commuting in unhealthy, dangerous, dirty, and expensive ways.
Fixed that for you. For people who lean towards an autodidactic approach, this might not be as universally applicable as you make it out to be. In my experience, remote code pairing sessions can be even more productive because each dev has their own dedicated screens and don't have to look over one's shoulder.
I never was able to make a clean experiment with the same people in-person vs remote, but subjectively I didn't find it harder. It might even be easier to have a one-to-one chat with a person you want to chat to in the remote environment than in a chaotic open space office. Not to say remote work gives you exposure to people you might not have exposure to in your country/city at all.
This is a you problem. It is not an everybody problem.
Sure, there are other people who struggle in the same way, but your experiences are not universal, and you are arrogantly preaching at people as if they are—as if because you couldn't do this, obviously no one can.
You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. Not to mention the numerous open-source projects you can learn from and contribute to, which are essentially "fully remote" distributed teams that have been working effectively for years. The larger open-source projects can also be great for networking through their forums/chat rooms/online discussions. Those "randos" are building software that is literally the underlying infrastructure of almost all commercial software being built today.
And, anecdotally, a lot of software jobs are building generic CRUD apps, and a lot of "senior colleagues" are not necessarily great teachers, or even great developers. In scenarios like those, you can do a lot better teaching yourself online with lessons or learning/contributing to the aforementioned open-source projects. It's not just about in-person vs online, but the quality of the team/project you're learning from.
> You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online.
I am not, but my definition of junior/senior/whatever is likely different than your own. At the risk of a truism: can you learn technical things online? Yes, absolutely. It's the kind of things you can't learn from a web forum that make the difference between junior and senior.
Just as a simple example, most stuff you'll read about conflict resolution (people, not code) online is superficial and trite. You can get maybe a bit more from books, but to really learn how to do it, you need to spend time watching someone who is talented at managing interpersonal conflict. I'm not great at it, but I've had the good fortune of spending time with people, in person, who were truly gifted at the task. It completely re-framed my expectations for what is possible.
Maybe there's a way to do this by video call -- but it's harder -- and you're definitely not getting the human experience by reading or watching a video.
I'm curious, did you grow up on it? Or was it just there?
Of my good friends, a majority of them were met online and very rarely have we met in person - maybe a couple dozen times over the past 25 years.
I don't particularly care which way companies go since there will always be remote-first options: there were many before the pandemic, and there will only be more after.
But from my experience a large problem is companies just aren't used to doing what it takes to help relationships develop in a remote only environment. They aren't used to it because when you co-habitate with people it happens more naturally. But it takes more deliberate choices for it to happen remotely.
I wouldn't point to this to call remote "harder". Just different. There's also all sorts of other difficulties with respect to being in an office that you don't have to deal with remotely.
And ultimately, some will prefer one or another. Which is fine.
Connections/network are indeed fundamental to career growth and learning, accomplishments, etc.. but those don't have to be in-person at all. I mean, I have been learning, building new things, making connections with new people, and I've been 100% remote for the past 3 years. There has been no discernible adverse effect on any career-related criterion I can think of. The literal only downside for me is not being in the super-awesome building I got to work in before, and maybe random off-topic chatter with people. I have that "off-topic chatter" on chat/videocall now, which is just fine anyways. And I don't have to donate 1-2 hours a day to my employer by driving to/from an office.
Is the “being in the office really did help me” because you were in the office so figured out how to be successful in the office?
I look at GitHub and I see thousands upon thousands of highly successful highly complex software written by all levels of experience collaboratively without an office environment. I got started with open source in the 1990’s and it was amazing how fast we wrote stuff, and the level of mentoring I got was amazing. When I started working in professional office environments it was amazing how little could get done in such a long period of time with so many people, and mentoring was something I had to eek out of people who were too busy meeting and jockeying.
I think folks see in office as necessary because it was their experience and they don’t have a frame of reference for any other way of career development. That’s simply an emergent reality, not necessarily the singular reality.
Investing time in juniors is a conscious decision. It’s just as easy to ignore a junior developer in person than it is remotely. But I firmly believe asynchronous work habits lead to the best mentoring possible - juniors can ask their questions in slack or whatever, and seniors can answer as they have the chance to. Soft skill mentoring happens just fine over zoom, and that stuff is better scheduled as a private convo.
Open source is an interesting subject to look at. Obviously it's possible to build software without an office environment, but when you look at most of these projects, they have 1-3 main contributors and others who submit a single patch and leave. I've tried a few times to contribute to OSS projects and found it to often be an impossible barrier to get over. I'm decently experienced with 10 years programming experience across a few jobs, and I just have not found a good way to get all the required knowledge to start contributing to a project. I quickly build up a list of questions and the only channel for asking them is usually IRC where no one responds.
Meanwhile I get up to speed super fast in an office/work environment where another dev will sit with you for a chunk of time and show you the ropes. So much faster than floundering around the codebase making assumptions.
OSS is hard mostly because there’s an enormous number of zombie projects out there and you need to find the one that fits you. Sort of like, say, a job. I’m mostly in the rust world, but try these crates: ratatui-rs, nushell. Python: cadquery, build123d
They’re active, the contributors and maintainers are helpful, and are doing interesting (to me) work.
My point however wasn’t that open source monolithically solves the problems. My point was it can solve the problems that an endemic to office culture, and I’ve rarely found office cultures that solve these problems. My assertion was that the modalities of OSS work can apply to corporate work, with strong effect, but only if people are committed to making it work and invest in each other. The same is true of in office, but I hold that the asynchronous style of work is inherently more efficient due to the fact that asynchronous work in general is more efficient than synchronous.
In my career I’ve seen a lot of fads including importing OSS style work into the office. These were done by cargo culting- using pull requests, open code base, etc. The real magic behind OSS is that everyone works asynchronously - irc, slack, discord, mail lists, Usenet, uucp, etc except for when it’s absolutely necessary to stop the world and synchronize. This is intuitively more productive, or at least as an engineer you should see clearly how that applies to computers, programs, logistics, and every every production process - why not to software development?
The primary “why not” is “I like working in an office with people because after college I’m lonely.” But that’s just because you’ve not re-adapted to living in your community. Before the automobile and it’s associated infrastructure most people worked from home, or extremely proximate. You can have friends again outside college and without an office. It’ll just take some adapting to being human again. The human hamster wheels aren’t necessary.
Very much agreed on this. One of the key things in me being where I am now is spending a few years working for an ISP staffed by technology nerds in my early 20s, where I'd spend all day surrounded by people who knew what they were doing, and then spend several evenings a week in the pub with the same people. Its possible to get the same experience remotely - I got started in the industry via open source work, where mailing lists had a similar atmosphere, but it is so much easier if you can just bounce ideas around.
I love the idea of regular 3 day retreats, but being in my late 30s with a child now doing them anywhere near that regularly is a non-starter for me. Maybe quarterly, but even then you're going to have to really sell it for me to commit to all of them.
Imma be honest, if it was not explained to me during hiring that mandatory "3-day retreats" were part of my job on a quarterly basis, I would be finding a new job before the next one.
Some people care about their "careers". Other people care about paying their rent and see jobs as the only tangible way to meet that need. I will never give a fuck about being good at my job, only competent. I am currently at that competent level and have had this actively avoidance mindset since I got into the tech space. I'm very curious, love learning and have a ton of hobbies...that have fuckall to do with converting my time on this planet into profits for my overlords and financial crumbs for myself.
The Career people seem to think, falsely, that the Job people can be coached into changing. Some can, but some of us will fight the happy hours and the retreats and the optional mentorships.
I can't stress enough how refreshing it is to see this take on HN. The usual rise-and-grind crowd always seem to dominate the discussions - likely because they have that investment (emotional and professional) in the first place; I don't want to invalidate anybody by saying this - so it at times feels alienating to read these threads.
I don't want to be friends, I don't want to constantly be growing and mastering my field, etc; I want to be good at what I do, fulfill my objectives for the day, and leave it at the desk when I go home.
Why are you not able to bounce ideas around in a text chat room, audio chat room, video chat room, 2d/3d/VR shared space? Why is it so hard for you to do it unless you are literally in the same physical location?
I guess it depends where the retreat is held. And how long the commute is to get there.
Taking my house as an example - I'm ~1 hour from the city center (assuming no major delays). If the retreat ended up downtown, I'd hate that. If it was on the far side of the city, I'd want to stay overnight. But, if the retreat was at the corporate office, I'd love it - as that's one mile down the road and I can walk.
This is the exact reason executives favor return-to-office. Asking remote employees to assemble just 3 days per month becomes a major hassle, see above. If a job is work-from-office every day, the employees will either figure it out or quit, any other arrangement and the logistics of when and where to meet becomes a major distraction.
That's the whole point. The executives offer remote + 3 days together, and employees like alistair complain about the 3 days as opposed to the benefit of working from home the rest of the time. So the execs say fuck it, ok just come to the office every day.
Straight up just get everyone to bring their families. Head out Friday afternoon, back Monday morning. Two days of work kinda lost, but the weekend is for hanging out and chatting about work stuff -- both structured and unstructured. Go to family friendly places; let the kiddos play together. I love it already.
Just have optional office hours, Slack huddles and mob sessions every few days.
Some of my engineers…
- have a open huddle for a few hours a day where anyone can drop into their project while they work
- others make use of our scheduled themed mob sessions (ie. Maintenance Mondays, deployment Thursdays). have a problem, idea or just want to hangout then come by?
- ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice.
The default doesn’t always have to be return to office for a physical meet.
There is absolutely something that gets lost in virtual meets. It’s not just for within team discussions. It’s also about discovering colleagues in other teams across the org. Tools like Donut help a bit but the magic is still lost.
I think the biggest issue is people who claim it can't be done and that the only way to accomplish this is to physically meet.
I feel like the biggest hinderance to making the most out of a remote option are the ones who prefer going to the office or explain all kinds of issues with "it's because we don't meet in person".
One just have to embrace and apply the mindset that it is possible. Different, surely, but still possible!
I'm not saying there is something WRONG with going to the office, it is lovely to hang out in person with lots of people, but it is very limiting in many ways as well. Just limiting in other ways than remote. You learn to deal with both, when you need to, though. The issue is mostly that people deal with the office-problems but don't care much about dealing with the remote-problems.
that's an interesting angle, I wonder if this pattern of defaulting to "because we don't meet in person" is that a giveaway for some lacking of communicating in writing I wonder. Just people who can't get an idea out effectively in textual form for complex ideas on a repeated basis and chalking it up to needing that in person outlet. That's curious, does being face to face elicit other modes of communication and ability to articulate and connect things. Maybe. But I suppose it could also be an opportunity to lean on the "see what I mean", "do you know what I'm saying" and allow body language and other social lubricant type bits and pieces to smooth glossing over when another doesn't follow or see what they mean.
It always struck me as strange that corporations rely on chance for people to connect and understand what other parts of the org are doing, to find synergies* and suchlike.
That feels like something that absolutely can and should be operationalized* if the success of the company relies on it. Build in easy ways for people to join other teams for a quarter (or whatever), ensure that areas of effort are communicated horizontally and back down in minimally invasive, synchronous manners, have clear domain ownership such that it's easy to know who to reach out to, etc.
It's absolutely bizarre to me to pin success on "employees chatting by the water cooler" or whatever the expectation by upper leadership is when they claim stuff around in person. Don't get me wrong, I like seeing coworkers in person now and again, but I explicitly want to do it just to meet them for socializing and team building; not working.
lol, those mythical magic moments collaborating in the abstract, you never know where they're going to happen. It could be at the water cooler, or over that off color patch of carpet over there.
Honestly, most of my work experience has been those mythical magic moments just led to a decrease in morale. As a remote worker I am not as invested in the company, and that's a feature, not a bug. I'm doing my job, I'm actively looking to do it well, but frustrations I can't control feel further from me.
I remember distinctly overhearing our internal devops at one place (that was pretty fragmented) talk about how their mandate was to get people only 80% of the way there, that the teams were responsible for getting 100%, and it pissed me off no end, since one of the reasons my department was doing our own devops was that there was no way to take what the devops department was putting out, and leverage it to get to what we wanted (i.e., no path to go from the 80% they provided -> 100% of what we needed). We had tried numerous times to talk to them about it, but they wanted to decide things in isolation and tell us what to do, rather than listening to us. I tried figuring out who was in charge of that group and reaching out to them, and managed a meeting, and they heard and acknowledged the need and agreed change was necessary, then nothing happened with it. Etc. None of that helped my morale, and I ended up leaving that company, not because of that, but because of a number of places where I simply could not affect change.
As a remote employee though? Don't care. As I said, that missing cultural buy in is a feature, not a bug, and it benefits everyone involved. I'm still raising concerns, still trying to reach out for solutions, but invariably when the business prevents me from fixing things I'm not stressing, and am so less likely to leave.
yah I can see that as a feature. Reminds me of stories I heard from people at google who preferred the contractor/contingent-worker lifestyle over permanent employees for the sake of avoiding all the HR rigmarole and office politic drama, perf review busywork, etc etc that adds questionable value to ones career.
But they are operationalized, organizing such things is part of what managers are taught to do and what large organizations specifically budget activities and events for. Perhaps it's not operationalized well, but organizations are trying to do that.
Personally my team does stand up meetings weekly on Mondays. This is mostly to allow folks (and force a few) to think about their tasks and goals and organize them into "what can I accomplish this week" style bullet points.
But then we also have a Teams channel carved out to "watercooler" or Daily meets.
These are non-structured and you are free to come and go as needed. But its a place for folks to hang out and verbalize their tshooting or seek advice/help/opinions on problems etc.
For some, its a good place to listen and be a wallflower. For others, its a good place to bounce ideas. If you are trying to focus you dont join.
If someone specifically wants to bring someone into the fold they are free to ping them and just say "hey im in the daily, could really use your help when you get a chance". Sometimes that person can join immediately. Sometimes they may sit for a bit working on other things until the person they wanted to ask has the time. Sometimes that person just says "im busy, lets schedule a time or catch tomorrow".
Its worked....okay enough. And was specifically setup because I had several FTR guys well before COVID that specifically stated they felt distant and out of touch with the pulse or overall goals of the department.
Frankly I am in them so much I have a small Amazon Basics conference mic with a physical mute button and a blue/red indicator light.
The only habit that can be "bad" coming from it is sometimes folks will have an affinity to "rally the troops" and engage multiple people on something they themselves havent spent much or any time chewing on first because it can be perceived as easier or quicker to a resolution. This is especially true with "fires". But I have seen the same in person as well. Especially with teams of weaker IC's.
We basically do your idea at my current company. All the engineers have to be within traveling distance of London and we are all expected to be in the office together on the the same day every month. One day per month, that's it. Some are in more frequently but that's the baseline.
You can live wherever you want but you have to travel to London once a month and if that takes several hours and costs £100s, that's your problem.
It works really well. We do our retros and other group sessions in person, eat lunch together, chat with other functions, go for a beer or play a board game after work, etc.
The problem with in office work as an IC is that all day is spent helping other people and then you have to do your own IC work in the evenings.
The problem with remote work is the constant slack interruptions to help other people and you have to do your own IC work around that.
We have essentially a documentation, coordination, and communications problem that nobody has figured out how to solve in a remote first world. I'd be interested to hear people's solutions to this.
You have to communicate with people that you need a block of time without interruptions and that you only have a certain amount of the day to dedicate to things that aren't your own work. Your manager has to be on board and enforce this.
Otherwise you need to get another job.
To be fair I do get interruptions from Discord for my website that aren't related to other projects but I usually deliberately prioritize them because it's my business and no one else can provide support for it.
I agree, although I will add that one of the biggest breakthroughs I came up with was when I transitioned to remote when most other people still worked at the office (this is long before covid). I changed something so that I can use it remotely, and that had a profound impact down the line -- it coincidentally fixed some licensing/piracy issues we had and made the product better in several ways.
I think the moral of the story is that more diversity, in as many ways as we can apply that word, is probably a benefit to most organizations.
IMO, just make that 3 day retreat during work days so you don't require people to work weekends. With that small change I think this would be great for software teams. Perhaps too, every month is too often for anyone with a family. Consider making the interval larger.
I think the word you are looking for is "osmosis".
People learn faster when they have someone to teach them in a multi-modal environment. Videoconferencing is only a shadow of this, and everything is scheduled. There is zero chance for spontaneity with such a sterile structure.
I'm nearing the end of my career, but I certainly would not have learned as fast as I did without many, many mentors. Just reading the internet, especially when the technology is cutting edge and not even ON the internet, would have left me far behind. And if everyone falls behind, the company falls behind.
I think companies that mandate some amount of in-person time will have less risk of falling behind than those that are 100% remote.
I don't see how all of those junior 100% remote engineers will keep up. Maybe they are all just very very very smart.
My company has three days in office each month, and it’s during a week specified by the company so that you synchronize with your team. Very similar to what you’re talking about.
So, no one in your company lives in a city far away from the office? If so, how do they handle it? Imagine having to drive 6h to get from home to the office. Suddenly, your 3-days/month become 4-days/month plus accommodation.
Love it. Privately owned company (doesn’t have to conform to shareholder wants) with good leadership; lots of the policies resonate with the employees. I’ll admit: I’m particularly extroverted, and this makes the in-person days more enjoyable. I get much more work done at home, and I generally enjoy life better working remotely. I thought I would have preferred full remote, but I have no desire to leave because everything else about the company is ideal.
My understanding is that they have, before and after the pandemic, drawn a connection between remote work and attrition. Their hybrid policy is based on this, and they have found it solves the attrition issue. We could theorize all day as to exactly how/why :) Some combination of forcing people to be geographically located, see their teammates face to face, and then giving employees the majority of the time to themselves seems to work better for keeping employees than being fully remote.
My personal theory is that, counterintuitively, just about everyone actually ends up feeling/doing better if they have a bit of in-person interaction. I was staunchly in the camp of full-remote even before the pandemic, yet I don’t have any desire to change companies. It’s just a great place to work, and 3 days a month is extremely manageable. I have lots of connections at Google, for example (good full-remote options) and I could get an interview at the drop of a hat. I have no interest in this right now, though, even with much lower compensation.
To support your theory, I am an extreme introvert managing a fully distributed team. Yet I choose to regularly come to the office for a bit of in-person interaction (mainly social since my direct co-workers aren't based here).
I should mention that I live within a ten-minute walk to the office. For example, I can easily walk there for lunch and then walk back home.
If the commute was much longer, that would significantly change the calculus. A pleasant half-hour train ride? Maybe, but not very frequently. An hour drive? No way I'd go unless I absolutely have to.
It boils down to work culture. Everything you can do in person, you can do remotely, you just need to ensure the company enforces a culture that embraces the tools required to make that possible. Pair programming? With modern tools it's trivial to do. Discussions? Start a call or use a channel. If anything, remote work forces you to better document what's going on, rather than some poor junior having to hunt down the right guy the office to help them figure something out. A junior suffering due to remote work is a junior whose company has failed them.
The physical location in many people’s circumstance is far away from the high cost of living area that the company is located. “Working remotely” and still having to be in a designated city really doesn’t help much for most people.
This is less of a problem if there's a culture that provides positive & honest paired programming w/o judgement on a regular basis. I try to do this, not just to glean business context from other engineers, but so I can learn from others.
For this to work well, toxicity needs to be nonexistent. I would even advocate for a "no tolerance" for toxic comments/behavior from peers/colleagues.
I just don't buy into the idea that it's impossible to effectively "absorb" or "brainstorm" over the internet. It sounds like a lack of effort and/or knowledge of how to use the tools.
As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who
1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee
2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)
3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office/remote.
If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor/TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.
As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the most.
It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.
Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.
> It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.
I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for companies of different sizes in between. I've built successful projects and saw my share of failures.
I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort.
This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if it was fact, and that completely puzzles me.
Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always happened online even when I was in the office, normally through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).
> I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort
Does not match my experience at all. Depending on how you approach the water cooler you will get :
- People going to the water cooler to get water. And go back to their desk asap to stay focused (which is fine)
- People who go there and wanna have some chit chat about whatever interests them. Sometimes that means the game and sometimes not.
But yeah; but if you go in asking "what did you do this week end"; I have some colleagues who will happily jump in to say "I tried playing with Haskell, but those monads thing are are to fully grasp".
Never ever in my life, have I described my week end on slack. If I am going to be sitting in front of a screen and worsen my carpal tunnel syndrome; it's going to be for work related stuff.
I'm sure there was a time where people "never shared their weekend through text" either. I remember those types "I only use a phone for calling." Most of them are long gone now.
The water cooler experience extends beyond the actual conversations occurring to encompass a general camaraderie that gets built being in proximity to others. Schools had the same effect happen in over lock down - students weren't sitting next to other students and overhearing projects they were on, general grievances with school work, or miscellaneous "the game last night" stuff. Without that sense of community, you can really feel alone and things like imposter syndrome have a chance to creep it.
Obviously, I'm in the camp that thinks the water cooler myth exists. It can extend to just learning colleague Z has 2 kids. Things that can happen online, but also might not since small talk and casual conversations might not occur as often. It can happen more naturally during periods of "waiting" - like waiting for a class/meeting to start vs everyone logging into Zoom at exactly the start of the meeting.
Inevitably when you go out with co-workers or industry colleagues at a conference, you will end up talking about work. That is the one thing you for sure have in common (while someone may not even like sports), and it's an easy topic to fall back to.
But FWIW, I also think the small talk and getting-to-know your colleagues is valuable. Some of my deepest and longest-term friendships have come from former co-workers, former classmates, etc. While it's possible to cultivate a friendship via remote work, it's a lot harder.
Coworkers often share birthdays, weddings, random trips, and enriching experiences together that are not very easy at all to replicate over fully remote work.
I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote, it's harder to even count on making new adult friendships into my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I really intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups outside of work. That's not a bad idea on its own, but it does take intentional effort and some degree of consistency that just sort of came automatically with working in an office. And some young people with less overall confidence / social experience may not even know how to go about that.
I think all of that def takes a mental toll. We're social creatures, even the introverts among us.
I have had some great friendships form at work. But I've also had really difficult situations. I've seen friends form and then become bitter enemies, transitioning from workplace disagreements to personal disputes.
The fact is we aren't in the army. This isn't band of brothers. Some people don't want to know anything more than how you're helping them finish some task for their job. There are going to be varying levels of motivation, care, etc.
> I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote, it's harder to even count on making new adult friendships into my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I really intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups outside of work.
I think you should explore finding friends outside of work. I've seen many go down the "friends only at work path." Then they retired, switched jobs, and moved on, and that friendship faded just as quickly. It's amazing how many people will be your friend when forced to be with you (e.g. gotta go to work) but given the choice they aren't choosing you.
Yep. For me work is work and friends are independent of that. In 30+ years I have never had a friendship at work that exended to doing stuff outside of work. There were people at work who I was friendly/sociable with, of course, but at 5:00 we went all went home to our separate lives.
Totally opposite of my experience. I do an annual ski trip with some of my old coworkers from 5+ years ago (from a company not many of us work at any longer). I have been invited to weddings from coworkers I worked with 10+ years ago. I am still great friends with dozens of people I went to community college and university with. But since going remote it is far more difficult to make the same connections.
I'm still friends with old roommates from school too. That's different in my mind anyway -- I lived with these people, saw them naked in the shower, etc. It was a level of personal contact that was much closer than anything that has ever happened (or I would want to happen) with someone at work.
YMMV though, if you make friends at work that's cool, just never seemed natural or obligatory to me.
Wow, that sounds like a bummer -- I can't imagine spending a significant portion of my life working on something and never establishing any meaningful relationships with the people that I worked with.
Not everyone feels the same way and that's the point. Some people want deep relationships. Others want to get their job done and go home to their family. Others are so stressed out with this office culture worship draining them with a 2 hour commute that they'll go home depressed with no friends.
But statistically Americans have had a significant downward trend in the number of friends over the last decade (yes, before COVID). The office culture was always there. It definitely isn't helping.
The key for me is spontaneously reaching out to coworkers who you like. Invite them to parties, or to disc golfing, or a brewery, or whatever fun activity you do that needs additional friends. I find that if a coworker comes with me to these activities regularly when we work together, that the activity and the friendship can continue after we no longer work together. You need to develop the out-of-work relationship early and acknowledge that you like each other's company even when you aren't forced to be together. YMMV
Again - yeah sure, there are communication benefits to general proximity.
But the idea that this literally happens "at the water cooler" (or from bumping into each other in the hallway) to a significant degree -- such that it's worth dragging people into their cars for a 90 commute each way, on top of the obvious productivity-killing effects of the vast majority of office spaces, these days, just to benefit from these wonderful and sublime interactions -- is just nonsense.
Or like another commenter put it: one of these things people hear and like to repeat, without checking whether it has any grounding in reality.
Nevermind the number of businesses that don't give a shit about your creative, new ideas you had at the water cooler, they know exactly what they want and they're not interested in what the grunts have to say about squat.
>While it's possible to cultivate a friendship via remote work, it's a lot harder.
One of the problems that I feel is only going to get worse, is how remote work is entirely on record. To make real connections you have to be able to talk somewhat freely. With Microsoft going full steam ahead with AI built in to teams for auditing and summarizing, you just wont be able to talk and build friendships like you can irl for fear of being flagged for inappropriate speech.
I've seen it. But, it never seemed to make any difference to what I was actually given leeway to implement on the job.
It's like sideprojects and github repos during a job search - everyone says they are important, everyone thinks they are important, but at the end of the day, very few decision makers are willing to put in the time and risk of involving them in the process of their work.
I have seen it on more than one place. Interestingly, all those places are research-focused universities. (And no, mere research institutes don't seem to enable it.)
In retrospect, it is quite obvious why that happens. Just for a start, if your place is such that a high-level executive announcing a layoff would lead people to believe in him, instead of reacting like "what is he talking about? is he crazy?", then you have no chance of ever getting productive water cooler conversations.
Certain teams thrive off of word-of-mouth data flowing across. I've experienced both type of work environments.
Usually, people may casually walk over to the area where the office gossip happens to get some info. It doesn't have to be a magical hallway or a water cooler.
I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned.
Oh I've seen it, but I'd say it's very rare - I sometimes do pick up useful snippets of information (so-and-so is working on X) while grabbing from the refrigerator, etc.
Like, 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time it's at best definitely tangential -- and sometimes outright nonsense (people talking at you for the sake of having someone to talk at) that grinds my gears and objectively disrupts my flow.
Well, I've worked in tech for half a decade, and I experienced plenty of it in my first job. It benefited me tremendously to be able to get context from other engineers and even people outside of engineering.
And I had none of it in my second job before covid. It's not a guarantee. But it's weird to me that people are going their whole careers without seeing it... maybe I was really lucky at my first job.
Bah. That is what hackernews/the internet is for. I learn more about new tools and stuff that other companies are using from seeing other companies/employees talk about that online than I do talking to co workers. Most of the time co workers are not talking about new cool tech, we are talking about life/bullshit because we are not robots.
Open Google Calendar or Office 365, create a meeting once or twice a week for 30 minutes and call it "watercooler chat". Make sure staff know it's an open forum, and that anything can be discussed safely. People that want to show up will. People that don't wont. Modern problems require modern solutions.
All of which can be done online. If you can talk to your friends via facebook messenger or whatsapp to stay in the loop so can you with your colleagues via teams or slack.
Some people flourish anywhere, some do so at home, some need closer supervision to do their best. I don't think anyone needs watercooler idle chat to get them to do the best they can.
If this is true, this is a really simple problem to solve. Organize cross-team show and tells. Past couple organisations I worked for did this successfully.
I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well.
That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc.
The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors.
So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.
> Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive.
In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So, genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from being in-office?
I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't even know I had missed these conversations.
I worked in-office for about a year and a half. Then I switched fields and companies right before the pandemic hit, so I was effectively starting over again. I did not find being in-office vs remote to be particularly impactful on my ability to be effective, get feedback, and get up to speed. Obviously this is a very small sample size based solely on my personal experience.
>For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed
Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates.
Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all.
Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.
>> For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed
> Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else.
That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult, like someone humming at their desk.
It's sort of like someone who writes a bunch of useless unit tests. The solution isn't for the team to scrap unit testing, it's for that person to be coached to not do that.
One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.
>That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult
Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so far. Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at the actual work performed, scratching their heads why nothing was happening and then giving said individuals special treatment. I'm not alone in experiencing this, either.
>One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.
"That's not really a counterpoint, just coach them not to do that." If your argument against my point is 'well just teach people differently, also it doesn't happen that often at all (despite it being a common complaint on the internet)', you'll also have to argue why your point is special enough not to deserve the same response.
Companies relying on a lack of documentation and individuals using said documentation is a humongous risk even outside the remote debate, and that's most of the requirements for remote covered. Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.
> Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so far.
Open offices are terrible, by the way. They provide few benefits, and their main effect is to magnify the downsides of in-office work (at least for software development). They just happened to be trendy and enable lower real-estate costs.
> Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at the actual work performed, scratching their heads why nothing was happening and then giving said individuals special treatment.... you'll also have to argue why your point is special enough not to deserve the same response.
Many managers are not great.
A busybody is undermining team productivity without adding value is a management problem focused on that individual. Remote work introduces more systemic communication and training problems.
> Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.
My experience is remote work isn't leading to any special emphasis on documentation. And in any case, any reasonable level of documentation isn't going to make up for all the experienced people leaving.
>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college.
I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education.
As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing".
I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses.
Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.
The idea that you can make up for being remote by being proactive proves the counterpoint.
You seem to be a top performer— the kind of person that someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you -would pull to the side and have you work on something more important, if you were in the office, because the office is where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place.
It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking “are you good at computers” while in an elevator. You fix their idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you end up in charge of some thing they want to build.
I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I believe this is reality.
For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell if they're struggling or not.
Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool demeanor.
Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.
As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet.
The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good.
I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter.
And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.
The office people here actually are actively politicking against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping you in the loop on lunch conversations.
This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid" situations.
> are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee
> don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)
> Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck.
And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.
As a business owner it’s just so much more economical to hire remote. No office expense, the pool of talent is so much larger, no relocation expenses, people are happier with the flexible schedules.
Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner. I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well).
It’s way easier to figure out new mechanisms of working to mentor and grow junior employees in a remote environment than it is to fight economics. The economics are just superior and you can’t fight that.
You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics.
> You’re business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very profitable and can afford that. See it’s lots about egos and not always about economics.
There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need to justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians, Eastern Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise of remote work, we should hopefully see those inflated remote salaries settle to the international norm.
I hire US and Canadian engineers. Canadians working remote aren’t any cheaper when benefits are included than US employees, at least the quality I hire. European engineers are good but the time difference is literally the problem. 5 to 8 hours makes it impossible for me. All in costs are 150k for junior and 280k for top tier including benefits. We have equity but it’s not liquid. If I could hire Indians I would but simply put I have found them to be quite poor quality over many experiences, I assume the good Indian engineers are already employed by solid satellite offices of major US companies or have emigrated.
Benefits are actually quite generous and expensive when you want to hire top-tier talent. If you factor in good health insurance, payroll tax, 401k match, yearly bonus, various things like cell phone and internet paid for and random free stuff, someone costing 150k cost to me is more like a ~115k salary depending on the region, and of course taxes and retirement expense to the employee will reduce it to more like $70k take-home. But yes, still sounds good to Europeans.
> There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need to justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians, Eastern Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise of remote work, we should hopefully see those inflated remote salaries settle to the international norm.
As much as I support remote work, what you suggests is not the norm. Mainly because companies hire much more employees than contractors. Companies cannot just hire employees from dozens of different countries (unless they have branches on such countries or they hire an intermediary company to handle the taxes/health insurance stuff). Companies cannot just hire people who are +-6h away from their timezone.
Companies usually hire remote employees within the country they operate. Which is nice because you can live in a modest town around the nature and work for companies who have originally emerged in the capital.
"unless they have branches on such countries or they hire an intermediary company to handle the taxes/health insurance stuff" is a big caveat - for any non-tiny company it's not a big deal to hire an intermediary company, such companies are readily available and the overhead is small compared to the salary differential; it's not a serious obstacle because you can simply buy a solution to that.
But that's not the case for time zones, of course.
There are a lot of tax complexities around hiring outside the company's country, so I don't think this is going to be as common as you'd like it to be. And if I were you, I would reframe the monetary compensation, rather than saying Westerners are overpaid, perhaps it's non-Westerners who are being underpaid.
I don't understand this weird thought process in the software industry where a certain contingent of developers seek to undervalue their own skills against their self interest...
> Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in this environment because economically it is just so overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner.
As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your remote hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you in the future.
> I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization from the critical mass of young people living around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which is way healthier as well).
That's probably wishful thinking to a large degree, especially the part about making friends. Some people will figure it out, but many will founder (which IIRC, is borne out in loneliness statistics)
> As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your remote hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you in the future.
Hum... The GP can't solve this problem, and it is a certainty that business owners as a collective won't be competent enough to do it even if they try.
IMO, that looks like a job for a government or something similar.
Huh!? Why can’t business owners find a solution to increasing collaboration and mentorship? It makes zero sense to involve the government in employee training.
Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.
They studied just one company.
I'm guessing that the company doesn't have a remote-first culture, and that things may have improved in the last 2+ years, as companies have gotten more used to both hybrid and remote-only.
And their timeframe is pre-COVID and the worst possible time during COVID, when people were just trying to figure out how to work and live and not catch some deadly virus. 2020 was a hectic time and such an abnormality that I wouldn't base any long-term human behaviour on it.
I always feel that discussing remote work in the context of software dev (basically, discuss it on HN) is so heavily skewed to the point of being meaningless.
We're talking about an industry that has a heavy concentration of, for lack of a better word, shut-ins, who don't really like socializing and really excel at work when they are alone and not being bothered. Most of them self-taught to some degree, or entirely. Heavy technical knowledge and strong ability to deal with technical hurdle of remote work. Probably have a bad internet addiction too, and attribute most of their knowledge to it. The nature of the work also heavily lends itself to being remote, and why there were even people in the 90's(!) who were doing remote developer work.
But take another field, like say marketing, that has lots of extroverted types and lots of meetings with heavy emphasis on visual things, that no one was doing remote prior to 2020, and suddenly remote work becomes a much more grinding endeavor that can really chew up juniors. These people are not shut-in computer geeks and their work is not a fit for those types by a long shot. As much as they may hate the commute and insist that remote work is fine, the fact of the matter is that the type of work really doesn't lend itself to remote working.
TL;DR: These articles about remote work failing aren't really talking about software jobs, and your experience as someone who has worked remote dev work for 15 years isn't really relevant. You work a job that is almost tailor made for remote work.
Maybe the marketing people can do some market analysis and figure out that trying bully software developers back into the office so that marketing people can have a captive audience for their extroversion isn't a great path forward and instead is creating incredible amounts of resentment and even hostility. Maybe they should go hang out at the local Starbucks and make some real friends instead of trying to impose themselves and their preferences on others. Note that the WFH people don't give a shit if the extroverts with an addiction to endless external validation work in an office, at home, or in a deep sea trench but the converse isn't true with the extrovert trying with all their might to force their preferences on everyone else. You'd think marketers would understand people a bit better and realize that the outcome is going to be that they're going to get blasted each time they try to use their slimy sales tactics to force everyone to conform to their personal preferences.
I don't see how the working decisions of a markerting firm would have anything to do with software devs.
The world doesn't revolve around software devs, which is kind of the whole point of my post. Devs can work from home, these articles aren't about them, and hence why its dumb to discuss them on HN.
I suspect you're correct more broadly, but this article is talking about software jobs:
>The economists — Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais — studied engineers at a large technology company. They found that remote work enhanced the productivity of senior engineers, but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code), and some of the junior engineers were more likely to quit the firm.
However, there are major problems with the research. From the research article:
>Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm be- tween August 2019 and December 2020.
The study period includes the throes of the pandemic and ignores long-term adjustments.
It's true: a lot of people in software are people who, at a very early age, decided that a life with many more machines and many fewer people in it would be best for them.
I've been working remotely for about 9 years now, and have progressed from "designer who knows jQuery" to senior frontend dev. This criticism is true but not insurmountable.
Working remotely requires more active communication and explicit processes to make sure you're filling the deficits, but this can be done. Do code reviews on your merge requests, talk on Slack, do a Live Share in VSCode.
And make the most of your in-person visits: I've had people tell me that I seem to know more people in the company then some of the people who are in the office regularly because I make it a point to make my rounds, introduce myself, and talk to people when I'm there.
I worked really hard in school, and when I got my golden ticket to silicon valley I was so excited to leave the corn fields and start my new life. I knew zero people in the Bay Area, but my coworkers and roommates (and roommates’ friends) were enough of a social circle for me; I loved my work and my team. One year later, CA lockdowns hit and everyone I knew left CA or moved back to familys’ million dollar homes. I was left adrift, not wanting to go back to the cornfields, expecting things to reasonably end soon, working remotely, and alone. They did not reasonably end: I grew more and more depressed and isolated. I tried but zero in-network providers were taking new patients for therapy/psychologists, and the (sigh) remote therapy options just felt more isolating. I vividly remember having a good conversation on betterhelp, only for the call to end and just be left there sitting alone in my room, silence.. I talked to managers about it, but they told me I should watch more Netflix, and likely just furthered the decision to lay me off.
Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me. The work culture that led to it being done over zoom, was the worst.
This is your experience and is valid. But I would think about something. Those people left through their personal choice.
Many workplace relationships are like this. I met some great people at work. They left, or I left, and I never spoke to them again. Work brought us together, but it was just work. After one of us would leave, we chose to spend our times with other people we'd rather spend time with. I've had maybe a handful of friends actually be friends when work changed and we were no longer on that same team. It's not personal, it's just life.
My dad was a workaholic and never cultivated his life outside of work. When he finally retired he realized he didn't have any real friendships aside from a few. I make sure I do things outside of my occupation for this very reason.
It doesn't sound to me like GP was placing blame on people for leaving of their own accord and it really doesn't help to disparage how people get their social interaction. I enjoy the social aspect of the office and someone leaving has no bearing on that.
I wasn't insinuating that or disparaging anyone. I was simply suggesting that work can put on a façade of socialization but you can be left burned by it, and GP was. It's not a fun situation to be in and I feel for him, and is also why I make friends through shared interests outside of work, because one day you can get fired, or your team gets fired, or your company goes under and everyone gets fired. And then you realize that guy talking to you about your weekend at the watercooler doesn't actually care, and won't be calling after you got fired. The GP was very clearly affected by this. It could be mitigated by not relying solely on professional atmospheres for friends.
It’s no different that being burned by college or high school friends moving away. Just because people leave your life doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection that you can enjoy while they’re in your life.
FWIW, I still keep in contact, digitally, with people from HS, college, and previous jobs.
No, it isn't, but college/high school has way more opportunities to meet people and friends than in the workplace - you aren't spending 8+ hours at work at these times, there's ample opportunity to meet others (changing classes every year, prebuilt extracurriculars, etc.) These opportunities simply don't exist in the workforce, where it's typically the same group of people in the office. Extroverts like yourself may do just fine but not everyone is like this. The sample size of people you meet who also want to meet other people is exponentially higher in high school/college.
Again, the statistics show this. People really struggle with making friends, especially as they get older (when they're working.)
There's a lot to say about in-person collaboration and knowledge transfer through osmosis, but I think this quote from the article highlights the crux of it
> When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind
The people in the office are having lunch together, they're talking and laughing, participating in office birthday celebrations and get togethers after work. Even something as simple as a warm smile and a "good morning" has a cumulative impact on those around you. Your presence is a contribution to the cultural mosaic of the company in a visceral way.
It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with. The business world is just as much about politics as it is about productivity and if you find yourself far away from court, you'll inevitably deal with the consequences of those who are present to assert their influence.
> When you’re remote, you’re out of sight, out of mind
This simply isn't a state of being. You can be out of sight, and out of mind, if you have a shitty manager or a shitty company culture, in that case, it's probably a blessing to be fired.
> It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also someone you can have lunch or drinks with.
If you're at a company that chooses promotions based on a crappy HR pizza party leave immediately. I've never been rewarded at work because I pretended to care about coworkers personal lives beyond courtesy.
What got me promoted was being courteous but also reliably getting shit done. You can do this in the office, remotely, or through some hybrid set up. I've done all three. Do good work, make sure it's visible. It's not complicated.
I feel a whole lot closer to the sales people and random product people who come in the office than the other developers on my team because those people in office are real people while the others are just icons on a screen.
Even though I’ve personally taken the trade off of remote work, it’s always seemed intuitively obvious to me that there are also massive benefits to being in-person because collaboration, chance conversations, and feedback are more likely to happen naturally and because communication bandwidth is far higher face to face.
The trade-offs are largely around whether those things are desirable. Sometimes they aren’t. But also sometimes they are. And I’ve never understood why there seems to be such a dogmatic insistences that remote is better on all fronts and there can be no acknowledged benefits to in-office work.
The reason you see so many of us being so insistent is because most of us work at highly dysfunctional companies with incredibly boring and annoying people and don't want to spend 1-3 hours per day commuting to the office and/or spending more on staying alive so we can be closer to the office.
I've been remote since the start of the pandemic and will never go back. I'm the happiest I've been in my adult life (mid 40s) in large part because I'm able to get more sleep, don't have to deal with the noise and density of the city, and don't have to deal with commuting. My home office is better than any office environment I have ever had. I put less than 5k miles on my car in the last year. I eat far better and spend less money on eating out.
I have also received great raises every year since the pandemic started (and before) and have been promoted (for the second time since the pandemic started) to what is probably equivalent to an L8 at Google (I don't work for a FAANG company).
Some of us are flourishing in this new work environment, and we are being tired of being told that we'd be better off if only we would spend an hour commuting to hear Fred's mildly racist/misogynistic jokes and attend useless meetings in person instead of passively listening to video calls while we get actual work done.
Notably I didn’t disagree with any of that, and, in fact, take pains to very carefully address only that there are tradeoffs—that is that there legitimate arguments to be made both ways particularly depending on the person.
I don’t object to an individual saying “I’m far better off this way”; it’s often true. But it’s also the case that I’ve observed others who are far less productive working from home.
And we should be intellectually honest enough to recognize both realities.
This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their currently declining investments.
I've been working remotely for 4 years and can assure you: no it isn't FUD. It is a real issue that can and should be addressed. And the good news is that CI/CD, Slack, Dischord and Meetup make the solutions possible. All you need is management understanding and buy in.
There are a lot of organizations that try remote with the same culture/mindset of in office. This is an error. Communication and iteration on remote work must be explicit, formalized and enforced.
I'm a huge proponent of WFH, but I do know where there are challenges.
New employee onboarding is challenging. It can be done, but it has to be very deliberate.
Any large team moves/merges are harder. Again, it can be done but there has to be a lot of deliberate work.
Interpersonal relationships are important for working. They are the lubricant that helps prevent communication friction. It used to be those relationships happened naturally in the office, but now they have to be deliberately nurtured. And that's part of WFH, not something ignore.
Office relationships can be good and also extremely toxic. I doubt there is any statistical evidence that being in the office leads to any net benefit of relationships.
How was any of this hidden? It was plain a day from the start of the pandemic that not being present, not building social relationships and just being a name in a chatroom is going to have consequences in the velocity of your career.
Anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you because they don't want to lose the perk of the flexibility and don't personally care about their own trajectory at that point in their lives (nothing wrong with that, just wrong to claim its without tradeoffs).
Would working totally remote, but paying for quarterly tickets and accommodation to gather all staff (from all over the world) for a week to meet and brainstorm, be cheaper than hiring locally and renting?
I know someone who worked for a danish company, they has a similar scheme but every six months... worked really well for the most part. The company would hold retreats all over Europe, and since it combined both business and employee perks (stay at a nice resort), worked like a charm for them.
____
But it also highlighted an interesting issue, that might act as a counterpoint for the whole thing.
The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like me... and visa for us is a really big headache.
Not a big deal for an EU company to announce only a week or two before where the retreat would be held this time, and most of their workforce, who all had relatively strong passports, also didn't face major issues.
But the earliest he himself could get any form of schengen visa was like 3 months after the retreat, so too late for the first one and too early for the second one, whenever and wherever that would be decided.
I think it worked out for him after sometime, but remote work is not all sunshine and roses.
Even if you are in the EU, 1-2 weeks notice for something like that is bonkers. And as soon as company has more than a handful of employees, this is something you want to have booked with hotel and such earlier anyways. From what I've seen in other companies, time and location of such things gets announced months in advance.
Apologies if I am remembering the anecdote incorrectly, it might have been more than two weeks. (We were in a chat group and he was bemoaning his visa headaches, I forget the exact mechanics of his company policy, since that wasn't the crux of the issue)
The point was, however earlier they had given their employees the notice, his visa was going to arrive much later than that.
Visa for us is extremely difficult, someone on twitter shared a screenshot, the Canadian website told to expect a wait of "580 days" or something absurd like that.
So you can hire remote workers cheaply from other countries (and no employment visa headaches), but if you expect to call them for a quick visit, plan absurdly early.
I decided to hit him up again, and he told me he had moved to another (European ) company, one which would sponsor a work visa, so he didn't have to go through all these headaches
so I guess remote didn't end up being suitable for him.
Hm. I started working remotely at age 24 years back. This article just doesn't reflect my experiences whatsoever. One data point doesn't mean I'm right, just that this article seems written from an odd perspective from my perspective.
I love the photographs in this article, of young professionals smiling and having a great time in the open plan office. It's been a few years, but I seem to recall a different vibe prevailing in offices like that. I guess you can't take a picture of someone internally fuming because the person they're sharing a desk with can't stop drumming his fingers on the table and farting. I guess you can't have a photoshoot of someone working in the stairwell because it's the only place they can concentrate, since all the meeting rooms are already occupied by other people who can't get work done at their desks.
First, there are the cliches: "face to face meetings are better", "spontaneous collaboration", "out of sight, out of mind".
Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that?
Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I'm a college dropout, I'm not qualified to do any scientific research. But I still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.
I started my career in my early 20s at a junior-unfriendly office. Senior guy next to me literally bought some noise-cancelling headphones to avoid talking to people. I hated that place.
Getting a 100% remote job is still the best decision I've made in my career. It has allowed me to make way above market average money and work with incredible professionals from all over the world, despite living in a country with a mediocre IT market.
I'm not here to assign blames, it seems to me the younger generation somehow missing a lot of life skills.
I was both a student and TA in college back in the days. My experience has been, those who go to Office Hours or TA hours usually perform better than those who don't (unless you are one of those folks who are just smart and know how to work hard). In my junior/senior year, I consistently went to office hours and TA hours, my grades got significantly better. This goes for my students as well.
Remote problem is like that as well. No one is parenting you anymore, your success and failure is based on your action. If you are a junior, schedule calls with your senior, two to three hours a week, prepare your questions and see what you get out of it. Don't wait for your managers or seniors to contact you.
I will say this, there are companies/seniors/managers that are shit at helping juniors, just like shitty professors and TAs.
I think there's a valid argument for the premise because office and remote environments are very different and people default to working like they're in an office, but this piece reads like shit.
> At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”
All I could think when I read this first paragraph is, "she sounds incompetent". Feedback 10x a day makes zero sense once you have basic competence. You need much longer feedback loops for more complex and important skills.
Feedback is guidance. If you need guidance 10x a day...
30m once a week is a lot of time for feedback (Perhaps too much) if you're smart about using the time, and it's way more useful than 10x a day.
Sales and sales development roles are very different, especially if you are in an inside sales role. The number of feedback touchpoints are much higher for those roles. Sales interactions happen very frequently and getting feedback real-time increases the quality and relevance of the feedback.
> Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen, as it won’t happen by itself anymore.
Then it very frequently won't happen anymore. Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results.
When I lead a team I try to minimize the number of things that require unmonitored "discipline" to do right, and try to set things up so as many things as possible so they "happen automatically" or "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker." That's because a most people are lazy and communicating every detail of how to do things right is hard, so things tend to decay to some long/medium-term half-ass but short-term "easier" level.
> "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming a blocker."
This is something that many places, including my current consulting placement, will consider a bad thing and actively work to do the opposite. The attitude at these places is that "blowing up" is a Bad Thing, and should never happen. This causes everyone to suppress useful signals of impending problems that can be mitigated in advance. What's left is things that do "blow up" because of neglect, and are truly Bad, so it's a self-reinforcing policy.
These organizations accept the decay (apt word, btw) and really Bad Things happening too frequently over diligence and preventing Bad Things from happening in the first place.
> Anything an organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term results.
The problem is that they have to be intentional about it no mater what, either by making the remote networking happen or by intentionally having a policy where most people work in the office most of the time (Friday-only WFH or some similar arrangement). Nobody gets it for free anymore because non-remote office culture is no longer the default.
Something relevant here: The New York Times is a Real State company now. They manage the real State they had in the center of New York that is more valuable that all the printing presses in the US.
So this company is highly biased against Remote Work. If people can work from home, they don't need the super expensive Offices in the center of the city, prices go down and NYT loses money.
"At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns to her boss with questions. “Did I handle that correctly?” she asks. “What could I have done better?”
almost no one does that. Me smells a marketing piece done for property owners.
This really only applies at a company which is “in office first”. I’ve gone from being a junior to a lead fully remote. The only time I have had an issue is when all other team members were office based and the work culture was based on that.
When a company is remote first this issue goes away.
No, you just open Zoom and share screen and everything's at least as good as in the office days when everyone was so distracted by interruptions that they could barely work.
From the article - "but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code)"
Sooooo...literally just measuring how many comments are being added to the code? That feels like both a really poor measurement for feedback, and also really easily addressable (heck, if you really want that in person feel, make it so PRs are done synchronously; someone hops onto a zoom and the writer presents their code, talking through the changes).
After 3 years at home I wouldn't mind being a TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), provided I liked my colleagues and the cute account managers were in. But if I went back in and there was little social interaction I'd rather stay home.
It's so much easier to take your laptop over to a senior colleague and ask them to help you debug something in person. There's much more friction to asking for a call, waiting for them to respond, sending them the invite, perhaps waiting for them to get to a phone room if they happen to be in the office, setting up screen sharing (with its minute and fuzzy type), and having to type things in yourself.
It’s harder because you (the one asking for help) first need to articulate your problem in a way that is understandable via text. So, I would say that’s an advantage for everyone: think first, then ask.
Usually, in the office is: poke first, then ask, then realize you actually didn’t even read the error message in the display.
Writing is harder than talking. In my experience, people who don’t care spending time writing properly, well, they usually don’t care about your time. Or perhaps it’s just me, since I’m a non-native English speaker, at work I re-read (and rewrite) what I write many times before hitting Send. More often than not, it’s in the rewriting of my own words where I find the solution to the problem I was about to ask (duck rubbing or something like that they call it)
This is big, serious and meaningful. It is tangent to the main problem on making remote work to properly work: formalize communication and iteration.
Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and deliberated effort to stimulate communication.
Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn't just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of office work. My suggestions:
* rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a development methodology with full support on CI/CD techniques, issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc.
* people should be available on Slack/Dischord on pre defined times. You know the "my doors are open", "cubicles are meant to stimulate cooperation" slogans? In remote work these informal channels must be explicit
* There should be overlapping timezones in the team.
* stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people, where people should talk not only about work but also personal subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and personal trust.
Relationships and quick chat get built and done on Slack. My professional network is a web of in-work, Signal chats, professional Slacks/Discords. I have a massively largely and more substantive professional information network that benefits me and my employer than I do if I kept all the focus in the office and on what Mike my manager fed me during hallway interactions.
Proactivity to the above is worth hiring for, but works fine if you do. This all comes down to “since I don’t want to DM someone and set up zoom calls, and travel to the office once a week a quarter, let’s make everyone start commuting in.”
This article describes people who don’t know how to do that well or want to leverage alternative routes to achieve. Or, using number of GitHub comments as a measure for good feedback is about as logical as number of slack comments per day. Engineers know these metrics are tracked for performance and compensation.
Management: You don't want to work remotely
Employees: Yes we do
Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for us?
Employees: We don't care
Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad it is for you, sorta, in some minor aspects?
Some people want to work remotely, other people don't, and management/corpos HATE it because they invested in massive office leases/are listening to their rich investor friends who have money tied in urban office real estate.
I'm sick of these propaganda pieces, you're not going to convince the people who want something that they don't want it this way. IDGAF how much my "career" will suffer, I like spending my day hugging my wife and gardening when I don't have work on my desk. FOH.
I think your thesis about management wanting in-office is accurate, but your rationale for why seems misguided.
I'm the CEO of a 500 person company and our lease cost is negligible relative to everything else, and being fully remote means lots of travel and expensive all-hands get togethers which almost fully negate any office savings.
The overlap between VCs and public market investors and "rich investor friends who have money tied to urban office real estate" is non-existent from a pressure and influence standpoint.
Management: We just want everyone to be able to meet and share ideas and be in a simple easy to monetize…monitor space. It’s about team work!
Employees: we want to work remotely and don’t care about your fucking problems or rational so just stop trying to convince us
One has to distinguish between management and upper management. I have met plenty of middle managers (e.g., Engineer managers) who love working from home, but have to sell the “go back to the office “ idea because it’s coming from upper management.
I don't have an answer for this, really, and I can see it. Still, I think if workers prefer a certain way of working, they aren't cattle, or just a number, and they should be allowed to make this decision for themselves.
I'm older, financially set, and have a partner with a good job, so I can't make that call for others. Part of how I got to this place was by leveraging professional relationships along the way. I was never more than a couple of phone calls away from something if I was starving. If I didn't have that I'd just be a house husband I guess. Or maybe a NEET.
10 years ago, I would have told youngers to get their ass back to work and never have lunch alone. Now that I'm rounding the corner towards retirement, I can't give that same advice in good faith.
The problem isn't remote work. The problem is tradional in-office management and leadership that don't understand remote isn't just add Slack or add Teams and you're a remote-able team.
There's more to it than that.
But once again leadership blames the proles for getting it wrong.
One thing my remote team does that I think helps massively with this is we have a zoom room that's always open and we use it for regular meetings like standup, sprint planning, etc. When the meeting is over, you can hop (many do) but you can also stay as long as you want. Even as a write this, I'm in the zoom meeting. You can go camera off, but if you ever have even a small question it's encouraged to ask. This has helped massively with keeping an open communication channel that feels organic and synchronous. I highly recommend this, but the key is it's fully optional, it's camera optional, it's mic optional, and there's zero punishment for not being there.
slack is great, we have that too. But it's asynchronous by design. Async communication is great, it's super useful for getting work done. Synchronous communication is important for things like brainstorming, when ideas are half thought out and that's a good thing because it gets gears turning. Slack is too easy to sit there and edit your own words out of existence when maybe those ideas could have been helpful in a group branstorming session.
The study used as the basis for this article looked at one set of workers at one company. This is hardly worthy of a writeup in a local industry rag, let alone the NYT, but the point of this and similar pieces is to empower owners over workers.
I work remotely and am a big proponent of remote work but onboarding is definitely a huge challenge. Getting young people up to speed is doable if you are using a lot of standard frameworks about which you can find information about on the internet. But it gets really if you need very specialized hardware and software and also use processes that are required by regulation. I work 8n medical devices and I have noticed a lot of our offshore don’t really understand things even after years. It’s probably solvable but you need management that understands this and puts resources into onboarding processes.
It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid, honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where junior engineers could thrive in.
I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are always so busy they can't get any time to help you.
There's a couple of reasons I can think of: "young professionals" are more likely to be flat sharing or living somewhere that's sub-optimal for remote work, and the other is access to grey-beards like myself for questions about the system and so on.
50 yr old me versus 25 yr old me: flat vs house with office, knew my way around Solaris and Windows, but not much experience in large systems or databases and so on.
And the IT world is so much bigger than 90s. Back then, it was Solaris or NT4. Oracle and Sybase. VB and C++.
Do we have a word/phrase to describe the rather obvious fight over remote-work that broke out roughly 2 years ago? I still remember the mechanics. Covid-19 forced management to go all-in on remote-work, which was a god-sent for those which always wanted to have more of it. Now, these people (rightfully so) realized that with the end of the pandemic, their newly acquired "right to work remote" would be endangered, so we started to see dogfights over the concept. The one side emphatically arguing for remote-work because they were seeing their new acquisition endangered, while the other side trying to get back to work with other people. That said, in my opinion, the discussion wouldn't have to be so energetically loaded if both sides would realize that it all boils down to CHOICE! If people were not forced to go one or another way, they could actually choose what fits them best, and there would be no need to fight over what is right or wrong. This article wouldn't even have to be written. Because if WFH is not mandated, people choose what they prefer, and missed opportunities are much less relevant as long as you are walking a path you actually decided to walk on.
It's amazing how much better teams are at remote work now than in 2018. However... It's still just not as efficient as in-person fact-to-face ad-hoc meetings. The "water cooler discussion forum" is very real. Informational cross-pollination between teams and between levels of the org structure simply aren't happening as much with remote work. The siloing has locked companies into rigid plans that cannot respond to change.
I don't even know what half the people do at my company. Productivity has no doubt fallen to historic lows. I def feel like 5% of the people are doing 75% of the work. I agree with the article that junior employees are not setup to succeed in this environment which will ultimately result in companies hiring less junior people (fine with me, tired of babysitting).
Honest question: why do you care? Don’t you prefer to see your family and friends more than working 8h+commute time? If you think you are working and others are not, why does that bother you? You are getting paid anyway. If you are forced to do extra hours because there are people who don’t do their job, then just say No (if you cannot do that, then you probably want to change of company anyway… they will bite you in some way or another).
If any, remote work has taught me something: I care way less about the companies I work for. I’m a mercenary, I do my job to the best of my knowledge 9-5 and I couldn’t care less what the company does with my work (as long as it’s legal and ethical).
How would you feel if this was not a cushy white collar tech job but a blue collar job involving physical labor? Say people are slacking, not working hard, generally being lazy, while a small group does the majority of the work? Would it be acceptable to care then? I don't see how its any different. Remote work has given the underperformers somewhere to hide, and quite frankly, its not going to help them in the long term.
I agree with you, thanks for the term "mercenary". Was trying to discuss my (different) perspective similar to this with my girlfriend and couldn't find this word
a huge number of employees are punished for socializing / having "random" meetings at work. why arent you at your cube / chair doing your job instead of wandering around talking to people?
the metrics a lot of companies use purposely look for that and punish it. and tech-bros should understand this because they developed a lot of those tools.
the lunch breaks are 20-30 minutes, the cafeteria is replaced with shitty vending machines, breakrooms have taken away all the chairs, the ones that are left have some giant TV blaring reality TV 24/7. people get in trouble for spending too much time in the shitter.
buildings are sectioned off, you have to have a badge to go anywhere and do anything. if you are in the wrong area you are a security risk and could be written up.
dunno if people realize what tiny tiny fraction of the workforce has these jobs where they are supposed to randomly walk around and talk to each other about problems.
> Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.
I'm not sure what broad learnings you can derive from such a narrow study. Individual firms have seen wildly different WFH outcomes based on how they implemented it.
I can see that they will say anything just to get people to sit in the office, commute downtown or wherever and justify commercial real-estate.
Reality is that people are much happier when they can work from home. Not every profession and position can do this and maybe those who need to show up should be paid more tbh.
Economical and ecological impact of working from home is huge, positively huge. Companies get to expand without huge fixed costs for example.
Articles like this are created to promote world that has been and is not coming back.
Our plane of reference for our coworkers and interactions with them is now confined to the two-dimensional nature of our screens, rather than the three-dimensional world we "used" to see and interact with them in.
This is another interesting way our cultural changes in work may affect our experience because of our biology. The spatial data that contribute to declarative, episodic memory in amygdala-hippocampal memory formation, for example.
What a timely article. While I'm not a junior, I did take a down-level at my current job because it's a completely different field. So, even though I'm not junior, I've felt the affects of this as well.
However, the main problem I've had is social isolation. I'm going to be quitting my remote job and don't plan to work fully remote again for the foreseeable future.
"Hidden Penalty" is less feedback. But mostly the kind of feedback allistic people worry about. That not the kind of in-depth feedback that can make a real career difference, it's the "your pant legs are too short" kind of feedback that is important in the shallow sense of being a good corporate drone.
How does hybrid fix anything? Seniors at home and juniors in the office? 1 day/week everyone at the office (so “no-hire” to anyone who doesn’t live in the city)?
I think I learned more from the fellow juniors in my first couple of jobs than I ever did from managers/supervisors/seniors - remote work is easy for me now that I’m mostly “baked” but think it would have been a huge detriment for me early career.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to light that such research is funded by hedge funds owning the commercial real estate you "absolutely have to have for the poor young professionals."
I think feedback is a minor point, much more important in my mind is the morale-boost you get from working in the office alongside colleagues that in my experience is completely missing from remote-work
Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I'm part of the demographic they claim and it couldn't be further from the truth for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a shitty team and that's hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment, hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote. They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don't need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects. Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I don't know.
Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely. It's just tougher to have off-the-cuff conversations. With fewer of those opportunities, that means what could've been a 5 minute conversation and resolution to a technical issue becomes a full day for a junior engineer, and they have fewer opportunities to ask seniors since they're worried about being a bother. I'm not trying to force people back into offices, I'd rather adapt, but I think anyone new to the industry is at a disadvantage in the interim.
Yes it is almost just literally learning how to do this, vs everyone starts commuting in. Put another way, I get it’s a change, but Eng Managers make filthy money, and maybe they can add Slack comms and related mentorship to the excel and cross-functional working group wiki pages. Excel and email were new once as well.
Be available and not appear busy.
Frankly speaking, I love screensharing instead of sharing a screen/desks.
So while physical meetings has their places, mentoring is not.
Sure, there can be cultural hurdles there, but those exist in the office as well.
"Jane has headphones on, she's heads down and will be upset if I bother her now"
"I want to ask Steve for help, but he rolls his eyes any time I approach him"
"Sam said they'd give me a hand this afternoon, but I can't seem to find them anywhere in the building"
Agreed, but the things you’ve mentioned would all clumsily be grouped under the “busy” Slack status even though they mean quite different things.
And further, seniors should never be upset that a junior is coming to them for advice, mentoring less experienced people one of the main responsibilities that comes with seniority. (This isn’t to excuse help vampires of course.) So I disagree with with the framing.
If you're one of the "solvers" that gets pinged by random people all throughout the day, you need to learn how to use "do not disturb" and to balance it out with dedicated open time. Otherwise it's easy to get stressed and overwhelmed. Totally learnable, but I've seen a few people on my team take psychic damage from this.
Once you learn this though, it's actually easier to do remotely than in-person.
>I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in order to do that.
The skill to actually want to do that. Some people are shellfish and don't want to.
I've had a mentor who outright refused to do any screen sharing calls with me. He only wanted to communicate in chat. So things that could be cleared up in a 3 minute calls took over 30 minutes of back and forth in chats. I hated him to the core.
Actually he was nicer before the pandemic while we were in the office. He always came by to show me stuff when I called him.
I've noticed the behavior of several other colleagues (not everyone) changed while WFH. Many became more distant and hesitant to cooperate and lend a hand. Most wanted to lock themselves in a "don't bother me for anything, let me wrap my work faster, so I can sign out for the day early" kind of state.
Terrible, but some mentors are just like that very reluctant. I will say though even if he only wanted to do chat, most services offer that asymmetrical ability where one is screensharing and both are in chat. Still would have taken longer than purely audio but certainly more immediate than pure-chat. So it's odd he didn't opt for that, it's the method with the least friction.
> Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.
I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the confidence to speak in such broad terms?
Reflecting on my last 6 years of experience as an engineer (which includes both office-based work and being remote) this is not true at all.
>I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the confidence to speak in such broad terms?
Not him but it also matches my experience. Many have not learned to mentor remotely or just don't like mentoring and it's easier to show their contempt online vs face to face.
gp is responding to a comment that calls the study propaganda based on their individual experience. Since everyone seems to be generalizing to an extreme degree it feels a bit disingenuous to call out this one just because you agree with gp.
One of my old bosses would schedule an hour a week between him and I with no agenda to help with these more natural unplanned convos. We'll probably only do 5min catchup and then bullshit the rest of the time about random stuff, but something always tends to come up that spurs an idea, provides clarity, or helps in some other way.
Our company added designated buddies (generally senior assigned to junior) to assist with this for new hires. If they're stuck on a problem, you have someone set aside to ask questions too. If they don't know the answer, they probably know who to ask.
Certainly what it felt like. A Fortune 500 company (sounds like IBM), 1 sales team anecdote, fear mongering over
job loss for the remote’ers, and a very narrow study getting an op via the article to “suggest something broader.”
It’s fascinating, as well as disheartening, watching the massive pushback to labor advances in real-time by corporate owned news media and by their helpers on social media. The layoffs seem to be a catalyst to claw back power, even if it is a side effect and not the sole reason for occuring.
Ya I don’t think there’s something actively coordinated by some central party but definitely seems a bit close to manufacturing consent by a group of similarly incentivized parties. I never really bought into that mindset until seeing the remote work play out. Like NYT of all places, historically banging the gong for equality and progressive initiatives around the workplace, health , and environment, now covering zero of how remote helps all those.
Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my mental model. To be fair, the one economist I've seen seriously looking into this is Nick Bloom, whose research on the descriptive statistics side of things shows WFH Hybrid is here to stay.
There are some commercial real estate folks predicting a cratering of comm RE values if WFH is continued, but I'd argue that's just capitalist creative destruction at its best.
I was under the same impression. The whole article is full of "but what about".
If you follow the money this is not surprising, the managers, who also happen to own real estate in New York / California, want their workers occupying their expansive office space and living near it so the real estate bubble doesn't pop right now. So they had the NYT write an article about it.
It’s a bit bad practice to assume all research that promotes an opinion you agree with is truth, but anything against what you like must be propaganda.
It's not just the part about promoting an opinion that make it propaganda, it's the part about promoting an opinion that a. there is a problem at all, and b. advocating for a particular solution to the problem as defined.
A huge part of propaganda is about setting the terms of the debate. Ideally, as George Orwell wisely pointed out, a successful propagandist makes certain opinions seem obvious, common-sensical, and even inevitable, while making other ideas all but literally unthinkable.
So next time you read an opinion you disagree with, ask, "what would happen if that opinion were the dominant one in society?"
I'm not assuming anything except my main hypothesis which is simply following the corporate money interests. If I was a rich corporate owner, what would I do?
Well, I'd own real estate, I'd probably own it in expansive places such as NY and California, and I would use the media to influence public opinion and policies to advantage me.
Not simply "like", but actually having a substantial vested financial interest and having the means and opportunity to do something about it.
It has been shown by numerous studies that donations and lobbying by big financial interests determine the vast majority of public policy than popular democratic choice.
My company provides a 24/7 onboarding voice chat, where experienced team members are always accessible for questions. This system significantly reduces onboarding time, with most questions answered within minutes and team members starting regular code contributions in days. While some people may be uneasy with this persistent voice channel, participation is voluntary. Newcomers can simply join, ask their question, and leave. The company culture prescribes an expectation that at least some seniors should be available for new people, but naturally the extroverted ones participate more often.
In my experience, the "remote work hindering junior employees" narrative hasn't held true. Admittedly, there is an initial managerial effort required to accommodate remote work. But then remote onboarding thrives. So, as you say, it's not a remote work issue, it's a cultural one. Or as I would say, it sounds like an issue with managers refusing to do their job and manage the remote company.
Wait a minute, a 24/7 voice chat with experienced team members? How is that staffed?
Are you in some sort of huge-team highly-distributed setup with offices everywhere, or does the company expect people to work 24/7? (I'm guessing somewhere in the middle, but would be curious to learn more.)
The voice chat is available 24/7 but members of offices that have someone to onboard are usually participating, which helps. If a new team member works office hours in California, someone from CA will usually be there, or someone from adjacent time zones. If someone new from Germany is there, usually someone senior from that same office will participate as well.
Most activity in the voice chat takes place on workdays, but we don't treat the channel very formally. Sometimes some people are just hanging out and others are working. I used to join it when I was gaming a lot in the past to just chat/help out. Sometimes people would play multiplayer games there after work and still answer questions for those in other time zones. There doesn't need to be a rigid structure for this, just a friendly culture and a voice chat channel.
let's talk about general terms, not the narrow hyper specialized sector that is tech.
many companies (I would argue most) would stop working if people are not reminded every day what their job is and asked what is the ETA for the task they were assigned to.
it's a real problem, people are usually not super smart, they are average, and tend to learn nothing on the job unless they are required to, trained regularly and their advancement measured in some way. They do not think about their work outside, they hardly do it while at work, they do not experiment, they do not hypothesize, they simply wait for the paycheck at the end of the month in exchange for a portion of their lifetime.
if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.
> if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.
Perhaps, if it weren't for confounding variables like companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic, middle managers working to keep themselves relevant, and forces in the commercial real estate market trying to mitigate price crashes from reduced demand for offices.
> companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic
that's another problem entirely.
I am.not from US, I work for a rather large insurance company (> 12,000 employees) they invest in building because they need to have a capital reserve by the law.
Now if their buildings are worth less due to WFH, they will start buying other more valuable kinds of properties,with the consequence that prices will rise for everybody else.
you are not fighting the system by simply shifting where the money come from.
also: in my country usually people have between 21 and 28 paid holidays, paid sick leave and paid hourly permits. not exactly the worst end of the workers' rights spectrum.
WFH made people ask for less holidays, because they will use their absence from the office to fix issues that before required a day off or can actually go on holiday while also working a bit, if everyone is working from home, nobody actually checks if someone is working or not (ape shall not kill ape). if we don't use our holidays the company must pay for them (effectively paying those days double) so we are now required to use all the holidays and permits, no exceptions.
Meanwhile I am still fighting to get java 17 supported, we are stuck with 11 programmed like it is 8.
My job is exactly to bring people up to speed with modern technologies and am very well compensated for it, but with WFH the attention span has dropped dramatically.
Not my problem, honestly, but they don't understand the damages that are inflicting to their future self.
A lot of jobs are about being able to network and people-manage, not about being able to push PRs. It seems clear to me you are at a disadvantage being remote in these types of roles. Even for people in technical roles, or whose work naturally fits into being remote, these things are probably harder in remote environments. Most companies are not perfectly well adjusted, so it does not make sense to talk about what the ideal remote-first culture is, but what on average working remotely is like.
I have a slightly different take about this than other folks. Perhaps it's because I'm older and when I entered the workforce, there were very few jobs that could be remote, and even fewer that actually were.
I've worked in-office for most of my career (much of that was as a consultant hired for specific projects, and many clients want to see you working), but pre-pandemic I was full-time remote for more than five years, which was mostly positive, but with a few caveats.
One of the biggest caveats was that it was more difficult to build strong teams, as your colleagues were just voices (this is before ubiquitous video meetings) on the phone and text in chat and/or emails.
But that isn't limited to work environments either. More and more of our lives are spent online, with less and less human interaction. I suppose that might be a plus for the misanthropes among us, but it seems like that's fracturing our social cohesion (I'm in the US, my experience may not be valid elsewhere).
Please note that I am emphatically not prescribing full-time return to the office. Not even close. WFH allowed me to be more productive and not waste 700 hours or so a year sitting on a train commuting. I shudder to think about how much I hated driving to/from client sites as a consultant as that's even worse than riding the train.
No, I don't believe that your employer/co-workers are "family" (well, unless they actually are but that's not usually the case in larger organizations), but humans are social creatures and really do need real, physical human interaction (I'm not talking about sex which is important, but irrelevant in this context) to maintain a healthy outlook on other humans and society in general.
An outlier (at least I hope it is) being the recent spate of people being shot just for attempting contact (knocking on a stranger's door) with other humans.
What makes folks so suspicious and willing to harm their neighbors? I think it's a lack of regular human contact and the constant drumbeat of evil deeds from the news media (how does the old saw go? "If it bleeds, it leads."). And with the ability to get news from anywhere in the world in near real-time, we constantly hear about the worst of us, but rarely about the mundane, pleasant interactions that people have every day.
Perhaps I'm way off base with this take, but it seems to me that fostering human interaction with physical proximity with one's larger society promotes social cohesion.
That's not to say such interactions must be in the workplace, but for many folks (given car/suburban culture), it might the only time they might interact with other humans who aren't family or close friends.
Which brings to mind Asimov's dichotomy (as he combined his 'Robot' and 'Foundation' universes), especially in Foundation and Earth[0], where the "Spacers" are so anti-social that they loathe any physical, human interaction whatsoever, whereas the "Settlers" were comfortable being around other humans. I'm not saying that this is what's happening, just that there are some interesting parallels.
I don't pretend to have all (or even some/any) the answers, but interacting with actual human beings usually enhances my view of humanity/society/local community, while online interactions mostly degrade that view.[1]
[1] Please note that I'm not being categorical here. There absolutely are unpleasant/evil/nasty people in the world who should be avoided. But at least in my experience, most humans are honest, decent people just trying to live a decent life.
I think I agree with what you said. That being said, for me when it comes to balance work (as in “working for company X for Z money/year) vs non-work, I put all the weight in non-work. That means:
- in-person is better for collaboration than Zoom? Of course, but if I have to commute 30 min each way to see you, then Zoom it is
- being around other office people at lunch time is cool sometimes? Yeah, but if I have to rent an expensive and small apartment in the city to being able to be at the office at lunch time, then Zoom it is
>That being said, for me when it comes to balance work (as in “working for company X for Z money/year) vs non-work, I put all the weight in non-work.
Absolutely. Although many folks don't have much physical interaction with other humans outside of their jobs. In that case, cutting out those interactions without some sort of alternative for human interaction is detrimental to most humans' mental health IMHO.
Since we're online here, there's a much larger proportion of neuro-atypical, introverted and/or misanthropic people than in the population at large, so I think the discussion is a bit skewed.
Which is why I posted what I did.
All that said, I don't disagree with your assessment at all. It's just important to have those interactions somewhere.
More directly addressing the topic in TFA, when I was pretty junior, personal interactions with more senior folks was crucial for me to understand the culture and political landscape of a large organization, even as a technical resource. And those lessons/mentoring have served me well in my career.
For me, those interactions happened over cigarettes (this was 30 years ago) and at the bar after work, but the result was the same as "water cooler" interactions.
As a more senior resource, those interactions weren't as useful, but I can certainly see where juniors could benefit greatly from a more senior person taking them under their wing.
At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and article by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up. I'll suspect most articles before this point were too.
Sure they do, but unless you have some evidence this is the case it is just conspiratorial thinking. There's a reason we joke around about saying something is being pushed by "big x" where x = some shadowy group with a vested interest in y -- because it's silly to imagine and almost certainly not the case in most situations.
But one cannot just consider the benefits of office work in isolation. If working remotely makes me see my family and friends more hours per week (e.g., having breakfast and lunch with my partner/kids) then to the hell that x% of productivity I could theoretically gain by working from the office.
Not for me they don't. Most of our team is remote and it's great for retention. Nothing makes people want to jump ship more than a shitty office culture you have to experience in person every day. Guess what, most office cultures are shitty, no matter how many ping pong tables you put in there.
What's my personal vested interest do you suppose?
The fact that you think "most office cultures are shitty" and have thus decided to dismiss everything that might mention any kind of downsides of WFH as a conspiracy.
That's like... the definition of ignoring facts over personal bias.
Do you think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a group of wealthy commercial real estate owners would get articles published and studies paid for, particularly when they face significant financial harm due to people wanting to work from home? Who do you think paid for that study? It's paywalls so I don't know. I doubt it was a union.
Do you think it's strange that we've had a deluge of negative articles about working from home and almost no positive ones? Does this seem statistically normal to you?
It doesn't have to be either/or. Commercial real estate could have a vested interest, and there could be real downsides with many companies' implementation of work from home.
At that point, if the problems are real, dismissing the article, not because of who wrote it, but because of who you suspect wrote it, seems rather narrow-minded.
I can't read it because it's paywalled, but can you tell me the difference between this article and all the other articles we've been spammed with about how WFH is somehow bad?
>Commercial real estate could have a vested interest, and there could be real downsides with many companies' implementation of work from home.
You're also moving the goalposts I think. I just bet that both the article and the study were funded by said interests. Studies don't fund themselves and people who do funded studies have incentive to find the results that they are paid to find, or at the very least, omit any evidence to the contrary.
Seems weird to admit you haven't read the article and are just commenting on the headline and speculating, while at the same time asking another user to summarize it for you and compare it to other articles that you also likely haven't read.
The burden of being dismissively argumentative is so low, and engaging constructively takes so much time, that discussions become dominated by comments like yours and eventually everyone who wants to engage constructively leaves.
>Seems weird to admit you haven't read the article and are just commenting on the headline and speculating
Why does it seem weird? I'm not trying to deceive anyone.
I didn't ask for discussion, I was just stating an opinion. I openly admitted it was completely speculative by the wording I used, but I haven't changed my mind.
>At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and article by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up. I'll suspect most articles before this point were too.
I would also guess that some of the people who were arguing with me probably didn't read the article either, at least at the time they retorted. Perhaps if they did, they could tell he how this article was different from all the others recently. I suspect it's just more of the same.
FWIW, I have read other articles, and they all seem contrived as if they were planted to sway opinion. "Office cooler talk is invaluable," is one of the talking points. "Communication is invaluable in an open office," also seems pretty suspect. I haven't experienced either of these. The most productive environment I've ever worked in was when I had an office, or shared an office wither another person. I'm certainly not the only person with this experience. "WFH makes you more likely to be outsourced," is another threatening talking point. The newest one is "WFH makes you more likely to be replaced from AI." I guess this one is, "for God's sake, think of the junior developers!"
I've been around the block and working professionally for a while. I've read thousands of articles in my adult lifetime over 20+ years. Just based on life experience, all these arguments seem contrived to me. You might differ in your opinion.
Here's an article about how Google pays for research to shield against regulation. Know who has a lot of commercial real estate? Google. Just an example.
Unpopular opinion based on my personal experience: Remote work is broken and we will slowly see a full return to the office in most cases.
Why is it broken? This article points out some of the big reasons but the ones that stand out to me are: Lack of face to face collaboration, Lack of learning via "osmosis", and the biggest one I do not hear a lot about is the complete lack of social skills that I see from people who have worked from home for the past 3+ years. Some people have become totally incapable of dealing with others due to the fact they have been holed up for so long.
Why to we "really need to find a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment"?
It simply doesn't exist. Remote work, while great for junior engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during meetings, should only be reserved for senior people
If they're able to play video games and not pay attention during the meeting then it's a waste of their time to be there in the first place. Stop wasting people's time with your meetings.
