I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls.
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery mmediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
1. An office with four walls, a door that can be closed is helpful but as a _minimum_ I'd also want:
2. Pristine bathrooms
3. Clean kitchen and good supply of tea/coffee (with ample space for those to store or prepare their food hygenically).
The amount of places I've worked that can't provide 2 and 3 is saddening. Nothing worse than being stuck in a dirty smelly place, hanging around to get points for presenteeism.
No I'm gonna get on a rant.
Why is it that my home network is superior to the crappy wifi at the office?
Why with my limited salary can I setup a better desk with much better screens / computing equipment than my employer provides?
I once worked at a place with pristine bathrooms. Awesome in theory except any time nature called I ran into a “closed for cleaning” sign as they were deep cleaned 3-4 times a day. I always wanted to work with the janitorial staff to improve their timing and “system” as I don’t think they even realized sometimes they had all men’s rooms closed at the same time for significant amount of times. But I couldn’t bring myself to interject.
Anyways I have an appreciation for availability these days. My office butts to toilet ratio is very high and I’m occasionally in a jam.
I really wish people in the men’s room would only use the toilet to sit down. The seat should certainly rise without the weight of a butt on it, it’s the only time it belongs down despite what the women in all our lives have conditioned us to believe.
I can't comment on your own home or that of GP commenter, but in my home the cleaning and supplies services seem to take 7 days off per week, so I keep having to deal with cleaning the bathroom and stocking up on tea and coffee myself. At the office these tasks are taken care of, and when I get home the state of it and its supplies are no worse than they were when I left in the morning.
My organisation just opted into open area hot desks instead of offices. One day in there and interrutped about 5 times in 30 minutes by people who otherwise would have pinged me on slack and allowed me to reply in a manner more respectful of my workload. They see this as a big advantage of the open area "instead of making meetings you can just go over and quickly chat to someone!"
When you think about what software people do when they are most productive it is almost a deep trance-like state, I would compare it to meditation. Imagine proposing that people go and do their meditation out in the corridor where everybody is walking past and talking to each other, getting coffee and randomly interrupting you. It's insane anybody ever thought it was a good idea.
Unfortunately closed offices are a huge status symbol now and asking for one is akin to declaring you think you're more important than everyone else in the office.
I work remotely and rent an office in town. It's a 15 minute walk from my house, a decent size (~22m^2), all my own, and well set up. I love it and pay gladly but I it's not possible for everyone.
I used to have a garden office but my wife now needs her own space for her work so I took the rented space.
A dedicated space is a must if you're working remotely. Either at home or offsite.
I have no objection to going into the office for well defined, productive meetings like project kick-offs though. I still believe they're the best way to collaborate on big planning tasks, even after having worked remotely for over 10 years.
I live in a semi-rural commuter town outside London, and I've noticed on one of the few office-industrial estates around the town there's a new building which currently has the logo of one of those co-working companies. This isn't something I've ever seen outside of London (WeWork being the obvious one).
I'm curious to see if that style of working catches on post-COVID.
Yeah, I live somewhere that's very cheap indeed by the standards of most people reading this thread. I spend about USD 150 a month on a small office and it's brilliant.
Get all the benefits of office space (i.e., time out of the house, different mental space) with none of the downsides. I've got a couple of spare desks, so if I'm working on something with other people, or just wanna have friends hang out and work it's all doable.
Perhaps companies that require physical offices could try to offer a compromise incentive: personal offices or actual cubicles instead of open office layouts. At least that would solve many of the pain points of physically working in tech.
Maybe personal offices are too expensive, but how much does it cost to set up cubes?
The biggest contributor to me loathing returning to the office every day is the open office floor concept. It’s a distracting environment for software engineers who need to focus when doing their work. As I’ve become more senior, it’s become even worse because I feel like I have a constant flow of individuals standing behind me to ask questions. It’s very difficult to get an hour or two of uninterrupted time every day.
Flexibility is key, IMO. A cube/personal office might be desired, but it doesn't solve the time & cost problems associated with travelling into an office. And there will be some like me who prefer an open office environment to an enclosed space.
Indeed, this is backed by Real Data! Back in the 1970s or thereabouts, IBM did a study where they put one group in an open office and another in individual offices and quantified the productivity difference. The "individual office" group was (iirc) something like 15% more productive.
All from memory, so I may have misremembered bits... As I recall it, they actually built purpose-designed buildings for the study, such was IBM's cashflow, power and arrogance back then.
Yes, working from home is much better than working at open office. However there is some scenario where middle manager can make WFH as hellish as working at open office: by mandating everyone to install invasive spyware so they can "manage" you remotely.
Bonus point if the company didn't want to give/loan company devices, so you have to install it on your own personal devices.
That's a huge red flag for me though. If you're employed (so not working as a freelancer for the company), the employer is supposed to provide the equipment you can work on. For them to expect usage of personal devices and then have a requirement of installing these kind of tools on it wouldn't be expectable to me.
How common is having to install such spyware though? I hear stories about it but none of people that I know actually had to put up with it (or maybe they didn't know?).
The closest I got to this situation was being told that if I want to do work on my personal laptop I'd have to install some software that would allow the IT department to wipe it out in case it gets stolen. While I understand the reason, it was an obvious nope from me.
Eh. I use Linux at home, and the work stuff happily lives in a Windows VM; but installing work software on my personal mobile devices? too much liability, just no.
It's only cheaper if you leave out the costs of degraded performance, higher turnover in personnel, and being less attractive as an employer. These are not easy to factor in, but the general gist of the last decade seems to be that the (unmitigated) open plan office has an impact on the bottom line. It's just hard to put a number on it, which you can do with concrete items such as floor space or the cost of adding a wall somewhere.
Construction materials supplier here. That is not necessarily true. There are two major drivers for open office plans:
1) The notion in architecture that open plans, by literally removing barriers, figuratively remove them and create a more open and inclusive office environment. This is a popular belief in the biggest architectural firms in the world, even though the principals at those firms all have luxurious private offices.
2) Recently some offices have flipped to open plans to accommodate hybrid working. E.g. allowing employees to WFH 2-3 days / week but then expecting them to hot-desk when they come in. This reduces the total footprint required, which can reduce costs...except many firms are using the saved funds to enhance the office in other ways (more natural light, better furniture, plants and fountains, catering, etc.) in order to attract talent.
Gensler has published a lot of this research and positioning publicly in reports and in their podcasts.
I actually do enjoy being in the office. I would much rather the hours be a little better - like 6 hours not 8 to take into account the commute.
But being in an open office and not in my own person office is painful. So many distractions.
I had my own office (as a manager) for 2 years, and it was bloody glorious. After I switched jobs and still was a team lead / manager, I no longer did due to those companies cultures and it was so much worse.
Sounds like the relationship is dysfunctional in both directions.
On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that.
Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done." Personally, I'd prefer it if engineering work didn't go the way of Amazon warehouse workers, because if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Best of luck to the OP at the dice roll that is the next company he works for.
Do you see where the author is coming from? I believe he is a developer (or even junior) that has a scrum master or some kind of manager and has tasks and sprint points assigned to him. If he does not finish his "commitment" in points in their designated time, people will ask him "why it took so long?" and maybe put him on improvement plan.
Productivity is the most important for him and people like him, because that is expected from him and he is measured against that. No one is going to nag about him not paying attention in one or the other meeting. He will get people nagging when he does not deliver.
He dislikes things that get in a way of what he is supposed to do. Then we all know you cannot say you did not made your commitment because you had to attend 10 meetings, this will be taken as making up excuses.
It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other.
The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others.
There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour.
As an IC you should expect to spend 70-80% of your time on focus work (either solo or pairing) and 20-30% on communicating/planning/overhead.
The writing of the code itself happens in the middle of a much longer conversation and to deny the programmer visibility of this is to deny them context.
Designing working spaces to allow this is possible, but easier if you let people choose where to work for 4 out of 5 days a week.
Communicating/planning/overhead are part of productivity. So are 1 to 1s with good managers.
But the people who wander around telling jokes and drinking coffee are just socialising and (possibly consciously and deliberately) raising their profile.
Like you said, a false dichotomy, but after years of collaborative development with stakeholders, I still want well defined tickets. Things go missing constantly otherwise, people forget they asked for things, I forget they asked me, questions about the task end up lost across four different communication platforms, it's a mess.
At the end of a good meeting, I love seeing actionable tickets, I can relax knowing I have all the requirements so far captured and I can get to work as soon as it's time. In between now and then, I can forget allll about it.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
To be fair, that's been a popular view among software engineers long before ubiquitous WFH was a reality. And programmers are definitely keen on not getting their flow interrupted.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
Well, the most important thing is certainly NOT relationship-building either.
> Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
It's entirely possible to build relationships remotely.
I'm sort of a job hopper and also work 80% remotely on average, with two-week-long visits to the office. Throughout the years I always stayed in touch with at least one person from the previous projects.
Most of these relationships were built entirely remotely and were much stronger than those made during my time at the office.
It's likely a question of preference, but it's not like someone working remotely has to necessarily have a "business only" approach.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."
Relationship-building sounds like something my manager would say. And I’d still have to code XYZ, make sure it works, and make a presentation about it. Not sure how relationships help me in a technical role.
Relationships to your fellow engineers help when you're banging out code and need a review or just a rubber duck session.
Relationships to the Product Management team means you have a finger on the pulse in terms of where the product you're building is moving. That means you can push back on stupid things, and suggest brilliant things that were only possible because you had the technical insight.
Relationships to upper management helps if you have some technical idea that you want to pursue which requires a significant investment.
Basically, relationships help a ton if you want to have any influence on the work you're doing. If you're fine just taking whichever ticket pops up and implementing it then sure, you don't need relationships.
I think this however also heavily depends on the company and culture you're in.
I’m surprised I got upvoted at all, reading over your well thought-out comment.
I do command quite some deciding power. But I can’t figure out if it’s my technical skills, or the fact that I’m the only person carrying this project. Pretty sure no one else around me knows what a ticket is.
But what irks me is that my entire position feels incredibly ill-conceived. Like I’m not solving any actual problems. And I can’t “do” anything about it, because that would take years of company-wide restructuring. And I’m just not a long-term visionary, like my peers (who all happen to be, let’s say, at a much later physical and mental state in life).
That’s why I don’t see how in-company relationships benefit me. I wouldn’t dismiss them in general though, which I strongly came off as doing.
But it’s either that, or quitting. The latter will probably happen in the foreseeable future, once it doesn’t look too transient on my resume.
I upvoted you, but I heavily disagree with you. Working with people you don't know, don't trust and/or don't like is hard. This hardship can be alleviated by "relationship building"
You can also cut down a tree with a dull axe, but why would you choose that over a sharp axe?
> if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Productivity is the sole metric of your performance, it is the job of management to come up with meaningful metrics. If they try to optimise for something stupid like LOC or mouse movements or hours logged, they will get the hell they planned for themselves.
The very last thing I want to happen is being judged by how popular I am.
One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.
The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands?
I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months later we have 50+ training videos on every topic.
We implement mentors and formal onboarding processes with screen sharing and remote whiteboating sessions, too.
Actually it sounds like it is hard, but you pulled off something of great value by thinking about it, taking ownership, and iterating towards solving a problem.
It's a lot harder than giving an employee a laptop and having them shadow someone for a couple weeks before kicking them in the deep end.
Structured training may be straightforward to implement, but it takes many more man-hours than just letting the new employees sponge up knowledge on their own.
That said, remote work is here to stay, and you're right to criticize companies for being extremely lazy with remote onboarding. Companies that can quickly ramp up fully-remote new-hires will probably have a huge competitive advantage in the coming years.
Lucidchart has been my go to. Allows multiple users in the same whiteboard at once. Legible text as opposed to whiteboard scribble. Easily rearrange block diagrams. Permanent record of a diagram session that can be thrown in a design doc.
I have a second webcam pointed straight down at my desk, and scribble with a pen on paper.
Frankly, this works better than any of the digital tools I tried, despite not being collaborative. (I tried a number of them, and have both a drawing tablet and a tablet pc)
The fact that you put work into the problem is admirable. However, I will say that from personal experience, I find it significantly less engaging to watch online training videos.
As a junior, the most rewarding learning experiences I have had in my career took place during off-topic discussions at the desk of an engineer who was way smarter than me.
You can't replace human contact with technology, it will never be an adequate substitute. We are social animals and I think the increased push to doing everything online will damage peoples mental wellbeing in the long term
You're missing the point though, which is that people need time with people to learn. Watching videos isn't enough. What happens when they have questions and need to have a conversation?
How am I missing the point with a comprehensive training program that explicitly allows people to continuously engage with their mentor and have face time?
Better documentation, learning by osmosis suggests you don’t have a lot written down so people can’t solve their own problems.
Better mentorship, not “here’s your mentor” and it’s some disinterested person who can fob you off to soak it in. The good news is that if people can “learn by osmosis” you probably have some strong informal mentors already. You need to identify who they were.
Better follow up and expectations setting, if there’s obvious stuff you expect people will just get because of team culture make that explicit and check in about it as you would other aspects of work. The big thing IMO in any on boarding situation is to get the new person asking lots of questions ASAP.
All of these will make your on boarding better back at the office as well. On boarding by Brownian motion isn’t really a plan after all.
Absolutely. Remote working is absolutely devastating to the development of junior team members and people just getting started in the world of work.
If you're just getting started in your area (whether development, sales, marketing, devops) having immediate help and guidance from your peers and manager is really helpful - documentation helps, structured training helps but they're not the full solution. Those momentary 'quick' bits of guidance help, and whether we like it or not "face-to-face conversation" is the highest form of bandwidth we have.
The other element people don't talk about enough is that getting used to "working" is a journey in and of itself. There are lots of elements of being productive in the world of work - not just churning out code - and it's not obvious how it all works. In some areas I see a lot of "hollowing out" where we don't have as many entry roles.
Hey I really feel for you. Please don’t disengage, fight hard to get mentored.
Not sure what your org is like but ask to pair remotely if you can, ask to do code reviews over video call so you can talk through questions, ask your manager regularly to talk you through the trade offs involved in the decisions they are making, etc. If you hear about a weekly status call happening on some project, ask if you can be included “to learn.”
Your goal is to first increase your situational awareness and understanding of the domain, because that is upstream of the technical trade offs.
I think people graduating into this have to fight really hard for the mentorship and learning that would happen naturally 10 years ago.
People like me who graduated 10-15 years ago and would now naturally be your mentors don’t realise this because we never faced it.
It's also the same for new teams or even new large projects. I have worked at {Big Tech Company} for 7 years and WFH has barely been a speed bump for me.
Last week I decided to switch teams. My onboarding rate is glacial so far. Naturally I don't have a big workload, because I am new. However between tasks I can't just try and learn by osmosis, because there's nobody around. I have to go out of my way to schedule meetings with people and say "what are you working on? explain it to me."
Luckily I am in a fairly senior role so I am confident scheduling those meetings and asking those questions. If I was a new grad I'd be terrified to do that and instead probably just sit here and twiddle my thumbs half the day.
I'd been at my company for two years when the pandemic hit, and I continued learning loads by osmosis through a daily 30min team Webex "turn your mic and camera on, and just chat or work silently or whatever ends up happening". Have you tried that? I haven't yet had the chance to mentor a new starter in remote mode, but from my own experiences and on general principles I would personally be trying a "leave my Webex room open all day and have a few of us working in there" approach. Of course, even better would presumably be to actively note what questions get asked during that time, and to update documentation accordingly.
I'm a reasonably experienced person and I've found myself much _less_ productive at home, because despite my experience I still get value from being able to easily and quickly bounce ideas off people or get help in components that I'm less familiar with.
Years ago a junior employee gave in notice for a new remote job. I told him I didn't this was best for him because it would make learning much more difficult. When I've met him years later he agreed that it wasn't a good move for him.
The lead / manager (or whatever it is called in your case) on your team should try to encourage pairing or mob programming as much as possible.
It is difficult to pull off, but nothing speaks against an experienced person sharing their screen while working on a particular topic.
Whenever somebody starts working on something they can ping it in a channel, and then interested engineers could join. We try to work that way and it doesn't always work but sometimes it works well.
> If you like/prefer going to the office that is fine. I am not trying to say we should all be remote. Companies should offer FLEXIBILITY to let employees choose where to work from.
That doesn’t work. I prefer working in the office, but only if the rest of my team is actually there with me. If some people are remote, then we have to do Zoom meetings, so I may as well be remote too.
I hate that people keep framing it as a "preference" issue. There are HUGE economic and environmental costs that go along with working in and (often) commuting to an office. Not to mention the consistent 20-30% productivity drain working in an office seems to have across the board at most tech orgs.
We don't need to destroy our planet, dramatically increase costs, and dramatically lower productivity just to appease the minority of people that prefer playing office space, and I think more and more people are starting to see it that way.
Well, there are also huge human costs that go along with working alone all day, and in the same environment as the rest of your life.
For example, commuting, while not nice most of the time, has one great impact on life: it allows you to break from work, which is not happening when you have sleep/work/hobbies/life at the same place. I'm not saying you should spend 1h in traffic or subway, but 20min and walking would be a great way to change thoughts and separate work from life.
Also seeing your colleagues for real, and spending some time with them, as they are humans, is a great way to have better empathy and better work relations: using only remote tools doesn't provide such a human behavior.
Completely agree. I'm actually working full time in the office just so I have a working environment that's actually optimised for focusing on work, even though it's primarily empty. There's no way I'd work for a company that insisted I work in the same space I live in.
I cycle in and my commute is one of the highlights of my day. When some colleagues are occasionally in the office they all comment on how much being back in the office makes them realise what they missed about it.
I don't think anyone is advocating for a position in which companies insist you work in the space you live in. The dichotomy here is between a) company forcing you to work in specific building and b) company giving you some say in the matter. People want different amounts of 'say', of course, but even a fully-remote company isn't going to prevent you from, for example, working from a shared office that's local to you.
Many people who work remotely will go to a coffee shop or WeWork. But my point is this -- people who have this urge to be in person and can't be placated reasonably are both in the minority and are essentially a problem when what they want is much more expensive and damaging.
Absolutely agree here - although I'm plenty productive working from home, I find I have to go out for a 20/30 minutes walk afterwards, otherwise I never really 'turn off' and my brain is stuck in work mode for the rest of the day. While commuting isn't always fun, it does help provide that 'switch off' - I'm lucky enough to have a relatively short (~20 min) commute though, so I can see how this would be more frustrating for someone with 1hr+ commute.
Seeing colleagues in person is also vital for me - I wouldn't have the working relationship with them that I have if we were fully remote. I think the hybrid model is the best way - it's what works best for me, at least.
One of the nicest work environments I've had (in these specific terms only!) was when I worked 15-20 minutes away from where I lived. In summer months, I could walk in — and it helped that there was a park on the way. In the winter, or if I was really in a hurry, I could take local transport. That short commute was perfect to clear the head and prepare for the day. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult setup to achieve and my last commute — nearly 2 hours there and back — was the final straw before I decided to wfh pretty much full time.
As someone who worked in an office for 5 years and has now worked remotely for 5 years, I have to say, this just isn't true. I get the same "peaceful reflection time" from simply walking my dog that I used to get from commuting.
You can also go walking/running if you WFH, which I do. At any time I want. If I'm stressed of work mid day I'll just go running for an hour and will feel super. Couldn't properly do that if I worked from office.
Honestly, it's just too much of a hassle for me to be able to actually enjoy the running activity itself.
1. I have to prepare for the weather, organise proper clothes. Fine.
2. I sweat really hard. After a run I'm totally wet and I'd rather be indoors as little as possible, since sweat is dripping all over. And to get to a work shower I would have to go through an elevator and some other places. I'd feel people judging me if I'm sweating all over the place before getting to shower.
3. I'd prefer to not shower at work. I will have to also bring so much stuff along like changing clothes and must find a place to dry my sweaty clothes since they are dripping through. I must remember to not leave them there and I'm quite forgetful about things like that.
Depending on where your office is (typically some sort of city) this can actually be pretty dangerous (hit+run, crime, breathing very unhealthy air). Conversely if you work remotely, you can live in the suburbs or even somewhere more remote.
Additionally, I know in many in-person orgs leaving to go outside and smoke is super frowned upon and seen as a productivity drain. I assume "going for a quick run" would have the same effect at your off-the-shelf toxic org. In a remote org, no one is going to be breathing down your neck while you take 15 mins to go for a walk to collect your thoughts. Especially if we keep passing privacy legislation that limits the ability of the Amazons of the world to install spyware on worker machines.
I work from home... but I'm not alone.. I've got as much, if not more access to co-workers whilst at home as I do in the office. We use teams extensively so if you are needing to concentrate, simply flip your status to busy. We've got a group set up for the developers where we chat, swap stories, ask technical questions or just complain about the poor management. No different than if we were in the office.. In fact probably more social.
About the only thing that I have noticed, is that having the ability to immediately communicate and that communication method being text, it is very easy for complaints about the organisation to get a little more heated than would happen if we were in person.
If you are working from home and you feel alone, then just reach out to your co-workers and spend some time just chewing the fat.
Text, voice, even video is not the same as a live human being: even-though it is communication in all cases, and I do agree we can have great tools, the tools can't replace the interactions you can have with a real human.
That's true. In person you also have to worry about COVID and other communicable diseases. Can't beat that!
But no in all seriousness, some of the most in-depth conversations I've had in my life have been in video call 1:1s. The intentionality of sitting in a call with someone for 30 mins is enormous. It's equivalent to going to someone's office and sitting right in front of them and talking for 30 mins. That almost never happens in office environments -- instead you have lots of fleeting encounters, passing people in hallways, etc. With remote you get this extremely intentional person to person experience every time.
It might work, but it is difficult to walk just for walking: I know people who walk their dog, which works, but just going out around doesn't seem like a good motivation
If you don't find that sufficiently motivating, then you don't care about it enough to use it as an argument for why we should all have to commute.
Before I had a dog, I would intentionally go for walks to think over an algorithm or endpoint I'm writing. People who work in an office do the same thing, often intentionally.
Depends on your neighborhood, but this sounds like a personal preference issue; walking just for the sake of being outside is a liberating experience in of itself. Walk for the sun and for the breeze and the sounds of nature. Or go for a jog.
> Not to mention the consistent 20-30% productivity drain working in an office seems to have across the board at most tech orgs.
I don't think it's so clear cut.
In less collaborative environments, nobody interrupts you and you can bang code all day, close many tickets, etc etc.
In highly collaborative environments, people will talk to each other all the time. You'll me interrupted and you will write less code and close less JIRAs but you're more likely to find issues with code, design and requirements earlier in the process, solve misunderstandings easier and faster, and you get that free flow of information where everyone knows what is going on and share knowledge easily.
So you might have lesser "productivity" but you're more likely to deliver high-quality product.
Now saying that, both WFH and hybrid and office can be both highly collaborative and not. But WFH makes is really easy for people to check out of the information flow (even by accident) and be angry they're not getting informed, or promoted or whatever.
If you want WFH to work out, you need to come up with a strategy how to make that highly collaborative.
You are correct about the problem, but your solution is backwards. The solution is not for us to retreat to the suburbs and WFH forever. The solution is to build dense, walkable cities with good public transit, allowing for sustainable in-person work and strengthening local communities.
They clearly aren’t that bad. China has very dense cities and has not had much issue controlling spread. Masks and a respectful society seem to be highly effective at stoping viruses.
Not in London, or the tech hotspots of the US, I'm sure. I bet it's a free for all. It's a big reason for my apprehension of a return to the office. In London, at least, it's very common to find significant numbers of people on buses and trains without a mask.
In my opinion this is an argument fallacy.Almost any economic activity causes pollution and spike in environmental and economic costs.
Moving to WFH will not do anything to reduce emissions and it could actually lead to an opposite outcome due to increased consumption as people would have more time to travel longer distances.
There won't be increased consumption at 7 AM and at 5 PM on a weekday if less people commute. I just don't see it happening. Additionally the tech industry isn't exactly a groundswell of people either -- if all tech workers stop commuting, that isn't going to have enough of an impact to change traffic conditions except literally in silicon valley. There just aren't that many workers in tech.
But let's examine the flipside... The average commute distance in the U.S. is 16 miles. The average tech company is located in a densely populated metropolitan area, and the average passenger vehicle in the U.S. emits 411 grams of CO2 per mile. Commuting two ways that's 32 miles * 411g = 13.152 kg (~29 lbs) of carbon emissions for your daily commute. The average American household in total has around 39.8 kg/day (~88 lbs) of C02 emissions. Reducing that by 29 on weekdays is a 1/3 reduction in emissions. That's huge. Also consider that the average person in the U.S. drives 36.9 miles per day. For working people cutting this by 32 miles on weekdays is an enormous change.
Consumption isn't going to increase proportionally because everyone is still going to be too busy working. The people who were already "consuming" during the day are going to continue to do so, but that population isn't going to increase. It's fixed. Maybe some will drive more, but it's not going to have the same effect that the people no longer driving 32 miles / weekday no longer having to do so will have.
I'm also ignoring the significant environmental and monetary costs of keeping an office running, and the increased work that needs to be done because of the (being charitable) at least 15% production drain of working in an office.
No one (save school trips) wants to pack into the bronx zoo at 8 AM on a tuesday. At best this would have diminishing returns -- the benefit of the roads being less crowded vanishes once the same number of people start driving for consumption reasons. There's no way it would exceed the original footprint of people commuting, because the motivation wouldn't exist once you approach commute levels of congestion. And this is ignoring the fact that there is an essentially fixed population of people who are able to consume during the workday.
>There won't be increased consumption at 7 AM and at 5 PM on a weekday if less people commute. I just don't see it happening. Additionally the tech industry isn't exactly a groundswell of people either -- if all tech workers stop commuting, that isn't going to have enough of an impact to change traffic conditions except literally in silicon valley. There just aren't that many workers in tech.
There's a delayed consumption.Time and money saved will inevitably turn spending time and money later.
Also not only tech workers work in the offices.A lot of other people might demand to work from home (and they already did).That's a lot of people.
>But let's examine the flipside... The average commute distance in the U.S. is 16 miles. The average tech company is located in a densely populated metropolitan area, and the average passenger vehicle in the U.S. emits 411 grams of CO2 per mile. Commuting two ways that's 32 miles * 411g = 13.152 kg (~29 lbs) of carbon emissions for your daily commute. The average American household in total has around 39.8 kg/day (~88 lbs) of C02 emissions. Reducing that by 29 on weekdays is a 1/3 reduction in emissions. That's huge. Also consider that the average person in the U.S. drives 36.9 miles per day. For working people cutting this by 32 miles on weekdays is an enormous change.
I dont think you can make an equation like this.People instead of walking to their favorite restaurant might decide to order more or make longer rides to go to "the better restaurants" instead of just consuming what is withing the walking distance from their apartments / office.
>Consumption isn't going to increase proportionally because everyone is still going to be too busy working. The people who were already "consuming" during the day are going to continue to do so, but that population isn't going to increase. It's fixed. Maybe some will drive more, but it's not going to have the same effect that the people no longer driving 32 miles / weekday no longer having to do so will have.
Except a lot of people will gain time and money to spend later.And that's usually one of the main arguments in these discussions that people hate to spend time and money to commute.
>I'm also ignoring the significant environmental and monetary costs of keeping an office running, and the increased work that needs to be done because of the (being charitable) at least 15% production drain of working in an office.
I was under the impression that offices generally are environmentally speaking better buildings than your average condos and houses.They have to follow specific sustainability standards.
> I was under the impression that offices generally are environmentally speaking better buildings than your average condos and houses.They have to follow specific sustainability standards.
The house/apartment you live in is still there (because you still live in it) regardless of if you WFH. The difference is if you WFH, it's actually being utilized 100% of the time instead of just at night and on weekends. Conversely, the office literally doesn't need to exist in the first place if everyone does WFH. So we have to compare having your apartment + having an office, to having just your apartment. The office situation is a net negative no matter how environmentally friendly it is unless it is actually carbon neutral or carbon negative. And that's ignoring the commuting aspect. If we were to abandon all offices tomorrow and let nature re-claim them, it would have a massively positive effect carbon footprint wise. And it's not like offices turn off the AC at night.
> Except a lot of people will gain time and money to spend later.And that's usually one of the main arguments in these discussions that people hate to spend time and money to commute.
By this logic, we should keep everyone poor because god forbid they consume something. Consumption isn't negative across the board. And overwhelmingly these days it's digital anyway. If I stay at home and watch Netflix, I have a much smaller carbon footprint than someone who goes and drives somewhere. You can see from the statistics above, the average person drives ~39 miles per day. I'm saying reduce that by 32 on weekdays and you're saying "oh no, what if they replace that with other consumption???". I think it is borderline impossible people would consistently do something _worse_ than their commute (carbon wise) across the board. It's like saying "oh no, if we ban unhealthy deserts in schools people will buy them and eat even more unhealthy deserts outside of school". They won't -- on average kids would be healthier. It's a no brainer.
> I dont think you can make an equation like this.People instead of walking to their favorite restaurant might decide to order more or make longer rides to go to "the better restaurants" instead of just consuming what is within the walking distance from their apartments / office.
There is no reason to suspect this would happen. If you work from 9 AM to 5 PM, and you cut out your commute, you have _more_ time to for example make a home-cooked meal. If anything people will order out less. All the statistics on WFH (and I've done contracting for a meal planning company so I can guarantee this one specifically) support this. People order out less when they work remotely, across the board.
Regarding the "taking longer rides thing" -- people aren't going to do that so much that it becomes as demanding as their commute. Then it would be annoying.
>The house/apartment you live in is still there (because you still live in it) regardless of if you WFH. The difference is if you WFH, it's actually being utilized 100% of the time instead of just at night and on weekends. Conversely, the office literally doesn't need to exist in the first place if everyone does WFH. So we have to compare having your apartment + having an office, to having just your apartment. The office situation is a net negative no matter how environmentally friendly it is unless it is actually carbon neutral or carbon negative. And that's ignoring the commuting aspect. If we were to abandon all offices tomorrow and let nature re-claim them, it would have a massively positive effect carbon footprint wise. And it's not like offices turn off the AC at night
I am pretty sure most office buildings adhere to strict sustainability standards as opposed to residential housing.Only more luxurious condos are just as good as your average modern office space.
I am pretty sure most modern office buildings turn off the AC at night or have a mechanism to keep it cool by other means (external blinds).
>By this logic, we should keep everyone poor because god forbid they consume something. Consumption isn't negative across the board. And overwhelmingly these days it's digital anyway. If I stay at home and watch Netflix, I have a much smaller carbon footprint than someone who goes and drives somewhere. You can see from the statistics above, the average person drives ~39 miles per day. I'm saying reduce that by 32 on weekdays and you're saying "oh no, what if they replace that with other consumption???". I think it is borderline impossible people would consistently do something _worse_ than their commute (carbon wise) across the board. It's like saying "oh no, if we ban unhealthy deserts in schools people will buy them and eat even more unhealthy deserts outside of school". They won't -- on average kids would be healthier. It's a no brainer.
I am not arguing against WFH.I am arguing against your argument that going WFH would bring net positives for the environment.People with more disposable resources do things that cause more pollution because they participate in economic activity.That's just a fact.
Americans tend to consume much more regardless of whether they drive a car or not.
>There is no reason to suspect this would happen. If you work from 9 AM to 5 PM, and you cut out your commute, you have _more_ time to for example make a home-cooked meal. If anything people will order out less. All the statistics on WFH (and I've done contracting for a meal planning company so I can guarantee this one specifically) support this. People order out less when they work remotely, across the board.
Regarding the "taking longer rides thing" -- people aren't going to do that so much that it becomes as demanding as their commute. Then it would be annoying.
I think things like Jevons paradox beg to differ.Cooking a meal at home is an option many would not choose.
I think the environmental factor could go either way. It's much better for the environment if people are clustered in dense cities versus spread out in rural areas. If the result of the work-from-home boom is a massive exodus from cities, that's quite clearly going to be bad for the planet.
I totally feel the draw to both. Personally, I really like the freedom of WFH and it wins out against the benefits of being in office for me. But I can see the appeal to being in office too; there's something really nice about working with your teammates, especially if you get along with them and learn from each other.
The thing with your attitude though, is that you're saying it only works for you if everyone is in office. Basically that everyone has to be in office for you to enjoy your office environment. This only works on teams where everyone feels this way. And that's a perfectly reasonable approach to hiring for a new company. The problem is that people have been WFH long enough that every team is likely split on 'team-in-office' sentiment. If a company wants to require staff in office at this point, it should be for building new teams, not applied to existing teams. Then people with the same sentiment as you can choose to transfer to those teams if desired.
My main employer is always very flexible, even before the pandemic, I just met one day in the office (everyone else had to be there too) and the rest I was free to chose. Perfect combination of seeing eachother and WFH.
We had small rooms so distraction was not a point. Commute was 25minutes.
I do believe we should get more flexibility where possible.
I wonder how everyone would feel about WFH vs. office if highly paid, highly valued employees weren't forced into literally the smallest possible space for a third of their day. If we all had our own real offices and a work space not architected to be as abusive and "efficient" as possible, would we think differently about how nice it is not to go to the office any more?
Likewise for city design where commercial space is highly concentrated and disproportional to residential... if workspaces were spread out and there weren't hubs with way more jobs than housing... maybe commuting wouldn't be so long and so unpleasant and the thought of working from the spare bedroom or the couch would seem ridiculous.
I think that makes a big difference! Cubicles should be outlawed really, or at least optional. Seems like an archaic thing to me. For my own contracted jobs I went to place that had you choose between an open plan or a small room workplace. All flexible.
So I think you are right, if we had more choice, people are happier. Hubs are also a great way forward I think.
Maybe there are some exceptions, like high security or high demand for coordination on the spot, but a lot of sectors should or could be more flexible.
A cubicle had at least the resemblance of a piece of space I could call my own.
My worst experience involved commuting two hours by train to a high rise, tiny "open plan" office space (read: a few important people got offices, the rest of us were in one not very big room). It was like a sort of torture... for up to 15 hours a day the only escape from being within a several feet of and in eyeline of half a dozen people at least was hiding in a bathroom stall for a few minutes.... and a space which could be mine and any sort of private was usually two hours of a foul smelling, packed, and unstable public transit away. Growing up in an environment where the median number of people within a mile was usually 3... being forced to be constantly "on display" and knowing that there was no escape other than hours of public transit at the end of the day was deeply psychologically unsettling. I lasted about 6 months.
>And that's a perfectly reasonable approach to hiring for a new company.
And likely discriminatory.
I prefer working from home because I (am caring for an ailing parent|just had a baby|am not neurotypical|have a disability|etc.)
WFH is going to start being seen as a "reasonable accommodation" because the last 18 months have proven that lots of jobs can be done just fine without a physical office and denying that to employees who benefit from it for protected reasons isn't going to fly.
In short: suck it up. Dialing a few people in to an in person meeting is fine. Maybe it doesn't work exactly as well for some reasons but so what? Getting along well with your coworkers doesn't require colocation.
For arranged meetings including the remote workers won't be a problem but there are many 'meetings' that happen in a work context where important information is exchanged that are informal that remote workers will miss out on.
I think this is an org-smell though, I shouldn't miss out on important details because I was in the stall or taking a quick walk either. My first job was remote communications oriented despite being overwhelmingly in-office employees, and it was amazing how much information you could find by searching communication channels and wikis. The norm was to ask questions and talk about impromptu problems in chat, and if you needed to collaborate you went to designated areas or scheduled a meeting. Remote workers weren't out if the loop and on site new hires like myself had a huge wealth of searchable info to absorb
That only really happens if the on-site people neglect to provide the remote workers with a summary. Even when everyone still came in to the office, this happened to sick workers, people on different shifts, locations, teams, etc. In other words: it's about emotional intelligence and seeing yourself as part of a team, not working in an office.
for a small effort. is not difficult to say, "George should be part of this discussion". Ok you may need to all put on headphones or get a room so you can use a speaker phone, but really, not that hard.
What if George had been away getting coffee or at the bathroom when you started the conversation, he would have missed out anyway.
I didn't vote, but probably it's mostly because of "In short: suck it up", because it seems like a crudely-expressed attempt to deny others the option of disagreement or further discussion
Why should your preferences dictate what other people do? What makes your preference for having people in the office more important than their preference to want to work from home?
That's not what they said, though. What they said was that the benefit of being in the office is lost of it isn't the case that most of the team are in the office. As such, either
1. Most of the people on the team should be working from the office (benefits of being together as a team), OR
2. Most of the team should be working remote (benefits of working remotely)
The point being made was that the third option, each person gets to pick what they want, isn't really a viable option. The team should pick one option or the other. Nowhere was it was that the "in the office" option should be the one chosen, just that it was their, personal preference.
* There are some other reasons for working in the office besides being in proximity to your co-workers, but that's generally seen as the primary benefit by a lot of people.
Why should the people preferring to work from home get preference, either?
At the end of the day, like it or not, the majority of people working for a company of beyond a small size are going to be in some level of a collaborative environment. Logistically, it's easier to accomplish that in person. No dropped calls or poor connections or VPN drops or whatever.
As an engineer, I sympathize with the poster. When I need to focus and get something done, I'm generally happier at home with either fewer distractions or more of the distractions under my control. I also like my privacy and loathe the feeling of someone. looking over my shoulder. I'm so very sensitive to motion in my periphery and find movement around me distracting, too. But, I also value the in person communication and collaboration I get in person.
Personally, I'm looking forward to heading back part time, especially considering that the "new normal" appears to be about a 50/50 split between home and office.
Of course, everyone is going to have their own preference, but the company you work for (and your coworkers) will have theirs as well. But, if someone's attitude is "my way or the highway" they as well start looking for a new job, because they'll need one regardless...
> At the end of the day, like it or not, the majority of people working for a company of beyond a small size are going to be in some level of a collaborative environment. Logistically, it's easier to accomplish that in person.
You say this like it's a foregone conclusion, a fact. I disagree with it completely. It's far easier to collaborate remotely. You don't need find a meeting room, you don't need to worry about making too much noise, you don't need to worry about adding one person from another location suddenly changing the entire dynamic.
It's nice to work together in person occasionally, but I'd much rather collaborate remotely... and get together for lunch now and again.
If you have a company with more than one office I think having some meetings with remote participants is an unavoidable truth. Perhaps not every meeting - but anything requiring collaboration between teams or features groups could require it.
I guess that's true, but I'm not sure why I would care about my home getting slightly smaller when I'm at work. It will affect some people, but I don't know if it's many.
I would expect it impacts a large number of people that work primarily remotely. A lot of us have a home office because working from the kitchen or other shared space just isn't effective. The cost of an extra room (even if a bonus room, not a full bedroom) can increase the cost of a house by a dramatic amount; and then you also have to consider utilities and the like. Every time I've done the math, working from home costs more (for the worker) than going into the office; usually my many thousands of dollars a year.
Needing a dedicated home office room for various reasons is a big issue but it is not the issue I was responding to.
In "Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours", a dedicated office is the "paid for more space" side, and I was talking about the "lost space" alternative.
Desk, monitors, keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and other things that go on a desk. I'm certainly not going to tear all that down every evening and set it back up every day.
Plus a separate office means a door to keep out noise, room for bookshelves and other office items, and the ability to just "put things down" without having to spend time cleaning off the kitchen table before dinner.
Any setup other than having a specific office for work is, in my opinion, sub-optimal. Sure, you can make due... but you could make due with a poor environment in an office building too... but why would you? You can't compare the setup in an office building to a much worse environment at home and then say "home is cheaper". For a like-for-like comparison, it costs the employee more to work from home.
> Desk, monitors, keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and other things that go on a desk. I'm certainly not going to tear all that down every evening and set it back up every day.
At worst that's still only a desk of space wasted.
And if you're willing to commute, you should probably be willing to spend 2 minutes putting all that stuff away. If you still decide not to, then it's because that space isn't needed very much.
> Any setup other than having a specific office for work is, in my opinion, sub-optimal.
I agree, but this line of conversation is specifically about if you don't have a separate office.
If you don't have a separate office, then odds are you have a sub-optimal work environment. So you're not considering "if you can save money working from home" but rather "if you can save money by working from a worse work environment". Which I guess is a valid argument, it's just somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether or not working from home saves money.
> only a desk of space wasted
There is a lot more to a dedicated, optimal work environment than "only a desk of space". Plus the fact that a LOT of people live in places that don't have an extra "desk of space". Approximately half the places I've worked couldn't give up a desk's worth of space without it being in everyone's way.
That’s still aligned with my point. Either you pay rent for an additional separate office (lots of money), or you reduce your existing living space to make room for work stuff. The only case where you don’t notice is this is when you just so happened to already have completely unused living space that you don’t mind filling up with work stuff, or you just so happened to have an office setup at home that overlaps perfectly with what you need for work.
> That’s still aligned with my point. Either you pay rent for an additional separate office (lots of money), or you reduce your existing living space to make room for work stuff.
Yes, but the reduction for a desk is only if you don't have another usable surface, and even then it's only a tenth of "lots of money" because a desk is so much smaller than a room.
A tenth of lots of money is not all that much, and very likely cheaper than commuting.
I think part of the disconnect is that (it appears that) for you, a suitable work from home environment is
- a 2'x3' area on a table, anywhere in the place you live
For a lot of us (at least for me and some others), a suitable work from home environment includes
- a 4'x3' desk (or larger, for multiple monitors)
- a door or other way to separate the workspace from house interruptions (and vice versa)
- a bookshelf and other miscellaneous items
- good lighting
In general, all that ^ is necessary to be as effective as one would be at an actual office, and generally means a separate room in the house/apartment; and that is fairly costly. The last time I did the calculations, it came out to several thousands of dollars per year.
All of that except the door is easy to do at low cost.
Whether you can get a nice isolated place depends on the particular place you're living.
But I was never arguing that isolation isn't necessary! Please look again at the initial comment I replied to.
"Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours you were previously working at an office."
My concern was only with the second half of that "or". To get to the second half of the "or", you have to take it as given that there's a suitable spot in your home. When you argue that many homes don't already have such a spot, I agree, but that's irrelevant to what I was trying to comment on.
Everything I've said here should be interpreted like this: "Okay, so you've decided you don't need an additional room? Well in that case, I don't think the space taken up by working from home in an existing room is a big deal, because xyz."
Still, it's a tenth of what an entire room costs. When you do something like weigh the cost of commuting vs. the cost of that space, a desk is probably going to win.
And maybe I'm weird but I'm going to have a desk no matter what.
If you already have a desk that easily accommodates both your work computer and whatever other non-work things you use the desk for, then sure, but you could say the same thing for any new at-home requirements for a job that you just happen to already satisfy. I don't have any reason non-work reason to have living space dedicated to a computer desk, and I suspect that's true for most people.
Home computer use is limited to my phone and tablet on the couch or in bed. Haven't had a gaming PC (or any Windows computer) since around 2013. I get enough desktop computing exposure at my day job, thank you very much!
It's true that PC gaming is as popular as ever, but I suspect its rise has been at least somewhat countered with a decrease in desktop computing at home as smartphones became ubiquitous.
Unless you're typing all these comments with no keyboard (why??), then I think your work experience, with getting your fill there, isn't the most typical.
And there's been a decrease in desktops, but far more households have a desktop/laptop than a tablet and it's not far behind the rate of having broadband.
We're probably both just swapping anecdotes, but I suspect you might be surprised just how many general computer users overwhelmingly use their smartphones for nearly everything. I remember years ago being confused by the steady and swift increase in smartphone screen size. Why in the world would people want the little communication gadget in their pocket to be larger? The reason, I realized, is that it's not "the communication gadget in their pocket." It's their only computer.
I'm not working off anecdotes. It's 78% of people that have a desktop or laptop at home. Households that only have a phone or tablet as a computer are only 14%.
It sounds like your office setup is much much more minimal than mine too then. Obviously you’re very fortunate if you’re fine working 8+ hours a day on a laptop on your dining table.
maybe it's just because I've never been the meeting room finding person but in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem.
>you don't need to worry about making too much noise,
I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting, but I have had the problem that kids in the house were being too noisy for the online meeting and everyone has to laugh and talk about how wonderful having the kids is.
>you don't need to worry about adding one person from another location suddenly changing the entire dynamic.
Why wouldn't this affect remote meetings?
Obviously there are any number of things that can affect remote meeting quality. I would think for meeting quality an in person one is likely to work better as a meeting, although people might prefer the remote one for all sorts of other reasons.
> in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem
In every place I've worked, there's been a limited number of meeting rooms and you needed to plan ahead to get one. And if your meeting ran over, it wasn't uncommon to have a group of people standing outside waiting for you to vacate.
> I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting
Fair. I was really thinking about the impromptu meetings of 3-4 people around a desk (because getting a meeting room takes too much time). Those almost infallibly annoy other people in the area, even if they don't say anything.
> Why wouldn't this affect remote meetings?
Suddenly adding a remote person to a meeting that was planned to be in person is difficult at best. It's common for the people on location to just not "play well" with the remote person. When meetings are "remote first", adding one more remote person doesn't wind up with that person being an afterthought. This is a fairly well known issue, honestly.
> I would think for meeting quality an in person one is likely to work better as a meeting
Under optimal circumstances, the in person meeting does tend to be best. However, there are so many different variations from optimal, it's my experience that remote-first meetings wind up being better in nearly every _actual_ case.
Our experience following the covid lockdowns and everybody working from home is that even if a majority of us are in the office, we still have meetings over Teams. It allows far better control, easier background chat, sharing ideas that can be raised in the verbal meeting and people to get on with real work if the topic under conversation is not important to them, but keeping them in the loop. Win win.
Even before the pandemic, in the office, most of the collaboration was remote. Even with people in the same building, because lack of meeting rooms, noisy open-space office and loong looong walks down endless hallways we'd all rather do a quick telephone conference. My direct colleagues were just a table away of course, but collaboration isn't just with them. On the other hand, teams were also spread out across half the world, so lots of things could only be done remotely. Working from home wasn't much of a change there. In total, 90% of communication wasn't done in person but by some kind of remote com.
And since the current trend in our company (and I guess a lot of others) is "hotdesking", where you pull a ticket when entering the building which tells you what desk might be free. Well, no sitting near direct colleagues anymore. So the last advantage of the office is gone as well. Unfortunately it doesn't stop management from hallucinating the great back-in-the-office future after the pandemic...
This is why I have doubts about hybrid. I work for an aggressively hybrid company. All it means is that I have to go in and have meetings at by desk beside other people having meetings at their desks.
Yes, but if everyone is out three days a week, in pretty much every meeting, at least one person is going to be out, making nearly all meetings virtual by default.
No, I mean monday and tuesday everybody goes there. This is how we are planning to do it from september and most people seem happy (especially new recruits).
at the end it may as well be just one day per week. The "pizza seminars" used to be a happy routine before the pandemic, and even colleagues who love WFH want to recover that.
I agree for internal meeting, but in my industry where external meetings are a huge part of my job, it's meant way less driving to meetings for me which has been a huge boost to my productivity levels.
Oh, my complaint is more that I am now Zooming in an open concept office with others talking right beside and behind me. I am fine with virtual meetings.
Are you in SW? Over the last 20ish years of being a SWE, most of the time I had the option to work 40-100% from home. That's as an embedded SWE, which often means I'm dealing with HW. I just setup remote controls and measurement devices and WFH. I keep hearing people talk like they're going to be forced to sit at a desk 100% of the time. Is that really the case?
That does work. Before the pandemics I worked many years with the majority of my team being overseas, in multiple companies. There's nothing wrong with the hybrid approach and never was. For many companies it's always been the default approach, for global companies specifically. I am also not sure why you put "that doesn't work" and "I prefer" together - your preferences are not really relevant to this case.
I dont mind being in office, but I meetings are much much better online. Especially those long ones. You can stretch legs, exercise a little, eat or whatever.
Do you only have a single office? Because even back when we worked at the office, we had people split between multiple offices so we had to do teleconferencing anyways even if no one was remote (and usually at least one person was remote as well).
Yes. It's also a < 20 person company. I acknowledge that both of those may be coloring my view of things—because yeah, if half your team is on another continent, I really don't know what the point of an office is. I also don't think I'd want to work in a company like that.
> The best part is that the cubicle doesn't have tall walls so I can literally see/hear everything, including other people's monitors.
Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't interrupt you as much.
I originally hated open spaces. But eventually I grew to love open spaces for being social. In fact, I had one of the most enjoyable times I ever had at a big tech company being in an open space!
But I was probably producing about 10% of what I normally produced in a closed space. I was OK with that :-) My company probably wasn't, but hey, I was salary; that's their problem.
The book Peopleware had a nice description of cubicles:
"Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; indeed in some cases, sources of noise and disruption are actively piped into your space. You’re isolated because that small lonely space excludes everyone but you (it’s kind of a toilet stall without a toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible to participate in the social unit that might form around your work."
I have a mild case of tinnitus which I attribute to headphone use for 9 or so hours a day (commute plus time trying to work in the office).
At home these days I rarely have music or anything on, I can work for the most part in comfortable silence.
Means that music is saved for when I actually want to listen to it and can give it my attention, instead of while I'm trying to debug or avoid someone's armpit on the train.
A lot of the time I had my over-the-ears headphones on in the office, I wasn't even listening to anything - it was just nice to block out the environment noise a bit, and let people know not to bother me.
I wonder if wearing a reflective face shield would be a more effective deterrent to interruptions. If people can't see your face then they would probably be much less likely to engage in conversation. You could just take a normal face shield and put reflective sunscreen window film on the inside.
You make a good point. Maybe it would need to also be worn with hearing protection until the novelty wears off. And adding a chin strap would prevent other people from removing it.
I predict the balance we're heading towards for many office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged". Like Monday and Wednesday are in-office, Tuesday and Thursday are WFH, Friday is optional.
Preference for WFH depends on so many individual factors, not just personality but also your commute length, home size, children, neighborhood, friends, etc. Although a lot of discussions on HN seem to be dominated by "I prefer WFH", I reckon in reality the divide is probably pretty close to 50/50, just like with introverts and extroverts. Companies will find strong candidates in both types of people and find out they can't fully satisfy them all, and the end result will be everyone compromises.
Encourage some days to be WFH so that WFHers won't feel career pressure from missing out on office politics. Encourage some days to be in-office so that office-lovers won't go to the office to socialize and find it half empty. Have a flexible day or two where people can do whatever they want. Maybe throw in some flexibility on start and end hours so that people can avoid peak traffic.
> I predict the balance we're heading towards for most office jobs is going to be something like 2 mandatory office days a week, 1 optional day, and 2 mandatory WFH days, with "mandatory" really meaning "highly encouraged".
Or a lot of people are going to be looking for full remote jobs and companies which are full remote will be able to get some folks they were not able to hire before.
I would suggest that Friday makes a good time for the mandatory day. Means people can go out for drinks at the end of the day. The in office days will never be as productive but they can be good socialising times so you may as well make use of that.
Throughout my career I've found Thursday is consistently "the day" when work people are most likely to go out together. In some places it may have been because the last Thursday of the month is payday, but largely I believe it's because the majority of people are likely to have commitments with other friends, partners, children etc on a Friday.
I'm also in favour of Thursday as the mandatory day if I need to be in the office as the last day of the week to do release management, e.g. minimise the risk of a bad deployment on a Friday affecting someone's weekend.
There is also a trend towards four-day work weeks to account for. I work 4 × 8, and Friday is a good day to have off; you get a long weekend and unlike Monday¹ shops are open in the morning too.
1: This may be a Dutch phenomenon, but many shops and amenities are closed on Monday morning. Especially with the gradual increase of shops being open on Sunday afternoons.
> This may be a Dutch phenomenon, but many shops and amenities are closed on Monday morning. Especially with the gradual increase of shops being open on Sunday afternoons.
This is the case in France too, it's common for small shops to close Sunday and Monday, and be open the rest of the week.
In London, I'm inclined to agree with this. 2 days seems a fair balance.
The trouble is that the majority of employees have signed a legally binding contract that says "your legal place of employment is <insert address here>", meaning that you are legally obliged to go back into the office.
Some companies think it is a "competitive advantage" to have people back in the office. A couple of banks and accountancy firms certainly seem to think so.
But as everyone has said "it depends".
I've worked in 7-to-a-row open plan offices in banks, to small companies.
I was more productive in open-plan when I was in my early 20s, and far more productive on my own or in smaller quieter offices as I've gotten older.
Going back to this from the other day [1] "Insulating developers from interruptions" is the best reason to wfh.
It's going to take a few years for companies to learn how to implement hybrid model. Especially for traditional companies with lots of works force that are grow up with the office work mentality. And I'm not only talking about how to run remote meetings, but everything including on-boarding and training new engineers and cross team collaboration.
Luckily full-remote companies have lots of good documentation about remote work. So I think other companies should start reading their playbooks or try to hire some of their talents to learn how proper remote work is done.
remote work changes the dynamics, when half the team is on zoom, everyone goes on zoom, not the other way around. Also, half-empty offices are much much less useful than full offices. So i think things gravitate naturally towards all-remote
Surely no more complicated than it is for hourly workers to keep track of their shifts, or for college students to keep track of 5 different full-day schedules that change every few months. "Come in Monday, stay at home Tuesday" is not exactly the peak of complicated scheduling.
Yeah but the real root cause (of that awful "I am wasting my time and life right now" feeling) is that modern office work often involves getting M hrs (M < 8) of real work done and having to stretch it to fit an 8hr shift. WFH masks that symptom very well but does not actually solve it.
IMHO it can actually be more frustrating because one feels more on the hook for keeping an eye on notifications. At least at the office I can zone out or focus on something personal or work related, safely assured if a boss really needs me I can be found in person, rather than just missing a ping and being assumed to be a slacker.
The above depends a lot on your company culture though. It's a common failure mode though.
> involves getting M hrs (M < 8) of real work done and having to stretch it to fit an 8hr shift. WFH masks that symptom very well but does not actually solve it.
Our team has a backlog of approximately 500 tickets / bugs / work ideas. Nobody has to stretch anything, the backlog will outlive us all.
Yeah, everyone has a backlog like that. A lot of them have very little or negative business value in retrospect, but we can't know that now, so we prioritize, and it's a good thing, because if we ever actually got most of that backlog done we'd have seriously diminishing returns to the point where we would not even be covering our wages by the end.
If you don't believe me, and your system allows this to be reconstructed, find out what your full backlog looked like about 10 years ago, find everything on there that still hasn't been done, and find out what percentage of them actually would have significant business value today.
I know this is a gross generalization but we are dealing in generalities. This is what I have found across many projects. We are not always great at predicting what we will need, and the backlog is BY DEFINITION prioritized. By the time we get down to the lowest priority stuff the statistical expected value gets low enough that we are not even covering our own wages.
You need a chatbot that replies to messages with "I'm heads down on a task right now. I'll read your message when I have some time. If you need to interrupt me please reply with 'interrupt'." And if you get that keyword your chatbot plays a sound or texts you.
I mean, that's almost exactly how Slack's DND mode works. The thing is, it's too open to abuse by that one prick who stays on DND for months at a time, or (for less vitriol) maybe you just forget to turn it on/off, then you try to automate it and then never follow the schedule you set for yourself, etc., making it basically useless.
It's pretty difficult to fix bad social behavior with more tech.
On a tangential note, thanks to WFH, I've grown to hate clockwise with a passion. It's the single most disruptive tool in the remote workplace, especially when combined with private-by-default calendars. Maybe I only worked with bad users, I don't know. I just haven't seen anyone with that consistent a schedule, and no one pays attention to their calendar schedule after they set it once anyway. Have to set a meeting for 5 clockwise users? Tough, you'll either have to ask them individually if that time works, or just ignore calendars altogether and hope the relevant people make it work. I hope it dies soon.
Teams can do this. Create a calendar event or manually set yourself to busy and you will not receive notifications and people can see this. There is also a button on the sender side to mark the message as important to notify anyway.
Like most people, I enjoy being physically around my colleagues from time to time. There is real value in that sort of interaction. It is not, however, an essential component of most jobs that traditionally have been conducted in an office. This fact has been indisputably proven over the last 18 months.
If you want to go to an office every day of the week, go ahead! That’s great, who’s stopping you? But if you think everyone you work with should also be there in order to interact with you? In the environment where you like to work, regardless of how productive your colleagues are there? I shouldn’t have to tell you that you are the one who is being unreasonable.
Seems like their life would be dramatically better if they didn’t have some horrible car hellscape based commute. Pity cities are designed and spread out so because of cars.
Then making the office more comfortable and flexible without people micromanaging would be the next thing.
This is U.S. thing, right? People in Europe are using public transportation to get to work from the edge of the city with no problems. Come visit Prague to see how it's done :D
> People in Europe are using public transportation
No we don't. It would add 90 minutes each way for my 15km commute. We really need to stop with the idea that public transportation in Europe is awesome, it not, it actually pretty terrible outside a few select areas. It's actually faster to ride a bike to work in my case, except bikes aren't allowed on the motorway.
Europe need to fix it's public transportation system. So far the solution is to make driving more expensive, while providing no alternatives. Maybe it's better in Czechia, but in general I don't think we can seriously claim that Europe has good public transportation.
I think the problem is someone in Prague can say "Public transport in Europe is cheap, frequent and reliable" when talking about their experience and be totally correct ... while someone in some British cities can say "Public transport in Europe is actually expensive and quite unreliable" and also be correct from their experience. I think that at least in central Europe if you randomly select a city with >100k people you're likely to find that there's a good bus/trolley/tram network that can take you to your work - I don't know about Mediterranean countries, the Balkans or Scandanavia.
So you're saying that because you live rather far from work, and precariously located proximate to transit terminals, people in European cities don't use transit?
15km is far af. It's only not far af if you use a car. If your frame of reference though is not commuting by car, then you select employment and residence differently.
I currently don't have a car or a job, and walk or take transit everywhere (not in Europe), and as such I'm sure as hell not looking for jobs located 15km from my house. Sure, let me just thru-hike to work np.
>It would add 90 minutes each way for my 15km commute.
Oo
I've been commuting 40km each way before pandemic with public transportation and it took me (65min of travel + waiting for train + 10min of walking) each way
In Madrid (Spain) we have a good radial public transport system.
Works very well if you want to go from/to city center to suburbs.
Nowadays a lot of companies are leaving the city center. Office space is expensive and go to the suburbs or satelite cities.
The radial system does not work anymore: people have to either take the car for a 30-40 minute trip, or spend 1-1:30h to travel to city center then take another transport to the suburbs.
There are plenty of people with long commutes in Europe as well. I suspect we tend to trade off the commute against housing until the commute is just bearable.
In my experience, public transport is great in europe if you're in a capital city. If you're not, then it is very patchy, and you end up having to drive everywhere.
I've been traveling 40km in 65mins each way using a train from the village "at the end of the world :)" that has a few thousands ppl, so definitely not capital city
No problems doesn't mean enjoyable. It's still 90 minutes of overcrowded public transport. I may prefer it over sitting in car, but no commute at all wins.
Rush hour sucks though even if you use the metro/tram/bus/train. The idea that the majority of the adult population should be travelling either in or out of the city centre at the same time seems quite preposterous now.
They shouldn’t be travelling that far at all. They should be within a walkable distance of where they need to go. Walking to work is never stressful and often does reverse.
Unfortunately even in Chicago I found the commute to be exhausting when I lived right next to a train. It was still 40+ minutes if you got there right as the train was leaving, and most offices are still 10-20 minute walk from the stations. Living closer was possible but then you'll be paying significantly more on rent for less space (a problem for families)
I miss being able to tell if I'm interrupting a coworker's state of flow or not with a quick message.
When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them.
As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months.
Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."
Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.
ping "Hey, Bob, can I share my desktop and show you something?"
Five minutes later, Bob is fixing his mistake.
Or, Bob has notifications turned off, and he lets me know as soon as he's available again.
My point is that the tools are there to address this concern. I don't go a day without sharing my desktop or looking at someone else's. And in some ways it's even more efficient and less disruptive than getting up, walking over to someone's desk.
I can't describe how distracting it is for me personally to have to overhear every screen share in a physical office, and how great and easy it is to do it remotely and even pull in another couple people if something they're knowledgeable about comes up
I have found that the introduction of using remote tools (Teams etc) regardless of in/out of office location has dramatically improved collaboration.
People seem to be a lot more open to sharing ideas. We tend to chat back and forward all day. If you really need to, kill notifications and mark yourself as busy or focusing and review the chat when you are available.
The only down side I've found is that workgroup chats, being somewhat private, can tend to become a bit of an echo chamber if there is any dispute or controversy in the workplace. Dealing with this tend has required everybody to step back and examine their behaviour. I would assume that if you had a team in a different location you could have a similar problem.
On interruptions, I turned the notification indicator off for general messages in Slack, so I only get system notifications for DMs or mentions. Slack obeys DND (on Mac OS at least), so I use that a lot to mute it when I am doing work. I check it a couple of times a day to catch up on messages.
It's amusing to see the occasional "hi" sent without any context, then an hour or two later, the real question the person wanted to ask. I think I'd get in trouble if I set https://www.nohello.com/ as my status though.
Unfortunately we also have to use Microsoft Teams which implements its own notification system and doesn't obey the system-wide DND, so I usually just quit Teams when I am not actively using it.
Same here, I also like having time to proof-read and refactor what I've written to remove redundancy, clear up any amiguities and look for assumed knowledge.
> Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."
Honestly, I've found screen sharing better on a video call for pair programming. I can switch to the branch and share on my screen to code through a solution, give or take control of their workstation without crowding around a tiny desk, and if I need to have an in-depth discussion that takes 45 minutes to work out what core concept is missing, then we can do that without annoying everybody else in the office or needing to find a meeting room.
Three days is an epic amount of time for an open pull request to be resolved, unless there's been some massive miscommunication. To me, that would indicate there's some other problem with the team.
So in synchronous communication, you have to spend time _watching_ for someone to be available for a question? I much prefer async communication where I can ignore notifications for a bit, and check them when I come up for air. In the open office, I'm _constantly_ interrupted/distracted, so you might as well interrupt me anyway <sigh>.
If people keep interrupting you, update your notification settings.
Why are you not doing screen-share code reviews? You can easily say "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_." via screen-share.
> Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.
I enjoy pair programming MUCH more when we both have our own computers (with dual monitors, etc). This works GREAT with screensharing
I solved this by creating calendar events for just myself. I’ll book an hour of dedicated programming time and then after that I’ll respond to all of my messages. Or if I don’t need to be hyper focused on a task I’ll bounce around and respond to various messages and check the status of stuff.
Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting?
Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card.
Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.
Oh, oh, I know this one! Because the equipment is standardized for the entire organization, meaning that it's optimized for the administrative branch who uses mostly Powerpoint and Outlook.
For the extra credit: Of course you can order specialized equipment, but it will come out of your department's budget (because it's non-standard) and there might not be enough. It may also take weeks to arrive, a business case justification, and/or quotes from several vendors.
Paying for it yourself also won't do - Bring-Your-Own-Device may be forbidden due to security concerns, and I have yet to see a company that allows me to buy more RAM with my own money.
There's also the question of what a "high quality headset" is, but that's probably a different topic.
> and I have yet to see a company that allows me to buy more RAM with my own money
Reminds me of a funny story from my first IT internship. Got a ticket for a weird issue from a software developer on the floor above. Went to visit his desk, and found he was a quiet, shy, but likeable guy who was having trouble with some hardware in his workstation. He gave me a cheeky look before opening his company-supplied desktop, and it was completely full of custom parts he had slowly installed himself over the course of years to improve his workflow. This guy had a PCIe SSD, in 2011, while the rest of the company still had spinning rust.
> Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.
Because it is an expense, not an investment.
If you are building a product, having good equipment is a force multiplier: You get more from your expense in people.
If you're just billing hours to a third party, good equipment is an expense and might be counterproductive.
Why is that a better option for the OP than finding a job that better aligns with how they would like to work? It's really better for everyone in the long run. Company has fewer malcontent workers and can replace the headcount with people that do want to be in the office, and OP isn't suffering in an environment they can't tolerate.
Maybe neither are terrible. Maybe they're just poorly suited for each other.
Just as changing jobs tends to boost salary more than getting raises, changing jobs and disclosing all of one's grievances at the exit interview is probably a stronger signal than being the squeaky wheel while still in the company.
I agree in theory but in practice regular employees have extremely little agency in team wide matters. With the points you're making you might as well say "he should take things into his own hands and set his own personal permanent WFH policy." See how ridiculous that sounds?
The simple model I have personally is that my preferences are:
1. Good office environment (including convenient commute).
2. Working from home.
3. Bad office environment.
Some people love WFH simply because they experienced an improvement from 3 to 2 and they don't even know that 1 is possible. For others the order is genuinely different from mine and they would pick WFH over any office. I think this is helpful because office experiences vary a lot and people often end up talking past each other in threads like this one.
In my case, I worked in offices for over 30 years. I was pretty damn productive (at least, I didn’t get fired, and was steadily promoted, so I guess I did OK). For the first dozen years, it was “shirt and tie.” I learned to keep a couple of suits up to date; even after going “business casual” (I never worked in jeans and T-shirt).
Since working from home for almost the last 4 years, my productivity has gone stratospheric. It’s freaking amazing.
I still maintain a lot of personal “office discipline,” like dressing in jeans and a button-down shirt, even though I may not be going out anywhere. I also limit breaks (but I take them whenever I want, and sometimes, they may be an hour or so).
I work whenever I want. Early morning is my most productive time. I often get more done by 8:30AM, than I used to get done all day, in the office (8:30 was my usual starting time).
But not everyone is able to work this way. I don’t have small children (if you don’t count the cats), and I spend just about every second of work time, coding.
I have a dedicated office space, with a standing desk. No sitting on the couch, with a laptop. No Starbucks tables. My equipment is top-notch. I have a monitor that extends across my entire desk. I have a decent laptop, but its screen seems ridiculously small. My next laptop will be even smaller. I’m spoiled rotten.
I have tremendous self-discipline; partly because I’m a high-school dropout with a GED, and have had to fight for Every. Damn. Thing. in my career. I’ve never had one blessed thing handed to me. It was infuriating, but it taught me to stay disciplined, focused and productive; despite almost ceaseless adversity. Not everyone’s experience, but it made me who I am today.
I have no idea if things would be better for me by now, if I’d had a smoother road. I could easily see myself “going to fat,” so to speak. I probably would not have been so well-prepared for at-home work.
It is my opinion that if you are against remote work being the norm, you're a dinosaur and best get out of the way of progress. The amount of time people would win back to spend their life however they want by not commuting is astronomical, the environmental impact of not having so many transportation devices on the roads as a result would also be massive. If you somehow think that your need for water-cooler talk is as important as that, well, it isn't.
Have to agree with this. Exceptions being places where commuting isn't inherently destructive, and actually being in the office is irregular and obviously necessary.
Unfortunately, there is a drop in empathy and trust (to varying degrees) when interacting with those who one hasn't met in person. Being in office, talking to your teammates face-to-face is super valuable when the team members are new to each other. Once the rapport is established, let each person do what works the best for them.
i wonder how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing, outstaffing, contractors in 5 different timezones, vendors in 12 different timezones, regulators in 3 different time zones, separate divisions for APAC, EMEA, US and so on...?
...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over?
Sounds like complete nonsense to me. If they can handle vendors located on a different continent - they can handle remote employees, full stop.
I'll believe the complaints about WFH when they'll ban offshoring.
> ... how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing ...
All of this involves varying degrees of transaction costs (ie. how hard is it to have everone aligned, communicating effectively, etc). Outsourcing is usually done for (parts of) jobs that can be easily carved out into fairly complete packages.
For example, have the QA team offshore, or outsource the design or slide-deck preparation. Most dev outsourcing is also done at least per-component if not per-project.
True distributed teams are HARD. But having everyone aligned, on the same page and motivated, if half (or more) of the team is remote, means a lot more effort on clear communication, management, etc and many office patterns will need reworking.
As one example, onboarding (esp junior) team members is much harder, as new people learn as much by osmosis as by reading the documentation.
This is not to diss WFH - I prefer it to office esp. cubicle hell - but we should be realistic about the challenges involved.
A former colleague of mine quit a job over this. They wanted him back into the office. He mostly worked with their Toptal devs from Nigeria and and Hungary.
I worked on a team that was mostly Seattle people while I was based in the Los Angeles HQ. All my team members were in a different city. Needless to say "switching" to remote wasn't a big deal at all for me.
I started at a company in February and was basically remote-only until June.
A drop in empathy, trust, relationships for me was very small. It's there, but for work related stuff, I believe it didn't actually matter. Everyone was nice with me and we got things done. Whenever I had questions, they would help me out.
We were since then a couple of times in the office and talking to them in person was nice, I felt I could ask more questions, I got to listen to their unfiltered opinions as we could have spontaneous 1-1 conversations in the office. It was also because we didn't make time to "just chat" online, except for online watercooler team calls, but with 3-4 people in the call, we pay more attention to what we are allowed to say.
The open office space plan is silly when "normal" companies want to imitate office cost saving from Silicon valley startups. I feel nobody really questioned why.
Open floor plan is good for cost saving but not for anything else. Collaboration is less in open plan than a traditional office.
On a tangential pop cultural note, I recently realized that The Office, perhaps the seminal '00s-'10s equivalent to '90s office drone dramas (Dilbert, Office Space, The Matrix, Fight Club and so forth - https://www.openculture.com/?p=1067238), takes place in an open office. The employees of Dunder Mifflin have low cubicles that expose their sounds both to the viewers, and to each other. Not the best environment for concentration. Perhaps this has been an invasive trend that's common to white collar professions even beyond tech? And it's the defining hassle for white collar professionals of the present era.
Most of the people posting these sort of articles fail to realize people have different preferences. Some people prefer WFH, some the office, some something in between.
Smart companies understand that and tailor their approach to fit. Dumb ones will dictate The One True Way and see half their people leave.
i wonder how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing, outstaffing, contractors in 5 different timezones, vendors in 12 different timezones, regulators in 3 different time zones, separate divisions for APAC, EMEA, US and so on...?
...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over?
I'll believe the complaints about WFH when they'll ban offshoring.
If anyone can do your work remotely...ANYONE can do your work remotely. Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience? Its all nice and well when every startup can raise as much money as it wants. What happens when/if that pops?
That goes both ways though. It also means that you can get hired by some company on the other side of the world that possibly offers better conditions than anything local.
Well yes it's great for Indians / Africans. For people living in U.S, U.K not so much.
I think it also means people should go deep, way deep in their stack. Don't switch too much. You know PHP? Become great in PHP. Know Ruby? Stick to Ruby and become a real expert. Generalists may become a commodity...just my personal opinion. You will have to set yourself apart somehow. What is your strategy in this brave new world?
As somebody who's quite a bit of a generalist, I really don't see this happening. IT is just such a huge field that knowing enough general stuff to be useful is still pretty hard.
The tech company I work for was all SF based for it's engineering. Now they're open to hiring from anywhere.
They haven't entirely committed to hybrid/remote. They have however expanded beyond the Bay Area based on their experiences during covid. And that's meant new offices in the Philippines and Mexico City.
Sure but I think that's a good thing. I would rather we slowly lift millions of people out of literal poverty than sacrifice ~5% of our day (1/16 awake hours) in commute just to gatekeep our jobs.
Plus there are other barriers. WFH can be every day except a monthly lunch or social event with the team. Or it's WFH save for on-prem things like hardware upgrades. WFH doesn't have to mean fully remote... just not an office environment.
Lots of people took monetary obligations (mortgages mostly) thinking they'll make 6 figures for the next 20-30 years...what happens if that's no longer true?
Currently, mortgage debt evaporates faster from inflation/wage growth faster than outsourcing can realistically occur. In any case I don't see why software engineering should be exempt when the manufacturing and textile industries hit hard by outsourcing and automation. It sucks but that's just how capitalism works. SE's would probably have an easier time adapting than people in those industries anyway.
There's a lot of factors slowing down the outsourcing of CS jobs. The most talented pretty much always immigrate to the US because of higher wages and higher standards of living. Security concerns mean a lot can't be outsourced at all. Language & cultural differences give the US & western countries a huge hold on CS education. Etc. Plus a lot of jobs could be WFH 99% of the time but the last 1% is very important.
Even in the most extreme push of WFH or remote work, outsourcing would just be jobs moving from high COL areas like SF to lower COL areas of the US. Same culture/language, minimal timezone differences, etc. The pendulum is still very far on the side of favoring in-office work giving a few select areas a huge advantage & driving COL in those areas. The US is a huge country; even a 2x increase in WFH jobs wouldn't exhaust the number of low COL areas in the US.
You raise good points.
I'll just counter this: you say currently and that's a very important word. Currently things are good in tech, in fact never have been better. Almost any startup with half decent product raises tens, often hundreds of millions of dollars with ease. With this loose finance (the causes of which are the low interest rate) of course paying a lot for developers doesn't matter much.
I'm talking about a scenario in which if (when?) a lot of hot air is released from this bubble. This will terminate many companies that don't really produce much and will cause the rest to cut costs aggressively. I guess something similar to the dot com bubble only I think this time it will be worse.
I do agree with you though that if the abundance of money continues, for the reasons you listed the current dynamic will probably prevail.
After reading what I just wrote I fully realize this is one of those things that is impossible to predict and pointless to worry about. It can happen tomorrow, in 10 years or maybe never.
This has been bandied about since the '90s. There might be drastic hiring of people outside of the tech hub area (Midwest, Canada), but offshoring beyond North America is hamstrung by linguistic, cultural, and time zone differences.
IDK, how important is culture on a fully remote team? Also, what IS culture exactly? Basecamp's employees were all from the same culture, yet they managed to start hating each other and almost dissolve the company.
> Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience?
For all the upsides of working remotely and especially for 100% remote I think the downside is it can become very transactional. Write code for x hours, the clock ticks to 6pm and you leave to do something else. I'm not saying everyone has to have a great passion for their work and ultimately we're all doing it to put food on the table but it seems to me that it's a recipe for becoming disillusioned with it all.
You don't have to be great friends with your colleagues but if you're enjoying your work or the atmosphere of work, having a chat to people over lunch, going to pub every now and then, the odd team pizza trip or whatever, then after 10 years you may still be enjoying it. At the very least it breaks up the days so they aren't all the same. But clocking on at 9am to write code for 8 hours while talking to a moving image of someone's face once a day is a recipe for hating it in the long term.
I find it a lot more "transactional" to come sit at the office and be paid to be there until I can clock out. When working from home I'm clearly paid for my output, not for being in a place for a set amount of time.
If your work is so locked down they give out cards that take 2-4 hours to jr. devs, then working from home is probably just as productive if not more than the office - for the reasons eloquently laid out in the reddit post.
But if you want to work on new technology with a ton of unknowns (which I personally get more job satisfaction out of), in my experience you need that human connection and in-person collaboration - at least at first. Maybe that can work fully remote. But my fully remote startup experiences have been abysmal.
Right now some of the most cutting edge technology is developed within Open Source communities, predominantly resourced by geographically spread folks from different companies / independents - all using tools to communicate / collaborate.
I think this is a case of argue your limitations and they are yours.
There is quite a serious problem with letting people choose - financial overhead. If we go back to pre-2020 the systems that needed to be maintained, e.g. office space, pipes, parking, etc. was a done deal. Since 2020 the lines are quite a bit more blurry so providing for employees at the same level would mean worst case scenario double the burden for the employer, because both options come with their own requirements. Then you could say - but hey now employers can just adjust the office space for a lower number of employees and we're good. Not really, though, because for one the efficiency of yesteryear came from buying up stuff/services in bulk with a fixed capacity - we don't have that now. Then there is training your managers to deal with a hybrid environment, new systems/software - all additional costs.
My point is in a lot of cases maintaining options for people costs money/time/effort/opportunity for the provider. That's money that could have gone to your pocket. And note I'm not saying we're not going to have both options - just don't expect to live in a simpler, more cost efficient system.
No, sadly I think we're going to get the endless "remote did/didn't work for me and that's why it's good/bad" posts every single time this is discussed here, forever.
I think a lot of people are judging WFH by looking at the results of sudden unplanned WFH with no childcare and no coworking spaces/coffee shops/libraries.
But some people like to discuss things that some people like but some people don't like. Actually, most things are not universally liked or disliked (except ice cream).
It seems to me that this person doesn't hate the office but actually hates the company. It seems that the meetings, the style, the colleagues, nothing fits for him.
I also don't understand why he would discover the cubicle only now: didn't he interview with the company? didn't he ask the questions?
I believe this person should urgently go work for another company that better fits him, and not because he has to go to an office.
> When I get a card, depending on what it is, I can finish it in 2-4 hours, and then I can focus on doing something else for the rest of the day (learning/training, other meetings, or just not work at all since I was able to be productive).
Aren’t you supposed to start the next card?
“Working at the office sucks because I have to work instead of doing my hobbies” is a shitty argument for working at home.
Learning and training are not hobbies, it's something that many people don't have time to because they're overworked. If someone takes 10% of their work time to learn, at the end of a year they had the opportunity to learn a lot. If you just learn barely enough to finish your task, yoi never get deep knowledge about something - that's how I often feel.
I can feel the "I invested in a nice work environment" part a lot.
At home I have an insanely comfortable chair, very nice keyboard and mouse, two stellar 27'' displays on a very large desk. At work none of the above plus a shitty 2010-era work computer with a 5400rpm rotational drive that takes at least 20 minutes to boot and 10 to open visual studio alone.
Plus at home I can listen to the news while doing mundane work tasks like replying to tickets and emails, have some relaxing music on, access to my whole kitchen, and so on.
Commuting one hour each way sucks hard too. I hope we'll never go back to full office work, I feel like I got my life back.
I went back and it was pretty great. My colleagues are real homies, secretaries are real hot and I get to use the gym as much as I want so I can lose the kilos lockdown caused me to gain.
Will definitely be using home office more often tho.
I think talking on this forum is going to invite trolling and smugness...of the variety „well im just fine“. I went out for a long walk on my break because I know its not going to last. I feel like a cancer patient who is in remission and want to use the time to experience the best and simplest things. Quiet going for a walk to the end of the street a slice and beer and an un interrupted conversation with my Mom.
I went to the office for the first time last week, and I loved it, but I think where I work has a better attitude towards people than where that guy works. Certainly my department does. I went back voluntarily, mainly to get out of the house, and TO wear real clothes again. Tshirt and shorts, but I feel more human than the pajama man I was for the past year. I hope that guy gets a new job!
I’ve been working remotely more than 10 years now.
I get the idea that some people prefer to be around others, to have face to face conversations etc. And some people do not have the best home environment. Maybe they have kids and would prefer an office. And maybe, they just like working at an office. That’s fine.
What I don’t really understand is that people complaining about being in pijamas and being in the house all the time and stuff like that. Just becase they now work from home. At what point working at home meant that you should not shower for a week and have ketchup stains on your face?
Just wear the thing you want, meet with people you like and do as you wish. What is the hold up here?
It just means that for a lot of people "going to work" was the thing which was adding structure to their life and when WFH started they lost that"structure", that is when "not shower for a week and have ketchup stains on your face" these things happen.
Looks like lotsa people build their life around work instead of work around life.
This is another interesting way to split the WFH vs WFH divide. Senior workers are more likely to have kids than junior workers, and they have the ability to set rules for their workplace and therefore prefer WFO so they can avoid the noise at home.
I think it's the other way round: having kids means you have other demands on your time. WFH means it much easier to take the kids to school, go to parents evening/school play etc.
Plus, senior workers are likely to have a larger house with room for a separate office.
This monday I had to take a plane to go to the office because I didn't have enough PTO days left.
We must be there for 4 hours every day, and then go back home and keep working for another 4.
This means we have the worst experience of being remote and in an office.
The fun part is we're a consultancy firm.
I work remotely with customer equipment, I have my dailies with the customer in MSTeams, and I am not expected to go to customer officest for at least 24 months.
Of course, does not make sense to me, nor my manager, or my VP.
But the company was bought by a fund 2 months before Covid and the investor wants its money back asap...
I've gone back and forth between consulting and working full time in an office for the last ~12 years of my career so I have a good amount of experience with both WFH and working in an office.
I prefer an office mostly because unfortunately the only way to make some people "behave" and work together is actually by forcing discipline on them. My biggest frustration is the type of person who only values their own personal productivity to the detriment of the team. The type of person who joins a "useless meeting on mute" then after whatever time period produces output that wildly varies from expectations because listening to others is beneath them, and they're too smart/disinterested to ask questions about what they're building. The type of person who replies to messages hours and sometimes days after you message them because they turned their notifications off to "focus" and never bothered to check them after. The type of person who you have to message about everything because they can't be bothered to document anything they do (never updates tickets, never comments their code, doesn't write readmes etc). The type of person who writes tests that assert 1 = 1 for the sake of adding tests like their team lead asked.
I don't know OP personally, but I get the impression that they're exactly the type of antisocial person I'm thinking of.
Return to office is just management reasserting ownership over the serfs dressed up with mindless business jargon (collaboration, innovation, culture etc)
I think this is too reductive. There've been enough people in this thread who mention that they prefer working from an office. It's not just managerial oppression.
About 3 years ago I realized I turn into a hermit. Being home alone all day is bad for me. The problem is that I live in a small mountain town now and my company is fully remote as well.
I rented an office that I share with a really close friend who does the same kind of work. We set up a sweet little kitchen with our ridiculous coffee stuff. It's less than 5 mins from my house. I get to see my friend every day, and we can go for walks and talk about work stuff. Our dogs hang out while we work. It's in a commercial space but I honestly think renting a residential apartment would have worked just as well.
I think this going to become common.
There's real value in being around people who care about the same things, but it doesn't actually matter if you all work for the same company. There's value in separating home from work, but I still want to share my work life with friends and former coworkers that I really enjoy being around.
I've read this post a week ago (gee I browse reddit too much)
Not sure how I feel about this, maybe flexibility is the real answer?
Some days I woke up and I don't feel like working from home. It feels good to go out and walk to our company's cool office.
If I don't feel like it, then I'd just stay home.
I think it depends from company to company. Originally I was dreading working from the office and I still don't prefer it now, but there are a few benefits that make the analysis a lot less black and white. Office has free food, socializing with coworkers, and they've decked out the entire place with really good monitors, standing desks, a stocked kitchen, etc.
I think it's up to the company to make the office experience worth it and even then it might not be enough for some people so flexibility should be offered as well.
It's also nice now that it's voluntary so the commute is shorter and meeting rooms are empty. I only go about once a week so far (will start going 2-3 times soon).
I was thinking of renting cheap one person office, so I get out of the appartment. And have a distinction of enviroment. Not really worth the money in my current job. But when I get remote job for “western” company it will be peanuts.
I liked working in an open-plan office with my team around me. We were a team of 4 who had been working together from 2007-2008 through to 2017 (for a while, we were 4/5 of Sensory Networks, acquired by Intel). We talked all sorts of outrageous shit, got lots of work done, etc.
After the Intel acquisition it was still good, but having other people in hearing distance of us wasn't nearly as fun (likely for either side).
I enjoyed it a lot more than sitting at home. Conversely, I think sitting at home is way better than being wedged in with a bunch of random semi-connected folks.
I have several colleagues in the same situation (first job, never been to the office).
As much as I love remote work, a word of caution: don't take this text too seriously. It's just the ramblings of a very immature engineer.
Form your own opinion rather than using a second hand toxic one. Try it out. It turns out different people like different things, and also circumstances are different. If something doesn't work, try to change it. If ultimately you hate the office as well, then feel free to look for other opportunities.
> It's just the ramblings of a very immature engineer.
> second hand toxic one
You mean, be cautious because the reddit poster had not been sufficiently institutionalized yet to love his openplan cattle stall and believe he works with a "family"?
I have hopes for hybrid working but I think that it needs to be targeted.
A team should be in the office together on the same day. This day should have a schedule like a mini conference with talks, pair programming and architecture sessions.
We have done similar things in the past when two teams that are remote from each other come together and it works well. All the activities were optional and we went to a Beer garden at the end.
Simply going back into the office for a day and working as normal is wasting the personal contact time.
Do you know what I want? After a few years of WFH, somebody should do a study looking again for the "height salary premium". See if taller people still get paid more.
I think working from the office or working remotely is the last thing to worry about. There is so much nonsense in business that I think it's the last thing to worry about.
I use this speech noise-jamming page a lot at work, someone walks over near my desk and starts chatting, I wear my headphones and this goes on. I don't have any downtime in the office anymore because of this.
The few times I was able and allowed to go back to the office, I personally loved it. Having separation between work and the rest of life is much harder when working from home.
It also means I get to see and talk to more than 3 people. Much appreciated.
It does probably help that work is a 20 to 15 minute cycle, and I work in a 3-person room, rather than an open space.
To be fair, it seems like he works in a really shitty place. I guess lot's of us have better conditions at work. Also "having to wait to reheat your prepared lunch in the canteen" sounds idiotic. If people have to bring their lunch, at least have enough microwaves in the office....they are like 100$.
Would be good to get the opinion of anyone on HN who is in upper management and their feelings on this? What kind of discussions have you and your org been having about WFH? What have you employees been saying, and have you been losing staff over this?
I like the idea that employers are now going to have to actually think hard about how to make the office an attractive place to work. I hope some really positive improvements come out of it.
I am incredibly interested to see what happens with desk job workers vs. workers who need to work on-site (service sector comes to mind) as the wfh trend continues.
I rarely rant on hn or espouse strong feelings, but you've made a couple of dismissive comments like this so I'm afraid I've lost my composure. Socializing isn't the problem. The problem is an open office plan filled with constant noise, the stench of whatever the guy five desks over is eating for lunch, the music being played loudly through four different peoples' headsets in an attempt to drown out the constant chatter, the team building exercise Accounting is doing in the fishbowl (this designated meeting room earned its nickname by being in the center of the open office plan with all four walls completely transparent), the crashing of weights from the 24hour Fitness on the floor above ours, the 45 minutes wasted in traffic each way every day, and the constant backlash of people with attitudes like yours who somehow think this is better, who somehow believe that I not only need this environment to write code, but that I and my teammates (half of whom are remote in another country anyway) need this kind of environment to thrive!
There are plenty of reasons to work in the office and there are plenty of reasons to prefer working from home, but pretending someone doesn't want to be around the environment I just described because they have poor social skills is tonedeaf, childish, dismissive, and demoralizing.
I would like to echo the sentiments of another commenter in another thread who said something along the lines of how the wfh debate has been a great litmus test for who they would and wouldn't want to work with.
“ the constant backlash of people with attitudes like yours who somehow think this is better”
This reeks of bitterness and projecting.
I never claimed wfh is worse, to your suprise I actually prefer working from home.
If you do not like the environment you work in, adapt or leave. Or you know, complain about it on a programming forum, go on some sanctimonious rant, totally not childish.
Adapt or leave. Couldn't agree more. Any time I worked somewhere I felt my needs weren't met I tried to work with my managers to fix that. It is different for everyone but you should at least try.
And if it doesn't work for you after trying, quit batching and change your situation.
In my company the only ones that want to go back to the office are those engineers and managers that spend most of their day just walking around, talking to everyone about non important stuff, inviting you to have a coffee, and making jokes until 5pm. Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter.
The most productive engineers, and the ones I enjoy working the most are the remote ones. The only way they have to justify their time is with what they ship.
I don't go to work to be a family, a brotherhood, or whatever....I do that at my pub, at the gym or with my friends. I go to work to work, ship stuff, grow my career, learn and earn money.
Problem is when people mix the office with their entire social Life.
This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Many of us moved here and joined competitive, demanding companies. People bond in these situations. I really look forward to being back in the office and having a significant part of my social life return. Don't worry we still ship plenty.
It is a bad thing, for the reason you just eluded to. Your work goes away for any reason, and so does your social life. This is why many of my friends haven't made any real friends since highschool
What the OP has alluded to was that sometimes you just like the people you work with, and if you are in a situation with long hours and hard work, for some people it's more efficient to endure that in person and not in isolation, and it's not always a BS manager thing. Whether you choose for some reason to cling to those people, or fully realize that this is a team that gets together to get shit done, not a family, is a completely separate issue.
I don't think it was only this, but I agree this can be much better than in isolation. You just don't want your work and your work-social life to encompass all of your time. It's just not that important no matter how much your Saas is going to change the world.
I mean, nothing is stopping you from making friends outside of work too though. It’s just another avenue for socializing. WFH though means that socializing is likely completely off the table. Fine if you’re not into it - sucks a lot if you are. I really miss lunches with my coworkers. It was almost always the highlight of my day - if I didn’t do anything else after work.
Often times the feeling of pseudo-social life and working too much are some of the things stopping you from doing this. Then maybe a pandemic happens and you realize that all those people were doing the exact same thing, and there's no neutral substance to your friendship. For this reason, I always recommend meeting the friends of people at work. They're relatively neutral, and you only rely on your work connections as a jumping off point.
WFH means you can do other shit more easily because you have more time available to go to the gym, cafe, walking around, party etc..
Not to say that friends made at work cannot be friends, but all it takes is a trivial severance of that to reveal how close that connection was.
> For this reason, I always recommend meeting the friends of people at work. They're relatively neutral, and you only rely on your work connections as a jumping off point.
That's an interesting approach - how do you even do that though?
Honestly - WFH isn't much more time liberating for myself. Any amount of commute time I had (which was never very much - always under 20min each way, closer to 10min) was taken over by extra work demands or blurring separation of lines. On top of that - there's no happy hours, fun lunches, or what not now because WFH.
And I agree - but I guess what I'm saying is... You don't need lasting friendships for socializing to be enjoyable. Situational socializing can still be fun and it doesn't have to be this thing where you are going to have these people be your best man at your wedding.
> Situational socializing can still be fun and it doesn't have to be this thing where you are going to have these people be your best man at your wedding.
Absolutely agree. This is why I mean more specifically that this shouldn't be relied upon entirely. If you stop being in the office, and your social life goes away, then maybe too much is coming from your work social life, whereas my opinion is just that it should be an augment. You may not need your casual work buddies to come to your wedding, but you probably want someone to come to your wedding, and it probably needs to come from somewhere else.
It's just a common thing I've heard—from particularly 9 to 5, somewhat more socially anxious people—that they have no idea how to make friends now that they realize their work friends don't necessarily want to go have a picnic. Work tends to usurp their personal lives in this sense, though I don't necessarily mean it to be so dramatic.
> That's an interesting approach - how do you even do that though?
It takes time and breadth. It's probably a better idea in general to just meet people through other means, but the big thing is simply forming enough of a connection with a small subset of your colleagues that they'd invite you to a party or something, then you might get to meet some other people, of which a small subset of those will vibe well enough with you.
It's just like meeting the friends of your current friends in that if they move away, you have redundancy. You wouldn't want 10/11 of your social group dependent on that one person you met them through, but that one person might give you exposure to the other 10. Ideally you get to a point with the other 10 where you'd invite them regardless of your first friend's availability.
It can happen. Certainly if you did quite a lot of other things outside of work. It's just not necessarily a safe BET imo. If you live right next to them, or you became drinking buddies that talk about thingds other than the current project you're both working on, you stand a higher chance. If the only thing tying you together is your company though, it's going to be pretty vulnerable.
Most people with > 3 jobs worth of experience will tell you that coworker-friends rarely transition to non-work friends after leaving said company. You will become too busy with making new coworker-friends at the new company, combined with non-work family/friend commitments filling the rest of your time.
One person with over 25 years in IT will tell you not to generalize. We're all different. I keep in touch with people i worked with 25 years ago, even across different countries and continents. I am a contractor so I change jobs roughly every year. I still go out with friends i met at work, and i have brought many of them into projects i started at other companies. I also have been hired by people i worked with previously. People are precious. The fact that you work with them 8 hours/day doesn't make them less so. I won't talk about the difficult ones, there's always that category too
I know everyone has their own experiences, but I've just never experienced this. Makes me wonder what "friends" one is keeping as company.
I know, and I try and socialise with people who know, that work is just work, and its not worth sacrificing personal/social life just to simp for a boss.
I've met my best friends at work. I've moved across the world to another country with former colleagues. Created extremely deep connections with colleagues who've lead me to much personal growth.
I find this depends highly on where one lives. If you work somewhere where a significant chunk of the workforce are local either by growing up there or graduated there then this separation comes naturally since people have established social circles outside of work. It's different where the majority of the company's employees had to relocate to work there, people will be more open to making friendships at work and this will be a good thing. In the end it will be down to good leadership to manage the conflict of interests and they will arise anyway. I've seen this happen where due to the lack of friendships inside and outside of work some employees can be targeted and corrupted by vendors who take advantage of a person's social needs.
I'd prefer to have more choice about who / where / when I get to socialise. E.g. with remote work I can save time on commute and use it to visit a tech event, or a coworking space; I'd still meet similar people there, while having more freedom.
I joined a banking grad scheme many years ago in my first role out of uni. Have about 10 friends from there now 20 or so years on that I am in regular contact with.
I have moved to several different jobs since and pick up maybe one friend along the way but nothing as close as from our first job. Obviously age / place in life at the time was a big factor.
>This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined.
Damn, I've seen some random ass video on yt called "normal day of Googler" or something like that and it shocked me hard that "normal day" meant hanging out with coworkers
Don't get me wrong, it's not like we don't do it "here" - like going to pub or something, but it's definitely not normal day.
It sucks to read this because I feel targeted. I can not get any coding done at home and am 10x more productive if I have people around me working on the same project. I need to see the face of another person or I just go limp and become unmotivated.
People work differently and I think that an employer should accommodate as many types of work environments as possible. There should be a choice between remote or in-office and neither choice should be seen as better or worse.
Do not feel targeted. We are all different, and what works for some doesn't for other.
I feel better having people around and missed a lot of that interaction initially. After 1 year remote i hate people and love being alone at my desk. I also have no social life outside family.
Something is not right.
Sorry, but I once moved over 8000km away from the office. Some tinkering with lego to have a robot with an ipod touch and a permanent facetime feed is close to be the same. I could 'walk around' and talk to ppl as much as I wanted.
In the end, the whole walking around was a gimmick and 99.9999% of the time it was not used. But yeah, while you cannot smell your coworkers, you can have the same convo's etc. Just have everyone when they start working enter the video chat.
One programming teacher told me 20 years ago: "you think your technical skills will make you advance your career, wrong, it is your interpersonal ones that will do".
I'm not very good at it, but since then I try to work on both sides.
On my second job, I made 2.5x what I made at my first engineering job (which ended 3.5 years ago). At my 3rd job I jumped my salary by 10s of thousands of dollars over what I was making at my 2nd job. At my 4th job, I now make 8x my first job. I am now consulting (with way too many clients) and have the choice of making six figures by working less than 4 months a year.
Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%. Although, I am sure that if I stayed at my 1st job I would have gone nowhere due to my lacking interpersonal skills. I also sincerely doubt that I would have made millions if I had mediocre technical skills and mediocre interpersonal skills instead of my pretty good technical skills and subpar interpersonal skills.
Interpersonal skills are like salt in your food. It makes the food better, and sometimes it may cover up some imperfections. Sure, some absolutely bland food will be better to eat than a pile of salt but thinking it has to be one or the other is not the right approach.
For full time employees going through a career with no interpersonal skills is very hard, they stick around with the same bunch of coworkers for a lot longer than consultants. If your technical skills are top notch and you lack interpersonal skills, doing consultancy not only makes more sense financially, it's also much easier.
I guess your communication and people skills aren't too bad if you are in consulting now. Technical skill sure got you there but if you wouldn't be able to communicate them properly there is just no way you'd still be on the job.
I wish I knew. Besides generic praise (like saying I'm a rockstar at my job) a few of my managers said that they loved how they could drop me into a situation with little to no information and have me come out successful. Other than that I really don't know how to measure myself. Sometimes I've pulled off things that other engineers said (to the product manager) were impossible; a couple times I've had humiliating failures that still make me sad to think about; most of the time I get my work done.
People tend to think this is some form of injustice, but the real reason is that most people work as part of a team, and your ability to deliver value as a team member is constrained by you ability to work as a team member.
The anecdote I have for my office is the complete opposite of the parents comments anecdote. The least productive members stayed at home as much as possible, and the most productive ones are in the office every day (because they all know that collaborative work is so much more efficient in person).
It may depend on the company and the team. In the office I get asked questions or interrupted frequently. I enjoy talking to colleagues and it seems productive. However the bulk of my important work is done alone in longer uninterrupted blocks of time (at home). If I'm forced into an office then unless the team around me is really good/organised, I end up working at home at night to get those uninterrupted blocks of time. My wellbeing long term suffers.
Collaborating with others works as well for me over a video call as it does in person. Further, the hours I save commuting to the office I can use to solve or collaborate on something else.
Most people I've talked to concerned about those not being in the office appear to think those out of office are on holiday. If a manager is worried their remote staff are not on task, why not give them a call?
> Collaborating with others works as well for me over a video call as it does in person.
This is just fundamentally untrue. Depending on your office culture, processes, personalities of the people involved, and any number of other things… it can be _good enough_. But you are always going to make compromises to communication and collaboration by all working in completely different locations.
I think this is one of the reasons everybody gets so frustrated by the WFH discussion. Sure there’s lots of reasons why the WFH experience can be better for the worker, but most of the discussion on the topic is so completely dishonest. The detractors will grossly exaggerate the downsides, and then comments like this refuse to even acknowledge that compromises are being made.
> The most productive engineers ... are the remote
I was way more productive in the office. Home is too fun and distracting. The sounds and vibe of the office have work associations in my brain.
> Problem is when people mix the office with their entire social Life.
You sound like a joy to work with.
What's wrong with making friends at work? I have other friends (although age makes meeting new people harder) but work friends tend to be techie people who are interested in similar topics to me. My wife's eyes glaze over when I start talking about the finer points of my job. It's nice being around other technical people for a few hours a day.
From my experience it’s best to keep coworkers and friends in separate circles. Most of your coworkers aren’t truly your friends and have their own personal motives. You compete against them during performance reviews and promotions. It’s difficult to determine if you can trust or confide in any coworkers. Stick with true friends you can confide in and have healthy relationships with.
> it’s best to keep coworkers and friends in separate circles
I've made some really great friends in the workplace. Considering how much time you spend working, there's nothing wrong with cultivating relationships there, and often those relationships can outlive the job.
I can’t believe such over generalized garbage is upvoted on HN.
Everyone’s job is different, everyone is different. There are productive engineers who are introverts and there are productive engineers who are extroverts. Making jokes in the office and having conversations does not take time away from doing good work - no dev is productive 100% of the time.
Humans are social animals, and working _with_ someone is important. I don’t care if that interaction is over chat or in person but this idea that people are productive in isolation needs to die. This is especially applicable to new hires. The most productive engineers you talked about have habits and work they do that cannot be taught over chat or VC. It just doesn’t work that way.
> I can’t believe such over generalized garbage is upvoted on HN.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Humans are social animals, and working _with_ someone is important.
The most productive engineers are all different. But empirical evidence has suggested that those who are _the most productive_, such as people like Carmack, are productive in isolation (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726 about his programming vacations).
Of course, i don't deny there are productive engineers who do their most productive work in a group setting. But i would also not want anyone to assert that social interaction is required for it.
That’s awesome to read. I remember taking half a week before going to black hat in las vegas, and staying alone is some off the strip hotel. The amount of work I would crush was absurd, managed to finish a bunch of projects. I really miss these opportunities to spend a week somewhere else alone to have time to focus on what I want.
> Everyone’s job is different, everyone is different. There are productive engineers who are introverts and there are productive engineers who are extroverts. Making jokes in the office and having conversations does not take time away from doing good work - no dev is productive 100% of the time.
I would go even further than that in your criticism of the overgeneralisation: there are engineers who are introverts and want to go back to the office.
I'm sure this is very dependant on the local or office culture, but introverts can very much miss social contact in the office as well.
> I go to work to work, ship stuff, grow my career, learn and earn money.
I prefer an office for the same reasons - separating my work life from everything else. Out the door by 5pm. An emergency in the middle of the night? Nothing I can do about that.
Everyone else prefers working from home? Great; less noise!
It does heavily slant towards managers. Their perceived value is often build around knowing and reporting up on what others are doing. Remote work really shook the tree and exposed this.
How did remote work expose that managers are managing people?
The issue I see exposed is rather the top-heaviness of many modern companies where there are too many managers and too few people that do actual work.
If you're a manager and doing low level work you're doing it wrong. Your role is to remove the interpersonal roadblocks, get people to pull in the same direction, inspire with your vision, hire the right people, and fire the people that don't fit.
A manager doing these things properly has value. But that manager has to manage enough people to make these efficiency gains worth more than the manager's salary.
I'd say another role of a manager is protecting the team from external interference and time-draining activities. You don't get to see that side of it as a team member, or shouldn't if your manager is doing a good job.
So much this! Unfortunately instead of keeping unnecessary work away from their team many managers instead delegate the work they don't like to do to their team. Thus they essentially decrease the productivity of their team.
Being a good manager is actually a thankless job, because you have to deal with all the crappy stuff, like keeping office politics in check, shield your team from budget and bikeshedding discussions, order equipment etc to keep your team productive etc..
My wife has made the same observation in her own workplace and refers to these people as 'the wanderers', although judging by their impact on productive output they should probably be identified as intruders.
Not true at all. When you evaluate opportunity you are evaluating the people. Your success depends not only on your abilities but also on the abilities of your network.
The unproductive ones that invite for coffee, make jokes also have successful careers as they are perceived to be - friendly, high in openness, and high in consciousness. Now, I'm skeptical of your claim that these people are unproductive, not sure whether such an individual would survive a highly competitive environment. I could argue that they are productive enough to have time not just for work but also to engage in things outside of them.
I'm that type of person, my career growth has improved tremendously due to this ability of mine though it is natural for me to engage with people in my workplace. I am the guy people come to build XFN features and products because everyone knows me and I don't come off as a threat. This is a huge plus in large-scale enterprises where each BU works as a startup of its own and collaborating with them becomes a hassle.
>In my company the only ones that want to go back to the office are those engineers and managers that spend most of their day just walking around, talking to everyone about non important stuff, inviting you to have a coffee, and making jokes until 5pm. Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter.
This is more applicable to managers, who have a lot to lose and might feel compelled to protect their dubious skills/roles/responsibilities, which are now being eroded and automated by 'Bossware'.
I have a counter-example for you. Most of the people who are most keen to get back to the office in my company, and a few others that I know about, (majority engineers, certainly all knowledge workers) are the people who are struggling to work from home. Maybe they’re young and/or in tiny or otherwise non-ideal apartments or houseshares, maybe they live with a partner or kids and finding the space for everyone to do their thing is difficult.
Being able to WFH comfortably is not a luxury everyone has.
> Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter.
These positions are part of the incentive system: "if you're loyal and work hard, you might one day get a job like that." For most people, being able to lord over others is very seductive and motivating.
The managers just want to continue to experience what they construe as their "reward" for loyal careers.
for the engineers that I've seen going back to the office (where I work right now, we have the choice of WFH or not, as we wish), I've not seen any correlation. Though I haven't seen any managers coming back, I guess they're happy managing things remotely
The saddest thing is the people giving him a hard time for "being entitled". How fucked have our mindsets been by decades of anti-union, anti-worker propoganda, elevating CEOs to philosopher-kings, that people argue for their own bondage?
I agree that is the saddest part, but that has nothing to do with anti-union propaganda. Unions can be afflicted by this "crabs in a bucket" mentality just as easily. The fact is that free market was the reason the OP was able to leave for a different job in the first place.
"decades of anti-union, anti-worker propoganda, elevating CEOs to philosopher-kings"
It seems you have a political axe to grind.
I think this is just another instance of people being "small c" conservative about what they are used do since they were young. The first Stone Age hunter who used a primitive bow was probably chastised "what's so bad about spears?" by other members of his tribe.
Actually I have very fond memories of my office prior to 2010 or so. I had either a private office or shared it with another colleague, and both options were great as these were both professionals and amiable types.
However, once the open space revolution started and we had to flock like animals, it became a nightmare. People started to have headaches, problems with ears and even vagus nerve from constant headphone use. Some of my colleagues complained their blood pressure levels are higher than ever, with no apparent reason. Production-wise, it was a disaster.
The pandemic clearly demonstrated how useless open space offices were and how much more productive we can be if not treated like cattle. For me it does not matter that much if I work in a private office or at home, but spending most of my day in an open space is unacceptable, especially now that we finally have other options.
I've found the WFH debate to be a great proxy for finding people I definitely don't want to work with.
Everyone has a preference. But in my experience, the people that whine the most about having to go to an office are generally the people everyone wishes would stay home anyway.
I loved going to office at Google when we had teams of 5 in separate rooms. It was really easy to do team work, talk whenever we wanted. But the walls in the buildings were torn down while the company was growing, and we couldn’t talk without disturbing other teams, while they were disturbing me, and at some point I had to wait 20 minutes after lunch every day when I wanted to go to toilet. I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with that anymore.
“ The company kept saying we will be more productive at the office. That's the opposite of what I am seeing. My team is now taking longer for cards, and the amount of time wasted in the office is ridiculous. The number of people, mindless walking around, chit-chatting in cubicles, going out for lunch/ coffee breaks just to fill in the time is a joke”
You mean congregating like actual people. Not making snacks in your “private upstairs kitchen” and eating them in your pajamas?
Because to make something actually useful (rather than something technically perfect but useless) your team needs to be the kind of gestalt entity that chatting about the sports team helps to create?
Hopefully congregating is more for you than just gathering for work.
I prefer wfh for the very reason that it allows me to congregate more - early morning surfing with friends, midday gym with friends, afternoon training with friends, evening dinner with friends. All far easier to do when you’re not tied to a particular location all day. Doubly so when factoring in commute.
I definitely have much more time to myself with WFH, by orders of magnitude.
I can even get things done on public transit at a reasonable time when I have important errands to run! Because half the city isn't taking the train into the peninsula for no reason other than micromanagement. Honestly, this is the more interesting part to me. People that absolutely can't WFH by nature of job duties have much less traffic and craziness and delays to deal with as a side effect of the majority of the city WFHing - this greatly helps people that can't afford to live in the downtown CBD zones of major cities, for instance.
Profit comes from the difference between the hours you work producing value the cover your own salary and the excess hours that go to the company. It is simple extraction like bee keepers taking honey from a colony. We're the bees.
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I come back do for full time (I had interned there too with my own office), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery mmediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.