I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue.
I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric.
There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity.
This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.
It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
You better be good then or have a niche/rare skillset. There's no intrinsic right to remote work. Things will mostly revert to pre-covid, where only the best/most disciplined/highest performers are given the freedom to WFH. Sure, some companies will be 'remote first', but for the most part, you'll need to be a special hire with an exemption carved out. I'm already seeing this in my workplace. Managers are begging leadership for remote headcount but getting Bay area headcount instead. The teams getting remote headcount are the hardest to fill/most in demand skillsets, and almost always very senior.
This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.
I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.
(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)
Or the opposite - companies with the most draconian and rigid RTO mandates end up with high attrition. Anyone who can work anywhere else does so, and the company becomes a collection of misfits over time.
Currently the hard-RTO companies in the news are clearly doing it for silent layoffs reasons as there are simultaneous leaks of 5-figure attrition targets.
Maybe a strong FTC/DOJ stance on antitrust, plus the top-down mandates will lead to more small company innovation as well.
Sure but it's often a cycle right, the high performers go to innovative companies that create lots of money.
The companies that make lots of money then end up being softer & more extravagant with their employee (ahem, GOOG and a lot of Mag7/FAANG) until some equilibrium point where they're so soft they lose their edge.
This works as an argument against 8h work day and 5-day work week too.
Ultimately if something is better for the society (and WFH obviously is - commute time, carbon footprint, land prices, housing crisis - it helps with almost everything) - we should just force companies to use it by regulation, so that there's no "race" in that regard cause the conditions are the same for everybody.
The exact regulation is tricky, but sth in the spirit of "if your job can be WFH you should have an option of WFH" is a good starting point.
I agree that WFH is better for society, but anecdotally, it probably caused more of a housing crisis here in CA. Folks took their bay area salaries and moved to cheaper suburbs and totally wrecked the RE market. And I have read stories of similar things happening in other places that techies flocked to, like Austin, though I don't think it's necessarily fair to blame that on remote work because there were other factors in play there (politics for example)
> companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without
This is unlikely. Notice the parent post said:
>> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost […]
So you have a situation where:
- Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.
- Most of your employees are focused on optimizing their lifestyle rather than the quality of their work.
Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.
Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person, the latter company will outcompete the former.
I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."
> Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person
This is a nice image you've painted but this company doesn't exist except in the minds of some CEOs and startup founders.
You know what actually happens? A CEO announces RTO, people are outraged, everybody is looking at their options, those who manage to do it switch jobs immediately, those who can't do it at the next opportunity, the ones who are left are a combination of extroverts who finally can have endless interactions with those who want them and those who don't, and a bunch of disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck about your company because of the way you treated them.
> You know what actually happens? […] A bunch of disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck about your company because of the way you treated them.
I'm sorry you've had bad experiences. I hope you'll heal and be okay or find work that makes you feel appreciated and rewards you.
I remember being stealth fired simply because I was never in the office and those who were assumed "he doesn't really work here anyway". Out of sight out of mind, and Zoom couldn't fix that. Colleagues just forgot about me despite the Zoom calls.
No, actually I haven't. I just have many colleagues who share their feelings with me. In my niche, all best-paid positions are remote only, I basically cooperate with teams from different continents, it's very rewarding. If someone tried to offer me a job forcing me to sit in an open plan office, I would laugh in their face, it seems so ridiculously absurd and unnecessary. The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.
Ah. Well, second hand anecdotes are certainly appreciated. Thanks for sharing.
> The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.
Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "knowledge worker"?
Nonetheless I agree with what you and others have said: wfh is great for optimizing an individual's lifestyle. Such a person, focused on their lifestyle, would probably do just as well if they were paid not to work.
As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?
> Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "knowledge worker"?
If you stopped "working" tomorrow and had no means to generate income e.g. from ownership of capital you're working class.
So if you make bread, car wheels or SaaS for a living it doesn't matter, only whether you own the output and can sell it. Social class is a distraction from this economic reality.
> Does "working class" have a different meaning today?
It’s always had multiple meanings depending on context. Working vs capital class, wealth/income-based, job-based.
Being British, class here is tied strongly to your birth. My dad rents out multiple properties, I earn a good living as a software engineer. However we’re both working class because we were born working class. No amount of money can buy our way into the upper echelons of society because our accent will shut those doors.
> I would guess having employees that feel valued […] would be what is best for the business, no?
It depends. I think what's best for a business is having employees who want to win and want the business to win, as a primary goal.
It's not really easy to make an adult feel valued because individuals have very different motivations and personalities, so good feelings as a goal is a shifting target.
Of course, if it were easy to answer the question, probably the Harvard Business Review would be a single article and not many decades of publication, and the debate about WFH wouldn't even exist because everyone would feel valued already and the problem would be moot.
> As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?
It is very simple: you need best people. In tech industry, people are smart, they know how to optimize things, and they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit. You can choose from a limited talent pool. If you give yourself and them a choice, including the WFH option, you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people. (Also the ones "prioritizing company interest", provided such people exist at all.)
Also, if your company is in a remote area or is in a very specific niche, you basically might not even have that much choice.
Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?
> you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people
Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.
> they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit
Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission? That's amazing.
If you wish to maximize A, you will need to lower your standards for B, C, and D. This is the nature of any selection process: choosing a home to buy, breeding crops, writing legislation, etc. It us no less true for hiring employees.
There are a very limited quantity of perfect employees, and you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hire one. The vast majority of employees have a mixture of good qualities (e.g., being hardworking) and bad qualities (e.g., expecting a higher salary). Your best strategy is to prioritize those characteristics that are most important to the role you are hiring for and be flexible on characteristics that are less important.
If you get your priorities out of order, even if inadvertently (e.g., by asking unverifiable interview questions that select for better liars), you will make suboptimal decisions.
> Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?
I oversimplified it not to stray away from the main topic but actually they need to have very specific features like the willingness to collaborate, the ability to communicate when the time is right, being technically proficient and so on.
> Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.
Let A be the set of people who like to work remotely and B the set of people who love to do hybrid. (I leave out the set of people who love full RTO because I haven't yet met such a person, even hard-core office lovers admit a day of remote work is doing wonders to them.) Let A1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set A, and B1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set B. From the basic properties of real numbers one can infer that A1 + B1 is at least equal to B1.
> Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission?
Actually, they rarely ask it these days. Maybe the hiring folks are tired of this meaningless ritual? I once said I applied by mistake and they still wanted to hire me (I declined the offer as it was a different time zone, I realized this too far in the recruitment process and was quite embarrassed by mistake.)
Anyone who is dependent on labour rather than capital for their income is technically working class. The Marxist classifications don't really work for knowledge workers or professionals.
> The Marxist classifications don't really work for knowledge workers or professionals.
I see. Thanks for that clarification. Most of the people I've worked with earn money by running fleets of servers and software that do the work that generates income. It feels weird calling them "working class."
> earn money by running fleets of servers and software that do the work that generates income
If they're owning the servers and/or software, that's a capital asset. That puts them in the "petit bourgeois" category, like small shopkeepers.
If they don't own the capital assets they're economically dependent on, that roughly corresponds to sharecropping. We've had a few stories on here of what happens when the landlord decides to obliterate such businesses by changing the terms.
I'm reluctant to provide details as these days you can be doxxed by just one's writing style but I manage to save 85% of my salary and rent a private 50sqm office with all amenities just for myself.
Why would you prioritize company success in a world where the company has zero loyalty to you? You trade off your lifestyle in return for no equity and get made redundant at zero notice? Why would you do that?
> Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.
I get where they're coming from as excellence does require grinding - the idea of a 3 week bootcamp into mastery (of anything) is a pure sales pitch; on the flip side the grind's a means to an end, usually, and I am doubtful that goal is "become indentured to a company" when they've just built up the skills to found one.
> Why would you prioritize company success in a world […]
Exactly. If you don't want to work, or don't care about your work, that's fine. There are other people who care and want to work, and care about their colleagues, and they'll show up or the company will go bust.
> Why would you do that?
Everyone has to figure that out for themselves. It's the same as asking "why do I work here?"
You have people who care about their colleagues, care about the product, want to work, often crunch voluntarily, the company makes a profit, and they still get laid off. That is .. well, it's sustainable in that you can always find more fresh grads willing to work in games, at the expense of leaving a trail of burned out and disgruntled former employees behind you, but it's also driving unionization.
I think part of this is because most work today is not strictly "necessary to society". The basic needs of the population are provided by maybe 10% of the workforce now. So of course people see work as less important, because for most jobs at least - it IS less important.
> Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.
As one of “these people”, I enjoy my job, but I can recognize the fact that it’s just a job. I’m amazed that you would classify people that don’t center their whole life around their job as people that would be just as happy without a job.
I have a lot of other hobbies. I definitely would not be happier if you just took one of them away and gave me money instead.
> I enjoy my job, but I can recognize the fact that it’s just a job.
There's an old saying that "you become what you do". It's fine if your employment is "just a job" for you and you have hobbies you prefer.
But don't be amazed that there are people who define themselves by their careers as much as others define themselves by their hobbies. That's who you're competing with.
I personally have not seen that workaholic employees get consistent preference in workplaces. Often they get shafted the hardest, particularly in highly competitive workplaces (where, for example, supervisors may undermine their best employees who might threaten their own ambitions).
And the hardest workers are also prone to burnout, which often leads to catastrophic career failures: quitting suddenly with no backup plan, changing careers, having a breakdown and ending up nonfunctional for months at a time.
I have worked in a variety of workplaces, some that were circling the toilet, some that were leading their industries and nonetheless still shooting higher, and some that thought/hoped they were the latter but just didn't have what it takes.
The most consistently successful companies I've worked for have their employees work like tortoises, not hares. They want us to work hard, but sustainably. They discourage all that hypercompetitive nonsense that rewards backstabbers over hard workers, and they encourage us to have a life outside of work to keep us sane. They do this not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they are insatiably greedy and focused: they want our next 20+ years of productivity and experience.
>I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."
I know 2 Boomers who have 8 figure networths and own their own businesses(manual work, think maintenance and installing stuff). They frequently take the opportunity to self congratulate("I worked so hard for 30 years") and complain about younger people("They don't work hard at all, always on their phone during their shift").
Can't say I was surprised when I found out that back when they started their businesses these fields were basically completely unregulated, that the regulations for these areas were in part lobbied by them(and by others like them) once they got off the ground and that both were sitting on juicy government contracts because the guy in charge of the finance department of the canton was in their unit during obligatory military service. And that's just the stuff I am aware of.
The point being: Older people really did live to work, but they never mention that their marginal rewards for extra work were much greater in most areas of the economy as compared to today.
Survivorship bias. You will see the same thing with your generation in N years. I expect you’ll be posting here about how young people are lazy now etc
Bosses want rto because they’re paying rent for empty office space. I’ve been wfh for a decade in the consulting business, only time I’m not wfh is meeting a client. My teams are distributed across the world and our stock price says wfh is fine.
Bosses want rto because they can’t stand paying rent for empty space.
You may be right that a big part of it is the psychological weight of that sunk cost. But if that were the only reason, there would be an easy win-win: Rent less office space and let people WFH.
You're right but commercial leases for offices are usually multi year and larger companies usually sign longer leases (20, 30 years or more). They can be costly, though not impossible to wind down.
So for those large companies, the sunken cost is larger.
Agreed. So I think the question is: Which effect dominates?
Both effects depend greatly on whether most other employers in the industry agree amongst themselves on whether to allow WFH: If everyone allows WFH, or everyone forbids it, there's no incentive to change employers, so these are stable equilibria, all other things being equal. Employers prefer the no-WFH equilibrium since (they believe) that leaves productivity highest.
There are benefits to in office work. I don’t consider them valuable enough to offset the cost of 10hrs of uncompensated time every week or doubling my mortgage cost. I hope tax codes will incentivize allowing remote work options given the reduced burden to transportation infrastructure.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
This is a double edged sword. You don’t care about the company, you care for yourself. Your company sees that and gives you a certain treatment. If you don’t care just quit?
Your company already doesn't really care about you (for the vast majority of them at least), so there is a conflict of interest but you personally shouldn't take the side of the company.
There’s an element to that, for sure. But can it be generalised to a whole planet? I’m certain you have met people on your way who genuinely rooted for you. Companies are made out of people.
I'm just expressing my opinion with regards to WFH. I work from home currently and it significantly changed by life to the better. Whether WFH should be legally protected, I don't know. I, personally, would be all for it, but at the same time I might underestimate some factors.
Probably it makes sense to start with disabled people. There are not a lot of them, so potential negatives wouldn't hurt society that much and helping disabled people generally is well received. So basically if disabled person want to work in a job that could be done remotely and qualified for it, you must allow remote work, or something like that. Then you can follow with people caring for kids or disabled elders, they often must be at home, but at the same time they might have enough time to allow for some work. With enough statistics smart people could make an informed decision, whether forcing WFH worth it or not.
The problem I see with that is that anyone who is legally granted the right to WFH becomes much less employable, similar to the way that young women are often passed over in favour of men now because employers don't want to risk someone getting pregnant and taking lots of time off.
Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC.
For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus.
For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.
They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.
Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.
Agreed, however some teams/orgs have skewed ratios such that the senior job basically becomes fielding interrupts all day and then coding at home after dinner.
Fine if thats the job, but don't call it senior engineer and treat as an IC role that is also expected to clear lots of Jiras (hey! seniors should be able to do 3X story points if juniors are doing X.. what are we paying them for!).
A lot of "flat organizations" delude themselves with 30:1 IC:manager ratios where what's really happening under the hood is - 5 seniors on the team each fielding 5 juniors worth of interrupts all day, with 1 manager on top whack-a-moling crisis management.
I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic.
But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.
It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.
It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations.
The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other.
Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice.
Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
A bunch of reluctantly-at-the-office coworkers isn't going to be the collaboration utopia you're hoping for. If you end up with an empty office because everyone chose WFH, switch companies.
Eventually things will balance out, with people in companies that have the right balance for them.
This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person.
We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years?
I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
People adapted pretty well to being glued to a screen and reading order of magnitudes more than they were used to... or do most people just spend 12h in front of phones just scrolling pictures and watching videos? I honestly don't know.
I really don’t understand what you’re saying here. Letters have existed for literally thousands of years at this point and people were able to communicate effectively through that. Several countries were founded and destroyed with coordination through written communication.
I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last 20 years has led to a massive decrease in the effectiveness of written communication because people don’t have to be clear or concise anymore.
Perhaps they still study those letters due to the ambiguity in understanding of what those people meant?
We also don’t know that they understood each other as effectively as they would have if they communicated verbally in person.
It is far easier to understand someone’s true meaning in person thanks to tone and body language. Communication in person is quicker because typing/writing is slow. That speed allows for faster ideation and iteration.
It’s not impossible to communicate in written form at all but I don’t believe it’s as effective.
To your first point, we write more emails, more DMs, more online comments, more text messages etc than ever before. We clearly communicate more in written form now than at any point in history.
Most people struggle to be efficient and effective at written communication. There are a huge number of people with good technical skills whose writing skills don't go much beyond writing a string of one-liners on Slack. And particularly in the younger generations, there is an enormous amount of resistance to anything that looks like detail-oriented long-form writing. In-person interactive discussion is much easier for people without these skills.
It takes years of practice to become proficient at this, even if English is your native language. Everyone wants full-time remote but few people possess the communication skills to effectively work asynchronously and I see very few people intentionally trying to develop these skills or being willing to put in the many hours of work required.
This may be the primary essential gap for remote: people need to dramatically improve their written communication skills. Until they do, they lack the skills to work remotely effectively.
Ironically, we used to do asynchronous highly technical long-form discussions over email and on mailing lists. It is where I developed a lot of my writing skills, and this used to be the norm. It worked pretty well and some older open source projects still work this way. Now everyone hates email because it forces them to write.
If we’re talking about the IC work, the benefits of WFH are acknowledged even by its detractors.
The people struggling with the “management” problem in remote work are either looking at the wrong place or being oblivious that it’s solution will come from adjacent fields like lawyers or accountants. Perhaps it’s time for them to look beyond their own field?
Agree. I don't think there's enough discussion about how bad remote collaboration tools are beyond "Teams sux". We need low latency, large screen, high resolution tools like Google's Project Starline, which is a good step in that direction. Voice cloning and deepfakes offer a plausible route to achieve very high fidelity in low bandwidth, but I think Zoom et. al. may be reluctant to explore that path because of its [currently] creepy perception.
I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.
WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few.
On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.
One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.
Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.
(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.
Documentation is not a complete fix. So you have 1000 pages of documentation. Which page has the answer to your question? At work you ask your coworker with more experience "Can you tell me how X works?" and get an answer immediately. On remote you type in to chat "Can you tell me how X works?" you get an answer in 5 seconds, or 30 or 5 minutes, or 10 or 3hrs later, or never. Where as in the WFO example you were back to work immediately with little to no context switching, in the remote example you might have to just go work on something else (30-60 minute context switch) while you wait for an answer, then once you get it do another 30-60 minute context switch to get back into whatever it was you were doing.
Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works?
It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never.
People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.
My workplace offers both WFH and in-office work (our choice). Before COVID, most people worked in the office, but COVID forced everyone to get set up for and used to working at home.
One of the funniest changes that came with this is that, even when everyone is working in the office now, we still communicate primarily through our WFH chat program because it is less intrusive.
It's also very handy for referring back to later — to the extent that when we do have an in-person discussion, we usually summarize it in the chat afterwards so that we can search for it in the future.
Mind you, we don't have the issues you describe (questions going unanswered for hours or not at all). With very few exceptions, such as when someone was out sick and I didn't realize, all of my questions have been answered within minutes. I imagine that is is because we are a relatively small team (albeit stretched across several timezones these days) and the chat is mostly pretty quiet.
My only complaint is that it has made the separation between work time and leisure time a lot more fuzzy. We all basically act as if we are on call all the time to answer questions, and it is common for my coworkers to even attend video call meetings from doctor's offices and overseas vacations just to say hi.
I think this is backwards. It's much easier to join Zoom meetings from home, and while you are on these meetings everyone can see that you're giving them at least partial attention. While heads-down work at home requires more discipline from you and more of a leap of faith from management.
In the office, quiet spaces to take a meeting from are scarce, but it's better established that your unscheduled time is actually spent on work.
Some people collaborate better in person, some don't. I work with people (deliberately) who collaborate better via text chat. We sometimes jump on a call with a screen share, but that is rare. I have tried everything over the past 30+ years and find there are some people who just 'need' the office as they thrive there, but mostly I found that people who insist on office hours and say they are more productive are just really not very good at what they do and compensate for that with an external cabaret of 'work' which really doesn't work at home.
By the way, LLMs really helped us here; we chat with a bot reading and extracting everything and storing it conveniently so it won't get lost for later.
IC is usually meant in contrast to manager, meaning ICs are the engineers without anyone reporting to them.
The difference between "not a manager" and "working on their own part of the code" is important when you're talking about positions with a lot of seniority like staff or principal engineers, because those ICs are still expected to work on massive projects involving a lot of cat-herding and leadership that touch large chunks of a company's code, they just aren't doing it as the manager of a team.
Funny you mention whiteboard work. I agree that is one of the things that sucks remotely, but I also think it's because whiteboard support in video calls is universally awful.
Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc).
We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.
I agree it's not a black-and-white problem, but I don't fully agree with your statement about collaboration.
I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020.
Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.
I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though.
But we barely do any productive work at these meetings.
We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done.
In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.
However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.
Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them.
Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time.
That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.
Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand.
Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues.
There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time.
And working on the same codebase was horrible.
One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns.
And that was if we had a room with a display...
If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing.
If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.
When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away.
We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment.
We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others.
If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer.
If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.
I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed.
However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects.
Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time.
This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.
But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking."
Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before.
The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month.
It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings.
But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.
I am literally at least 10x when I work from home.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
> A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.
I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i:
- unload the dishwasher
- walk to the shops to buy items for dinner
- sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
Driving? Well, you have to be in at 8am so that thunderstorm, blizzard, morning twilight, yup, you have to drive through it. And the same the other way.
Catching a train? Is it on time? Will you get a seat or be standing for 30+ minutes. Will your connection arrive? If it's cancelled, what's the alternate route home if the line is closed.
Of course, your millionaire company owner has an apartment a short walk from the centre-of-the-city office.
In my experience, most people who struggle with WFH lack specific material things like space, a quiet home, a schedule anchored by the presence of loved ones who live nearby and a functioning community which they're a part of, good mental and physical health, coworkers who will help them without a fuss, and a million other things.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
Hard disagree. Working from home is a skill that does takes time to develop, but it's no more out of reach than developing the skill of being productive in an office. It was a terrible decision for companies to yank away that opportunity from employees.
Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference.
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.
I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.
I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.
At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.
The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.
I WFH, even work on weekends. I notice that after working weekends I feel tired on Mondays, so I decided to spend Mondays on less technical stuff, e.g. customer meetings, interviews, lead generation etc
It is not easy to say that I'm not a very "internally disciplined" person. I once spent half a year procrastinating instead of working on a personal project. But when you're working for someone (regardless of place), they are paying you for it, and you would like to continue receiving the money, how is this not externally enforced discipline?
I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
> I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.
Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.
I don't have too much of a problem with it but there are some obstacles depending on your home life.
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
During COVID, like everyone else, our company went to WFH. Conversely, when we had a round of redundancies some of the people that were perceived to be important or productive in the office, turned out to be nothing of the sort, and were surprisingly let go.
They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.
The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.
The 16 pings a minute. The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day. The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon. This is definitely not what it was like in the office.
Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.
Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.
I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.
You can't easily tell a coworker to go away when they start talking to you at your desk. You can mute your notifications and schedule calls. Sounds like you have bad organisation skills.
I have discipline problems but when I am on site, my days are more filled with bullshit, e.g. random conversation over projects that lead nowhere, background conversations on unrelated topics, explaining stuff that aren't worth it, coffee breaks etc.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
Every system in place for measuring output and bringing transparency to work done by office workers/software developers finally make sense in the context of working from home.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
It seems too take more discipline to attend a workplace than to do the same work from home. I don't understand your position.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
WFH requires discipline, but allows you more freedom to mould your environment to your needs.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
I think that he is the norm, actually. Slacking off in the work is easy too, there are many empty discussions that feels like a work, discussions that are not work at all but you still count it as working time. If no one sees your monitor you can watch the same youtube. But, since you are at office you clock at as working.
It also takes discipline to work at the office. and as you said, most people aren't disciplined. They just stay at the office, doing absolutely nothing productive and wait for the clock to tell them they can go home.
I'm not disciplined at all when it comes to my work and I'm still massively more productive at home. What are you talking about?
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break
up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus?
I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.
I think the top comment reflects this - I have adhd too and I can’t be productive at home. I suffer a commute every day because my job performance tanked when I worked from home 8 mo strait. I’m much more productive at the office - I just wish my wife would agree to move closer to the office.
The benefits of which you speak, are pretty much I've to say, too. My present situation offers me above-average flexibility, but not to the level as yours. Care to share whom you work for, or where to find such roles?
It's basic common sense. Cut almost 3 hours of commute+preparation and not only you have saved yourself half a working day but also the fatigue and exhaustion.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
I really don't think this is the case... I believe more than anything it's about the kind of personalities that make up people who are in charge of these decisions... Think about the types of people who are c-suite executives. They are likely people who prefer to be in an office setting.. at least most of the time. I don't think they like it very much coming into an office and seeing it mostly empty... Partly because it diminishes their perceived value as a leader and everything they've worked for but also because they truly believe people work better in person because that's what they've always done and continue to want to do.
I think that's actually plausible, because yeah, if I was to put myself in their shoes. If someone is looking for status, and people looking up to them, etc, it would make sense that they would get much less that sort of attention if everyone is working remotely. Getting that through the Zoom is not exactly what it would be in real life.
While we’re debating whether it’s a conspiracy from the elites or not, that eludes debates on the real important questions for a team lead/founder like me:
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
> Does the office provide a better environment for building things together?
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to hire a great, motivated team. I have no doubt they are doing their things diligently and it's clearly visible even through Zoom since they talk about their technical challenges and it's clear what kind of effort they've put in. If they didn't put in the effort they wouldn't be able to talk about those challenges at such detail. And I do constantly think how great job we did hiring.
I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.
There are tons of articles out there about mayors/council members/ etc pressuring execs to get butts in office seats for the past few years. I don’t know if that counts as data to you or not, but they are relatively easy to find in a google search.
They already threw away the money by purchasing real estate and falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.
Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.
I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.
"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.
2/3 of corporate real estate are empty and the commercial real estate market is due for a major crash. a lot of assets on companies balance sheets are for the offices that they own. or leave empty while leased
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me.
They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
not really. there used to be a system where the SF government of course provided tax benefits for Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block) to open offices to enliven Market Street. Jack Dorsey fell into this trap and actually did establish his office there, until the SF government decided to cash their Golden goose and take these tax breaks away.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workforce by prompting a lot of 'voluntary' departures! Seven key stakeholder groups."
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
While all of that is true, I wonder how much of it is re-affirmation of a social hierarchy.
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
Local tax benefits is the exception, not the norm. Just because 1% of the companies get that for 1% of the location, it doesn't prove 90% of the companies have WFH policy.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
“Send us a count of employees whose home addresses is in state S (or city C). We reserve the right to audit that count.”
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
>In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?
The pressure is not from smaller RE companies, is from the biggest banks who control the comercial debt and see the writing on the wall. The banking industry can exert indirect pressure on lots of tech investors. Similarly for politicians in large cities and states who can control the tax side of the equation.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have direct sight into all of that. Luckily, I think there's many start ups and other companies who are valuing and all in on the remote work. I haven't felt the risk at my company to have a strong urge of getting people return to the office.
>Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
Because that’s what feeds local businesses especially shops and service oriented jobs. I’m not saying I care that happens because remote workers can do that closer to their home so it’s a net zero game, but not in the eyes of business owners downtown or the mayors of said downtowns.
People being downtown are people more likely to spend money downtown then someone who lives in the suburbs and doesn't come to downtown. Therefore more sales taxes collected, more businesses in downtown, etc...
For Boston in particular, governmental borders are close to downtown. The city is composed of several unconsolidated abutting Towns and Cities. The City of Boston[1] mostly extends from downtown to the south-west. So MIT/Harvard are Town of Cambridge, not City of Boston. Downtown-vs-suburb revenue tensions extend into the city.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
Because then transit, services, restaurants, stores, dry-cleaners, gyms fail, and the taxbase collapses (every city has a different mix of commercial vs residential property tax vs sales-tax).
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
It's not just downtown that matters, it is the total population living in the city. People working from home will live away from Boston or other major cities. If they need to work in a downtown office the same people will be forced to live in Boston or close by.
Yes, Amazon needs people to fill their expensive offices in Seattle, or otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
>> otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I agree in that I don't think explaining a write off is a problem, per se. But I do see Amazon taking a long term view of their real estate investment and saying "OK we have it in our power to make this payoff" which dynamic is not in play with most writedowns.
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it.”
This argument has never made sense. Commercial real estate exists to optimize the real cost (labor). There is no temptation to put it above the needs of labor.
Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
Yes, all this. I have a 5 minute commute, an office with a door, and plenty of parking. Going back to the office is no big deal (and has some major advantages.)
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
If we could all be like executives and only come into the office when we feel like it unless it’s a rarely important occasion and have actual offices, it would be a much different game.
It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
I’m actually rooting for hybrid with mandated office days (eg Tue-Thu) but without being super strict about it. If people can’t make it on a day or even two that’s fine.
There are companies that have pulled off We Work style office renting successfully for decades.
Just without the crazy, megalomaniac founder CEO, without trying to spin it as being the savior of humanity, without a buttload of unrelated and extremely questionable side projects, without trying to sell it as a tech company and inflating the valuation to absurd levels.
“Company culture”… that’s the word they use for sure. Often it’s ego, sunk cost fallacies and other things that have to do with the culture in the C suite for sure. Pay people well and treat them with respect and you’ll end up with good and loyal employees, as always.
The canonical example would be it's hard to have a serendipitous conversation with your male colleagues in the mens restroom if you're female.
That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the fuck are we talking about?
And always what we're talking about is men communicate a certain way, and women don't, and the men don't want to have to change.
To answer the disabled question, there was a flight of stairs at the office, and the meeting would end and people would just head up the stairs. Except the dude in the wheelchair. I'm autistic and I have light sensitivity, and after a meeting in a nice bright window office, I am exhausted and don't want to engage in social rituals.
My point is that the examples that tech leaders give as the reason to go back to the office are simply male social rituals, held up as "how we have good ideas and develop new hires". They're not. They are all managers performing post-hoc rationalization theater And if those were the goals, they'd figure out an effective way to meet them that's better than "chatting to john while taking a leak".
And the most galling thing is that every single one of my most impactful career moments didn't involve having a serendipitous conversation. It involved researching things I was interested in.
No one is having serious conversations in the restroom. That would be profoundly bizarre and weird.
And most people aren't saying that serendipitous conversations spur great big innovations or "aha!" moments, but rather that it just makes the process easier. Or that they prefer it. If yours are different then fine, but don't be so dismissive of other people's experiences and preferences.
I’m sorry but rude people exist everywhere and it’s not a tech thing. I’ve been in big tech for over a decade and I don’t have conversations in the bathroom. If you think WFH reduces these bro-relationships, you are being naive and they just become less accessible.
We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.
It's not just about RTO. The trend is bigger than that. It's just overall reality. If you need to go remote to fill a position then so be it. But some people have certain thoughts lodged squarely in their atrophied boomer brain about how everything has to be, no exceptions because feelings.
The companies that don't have fog stuck in their head are going out and hiring remote and they have great cultures and are oozing productivity. That's the trend.
The title of the article doesn't match the rest. Productivity is getting more from the same inputs, not getting more with more inputs.
First, there is very little data and just a couple conjectures thrown around. There isn't much substantive evidence of what it claims.
Second, even if people aren't commuting, it just assumes people work the same hours, but many people are probably working longer hours so you can't tell the impact on WFH on productivity.
Third, it doesn't look at outputs at all, especially the output of the company. While some (or even all) individuals might produce more, the group as a whole will have less communication and each employee might have less context of what else is going on in the company, so much of their contribution might not align as well with company objectives. Management of all the individuals would be more difficult and the company would be less of a team. This would support the idea that the increased productivity is only available to well managed groups. I think this sounds much more likely.
Fourth, much of the increase explained is from widening the labor pool. It explicitly mentions those with disabilities, stay at home mothers, and larger geographical inclusion. This isn't increasing productivity, just increasing the labor input.
This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
Completely agree. And it is funny how we put so much emphasis on developing our skills and abilities, when really our actual value is always determined by the market.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
How has western society completely forgotten the point of a country? It is not the to create the most efficient economical configuration for routing wealth from the masses to the capital holders. Your value is not determined by the market, and those who tell you it is are only looking to exploit you.
There are people out there who haven’t succumbed to the nihilistic poison of modern liberalism, though the people in power have run a very successful propaganda campaign to convince you they’re evil (and I’m absolutely not talking about staple green cards to diplomas trump).
> If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
I live and run a (non-tech) business in Vietnam. I've never tried to run a business in India but I've spent quite a while there, and have worked on occasion with Indin freelancers.
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
I work for a company that has satellites in both India and Vietnam (among others).
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials.
They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
> our entire development team has been replaced. They can barely speak English.
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
Yeah, the argument made no sense. If "outsourcing" will work this time (and it might), it's because the global south have developed quite a lot in education and infrastructure (pretty much all of the global south has good internet now, sometimes better than the US).
It seems much less likely to me that this wouldn't have the effect of raising the global south up to the level of the global north, rather than drag down the global north to the global south, which would be a huge win for human flourishing. So I can't say I oppose it.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
They tried remote body shops, which was a disaster (we had "tested deliverables" that didn't compile). This time there seems to be more emphasis on opening your own remote office and hiring the strong candidates there.
> How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner).
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees.
Not really. Command Sergeant Majors technically dont lead anyone. They are just advisors. Plenty of other senior NCO positions in the army are just staff advisors as well.
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
> he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
"bourgeoisie" refers to the capitalist class. Made more rigorous, we can say the set of people who do not need employment to pay their bills, they can live off of investment income. They often still perform labor, but as a part of their own businesses.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
I currently work somewhere where I can't WFH. And as a counterpoint to pretty much everyone here I prefer it. My last role I was able to WFH.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
Tell me where this dream job is and I will apply. For over 20 years I commuted to the office. Some days I stayed late in the office and pulled 12 hour workdays. Most of my time was stolen by coworkers and managers who constantly interrupted or insisted I attend a meeting about some issue I knew nothing about. When I left the office after only putting in 8 hours, I would end up working 2+ hours at home to catch up for the work I couldn’t do on the office. Now with WFH, when people try to interrupt me on Slack, I tell them to send me a meeting invite.
as with all things your experience depends on context. if you are part of a business team that needs to request things off other people and build off needing something from others, then you love working from the office cuz the others are available for you
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
Haha dream job it is not, but a definite benefit is you never take it home. And I am never not paid overtime if I work beyond my hours. I could definitely get a better paid job but this one is good enough with a decent work/life balance.
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
It's a mental separation kind of thing. When I've had jobs where I work at an office, I am able to mentally leave work at work. When I've worked from home, I struggle to do that and end up thinking about work when showering or doing dishes.
before covid, you had this 9 to 5 separation where people were required to come in so they basically did, and after they left they would just sometimes even leave the laptops at work
during covid you took afternoon naps. so then this liberty also traded for you to work other odd hours with a get-it-done-when-you-can mentality outside the 9 to 5
post covid now? the employers want to have their cake and eat it too; where they require you to come to the office, then go home and work on for some further hours. I even had a senior position where I had a 1 a.m. and a 2 a.m. call. suffice to say I left really soon after
Hence why I'm now a consultant and get paid by the day/week.
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH. When I finish working, my laptop gets put in a bag and not taken out until I start working again and colleague interaction while remote is going to vary based on how your invested your company is in remote work. As far as your home being your workplace, you could always rent a cheap office to work from. The co-working space around me offers private offices for a few hundred a month.
Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
> Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
>If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
You answered your own question. The article is using work from home as a catchall term for remote work but not everyone who works from home wants to literally work from home. Some companies will even reimburse you if you want to get a membership at a co-working space.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance for assuming we were talking WFH instead of remote working. I got confused when it stated work from home instead of remote working.
Either way "some companies" ain't mine, and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
This is like if you said you prefer to stop at Starbucks on the way into the office and we replied: "Wait, but we thought you were talking about working from the office? We must be sooooo confused! Do you work at Starbucks???"
If it's silly and pedantic to assume we're talking about the thing plainly stated in both the title and body of the article, then yes I am.
Now if you're actual stance is that when someone says WFH you include all remote work then we are clearly talking about two different things. In which case it should be plainly stated. As it stands it just seems to me you were moving the goalposts.
For clarity WFH when I say it means a type of remote work where you work from you home. You can set up as many straw mans as you want but this it what I've been discussing from the start.
Ultimately WFH is a matter of opinion. I don't like it, you do; and that's fine.
Talk about moving the goalposts. I didn't speak of my preference to WFH. You're pissing your pants because we dare to hold you to a higher standard of discourse than you will ever hold yourself.
I sometimes work from a cafe next to my house. I don't say "I work from home and cafe" lmao. Nobody defines WFH like you do.
But you know that. You just can't be wrong, won't be wrong. Your office mates must fucking love working with you!!
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.
I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?
(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)
IME software engineering is a mix of coding, which can sometimes be fairly independent of others and require focus, and a range of collaborative activities. Face to face meetings help building the relations that help the collaborative part go smoothly. But once the high level requirements are understood and the humam relations are in place, a team can complete projects online quite effectively, even as the requirements evolve.
Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.
I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?
There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings.
That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.
Funny enough, those of us who had to deal with international teams or offshoring had to develop those skills even before remote-first companies were a thing.
I remember some of my colleagues were working in an office doing WebEx or whatever it was calls all day already back in the early 2010s.
It's funny how the internet became widespread which enabled what you say in theory but it wasn't enough, we needed a global pandemic to push us to use it as intended and get over the stone age type of culture we had before (remember doing your taxes on a frickin paper? Working only from the office? Having to sign papers with a pen?)
It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.
Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.
I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.
maybe I'm just super used to it at this point but I don't really notice any friction in 1-1's. larger groups there's some (4+), but tbh it's not that much worse than the friction of that size in person
Havent noticed that even on international calls. But it might depend on the type of convo. Latency for talk seemed a problem last in the 2010s skype era. Latency in what is shown on a screenshare.... yeah! A problem.
My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.
There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.
That's fair but there's something to be said of physically being around someone constantly and learning off of each other. It's how I learned vim, it's how I learned about neovim, it's how I learned about the majority of command line tools I use everyday.
That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.
If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.
I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.
I have to WFH 100% of the time because my company’s HQ is three time zones away. I think I would be more productive if I could go to the office once or twice a week and have face to face interactions with my colleagues rather than always only slack/videocalls… On the other hand, if I were working at the office every day I would yearn for some WFH days. The best is in a balance of the two, with the flexibility to decide when to do each.
> To explain the benefits of labor market inclusion, consider that fully in-person jobs can be filled only by nearby employees. A human resources or information technology position in New York can, for example, be filled only by a local resident. Even if there are people in Bulgaria, Brazil, or Belize who would be a better fit, they cannot do the job if they are not there in person. But as soon as positions can be filled remotely, employers go from taking the best local employee to taking the best regional employee for hybrid and the best global employee for fully remote work.
Before professionals in HCOL cities celebrate this article, a primary argument of it refers to handing the job over to better qualified labor in a nonlocal talent pool; that is, outsourcing.
This paper is the first one I've read that outlines a pretty good case as to why WFH is beneficial to both workers and society. I encourage everyone to share it with others.
WFH productivity is a matter of management. Pre-covid my company tried it and found that productivity declined. Also, the managers found it hard to trust that some of the workers were working and not doing other things.
Working at the office has its drawbacks too. As a developer, the worst one for me was working in an open area. It's extremely hard to concentrate without having to function like a hermit and alienating fellow workers.
I think some of that is still the case, but if managers define realistic expectations, I don't see why WFH can't continue to work. It's more work for management at the start but in time, as management and workers get accustomed, it will work out.
In my field of IT consulting I find the opposite to be true. Developing a shared understanding of client challenges, getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
> getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.
My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.
Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?
I would wager that there's a dead sea effect happening at these 'my way or the highway' RTO companies.
Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but definitely a tendency.
Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
> Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.
I do think there will be significant remote competition in the middle 50% ($101k-$167k) range [0], and at a given price point in this range the best candidates will be able to demand remote. But top talents can only get paid close to their market value at a few dozen companies structurally capable of affording them. These companies are competitive in the sense that they throw around a lot of money, but they tend to make HR decisions as a herd. Partly because they benchmark against each other, partly because they all copy Google and Facebook, partly because they illegally collude [1]. That's why everyone's waiting to see whether Amazon's move to 5 days starts a stampede.
For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.
Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.
also, we are very hypocritical about it. When it is about india etc, we (us and western europe) think it's normal to pay less, but when it's about different regions within our own countries, we think it's unfair.
In an ideal world, we would pay everyone based on role and output, but this is not how the world economy works at the moment.
Dont ask me to explain, because I also dont know all the details, but it is reality
I'm in a company that doesn't do this—everyone gets paid the same amount, which is way above average for most of the country—and some of the Californians are actively lobbying for location-based pay.
I don't think they realize that they're actually lobbying for most of the company to get a pay cut so they can get a greater percentage of the total salary budget, but that's what it would amount to if they got their way.
The company is fully remote and only a tiny fraction of us live in CA. Most are distributed throughout the lower-density regions of the country and are very happy with our pay rates.
This is a good way to negotiate the value of your personal wfh arrangement.
But from the company R&D perspective, saving is kind of a loser argument. Cash is cheap. In pg terms we are trying to make the album that sells a million copies, not optimize the margins on nightly gigs.
Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
> I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
> But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
They might not have a choice (although this is somewhat relative); switching costs to changing jobs and a move elsewhere due to changes in family circumstances or rising rents might lead to a situation where one has to “accept” the 3 hour commute, at least until the right opportunity presents itself.
just curious how this works, do the kids just need a lift home and you can continue to work? Just wondering how you fit a full day in even with WFH (asking because both spouse and I are 3+ days in office and pickup/drop off kinda happen before/after the work days so WFH isn't make a big difference for us, personally)
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
I'm not sure about that. Companies are still made of people and people aren't always rational or even good at their jobs. Managers might prefer butts in seats because it's easier for them. Or maybe they fall for the sunk cost fallacy and want people in the office because the office space is expensive.
It's not difficult to win at all, if I'm more productive at home, I'm more productive at home, and a smart employer would enable me to choose that. If I'm not, I'd like to have an external space, perhaps the office, to go to and be productive. A stupid employer would ignore their employees and just decide that the office is a universal good.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
I think though, that for hybrid or work from home to win in the shared mindset - productivity has to be accounted for.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Think it was the FT that reported, there's no data indicating RTO improves productivity. It is being done either on a hunch or as a form of stealth layoff.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)
Not OP, but less than a dollar for a great espresso that I don't have to wait in line or walk further than 100 feet for is practically free, especially considering the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to walk to the cafe at the office.
I’m fortunate to be a software engineer, I have about 4yoe and mainly work on frontend code.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
It really isn't. For me, hybrid is genuinely the worst of both worlds. My internal sleep rhythm is screwed each week, just because someone had a bright idea that today will be everyone in office day ( and unsurprisingly almost never is.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
"gay" in that sense is a pejorative against homosexual people. You could almost make it work with the original definition though.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
Tell that one to Amazon. It's really not all about productively.
There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.
I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.
I wrote this back in 2013, and I think much of it is still relevant. 11 years later I'm still WFH, and there's a fat chance you could ever get me into an office again.
Nice article. Small nitpick I saw, your articles has date of MONTH/DAY without the YEAR. I’d have love that to be the full date. Yes, I did see the URL but would still love a full date.
Thanks for reading. And yeah it's a small thing, I'll probably change it now that that blog is hardly ever updated. It's better for SEO if things aren't dated, generally.
When in office, I typically spend 70% of my time helping coworkers with their issues, since they feel like it's ok to just walk by and ask for help. When I work from home, my output skyrockets.
In essence, I'm a mentor, but have expectations to deliver high quality and reach tight deadlines.
I hate going to the office, since my commute is 45+45 minutes.
The moment I get forced to go to the office full time is the moment I take another offer where WFH is on the table.
Hire expencive, qualified workers who don't require hand-holding, and you won't have to care where they work from. Guaranteed.
But employees only get to that level of capability through early, engaged mentoring. WFH destroys that personal connection. So then you have new, or inexperienced, employees trawling through SharePoint trying to find some nugget of information about how and why X integrates with Y. Hours and hours are lost, I've seen it first-hand.
Whereas 15 minutes of face-time doodling on a page with an experienced analyst will accelerate the newbie's capability out of proportion to the time spent.
The person above said they spend 70% of their time helping others. That's great if that is their actual job and they are only supposed to spend 30% of their time on other things. But that's probably not the case at most companies. Employees don't stay around long enough for most companies to be able to afford paying senior level people to spend most of their time training inexperienced people when there is a good chance that many of those inexperienced people will use that experience to get hired somewhere else.
What companies that want everyone to be in the office should be doing is providing actual offices to the senior workers. Then when a senior worker is working on something that they need to focus on they can close their door and people can be told when the door is closed do not interrupt unless it is urgent. When they are doing less demanding stuff they can have their door open and inexperienced workers can come and ask questions.
In your particular example optimal would be to teach the new or inexperienced employees how to update the information in SharePoint so when they do learn how and why X integrates with Y (whether by spending hours digging around to find it or by getting someone more experienced to explain it to them) they can then make it so the next new or inexperienced employee will be able to find that on their own.
Someone more experienced can review their changes to make sure they are OK, but that doesn't have to be done right away so can be done at a time when the more experienced person does not have some higher priority senior level work they need to be concentrating on.
Well I went into the article expecting it to be the 143rd article in the ouroborous of articles that all reference each other and at the bottom of them all is that one single absolutely horrible WFH study that was done in Europe a few years ago, but I got stuck before even getting into the article.
The title: "Working From Home Is Powering Productivity" -> "X is Y".
The main headline: "A fivefold increase in remote work since the pandemic could boost economic growth and bring wider benefits" -> "X could Y".
Before even getting into the article they went from strongly claiming something to no longer claiming something but instead using a weasel word that could mean anything.
I could be the King of France. I could be 9 feet tall. Could doesn't mean anything.
Instantly closed the article, and not reading further.
I believe that Returning To the Office represents a significant step backward from a societal perspective. Governments should actively legislate against unnecessary in-person gatherings in offices.
To illustrate my point, I’ll share an anecdote that highlights the harm caused by this trend. I live in a major EU city, and last Wednesday, I had a doctor’s appointment in the city center at 4 PM, a peak traffic hour. Unfortunately, my bus was caught in a traffic jam. Despite the fact that buses typically have dedicated lanes in the EU, we were still stuck.
Suddenly, we heard the sirens of an emergency ambulance behind us. Unfortunately, the ambulance was also trapped in the gridlock. Other drivers tried to make way, but the road was too narrow to allow any effective movement. I don't know what the emergency was or who needed help, but it was clear that valuable time was lost—time that could be critical for saving lives.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, such traffic jams were virtually non-existent, as most people worked from home. Now, consider how many similar situations occur daily in cities around the world. RTO policies that force people to commute contribute to dangerous traffic congestion that can literally cost lives.
The societal disadvantages extend even further. When people work from an office, their homes still need heating and electricity; you can’t simply turn them off, especially in my climate. This means we end up maintaining two properties with full utility costs.
Additionally, there’s the increased wear on city infrastructure from more vehicles on the road, elevated levels of traffic pollution, and the under-utilization of office spaces that could be repurposed into affordable housing.
The push for RTO is clearly wasteful compared to the benefits of working from home.
Companies that require RTO, if they actually want their employees to return to office, should prioritize in their messaging the objective benefits/cost to working in the office. No vague-speak, no shaming people claiming that workers "don't work" at home, but rather objective analysis on what exact benefits they seek to accrue by mandating that work that could be done anywhere in the world must be done in separate rooms of a large corporate office space.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
Executive brain worms are real. They see each other do things, and they want to be like each other, so they feel safety in numbers, untethered to the data.
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
It's an open secret that we have no idea how to actually measure tech company productivity. That's why there isn't and will not be clear evidence for or against RTO.
Best you can do is pick a narrow enough sliver that it is measurable. Then claim it is the "important" view and wow, what a shock, the data supports your position!
I agree on an individual level, but at a company level it’s fairly easy to measure things like product feature shipping velocity, change in business metrics like growth etc. When you’re talking about company wide changes like RTO it would theoretically show up in these core metrics.
yes, working from home is one of the great solutions if you want a work-life balance. In my country, the term work from home became popular when the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, and til now several company (mostly tech, blockchain, and finance) still doing it. But honestly, if you asking about productivity working from the office is still a better choice.
Why is it ICs will argue endlessly for and against WFH, while at least in the press the main story from employers is pro-RTO?
Embracing remote is such a huge win for hiring (access a way larger talent pool) and budgets (who needs a lease??). ICs overall are more open to remote than otherwise so it's decently rare you lose a hire because remote.
Are these companies just not giving interviews? I get it: other companies screaming RTO drive ICs into your arms, no need to draw attention to it...
Sometimes politics comes into play at the office. "This is the decision. We're just informing you about it because we agreed in our informal hallway chat that it's the right thing to do."
Suddenly all of the doc comments and Slack threads become meaningless and are swept aside in favor of the consensus that a few people came to face-to-face. Remote employees will never be as politically effective as the employees in the hallway.
i definitely know myself that i'm less productive working from home than working on the office. the commute (or the ritual of it) and the different environment makes all the difference.
Same, home is associated with relaxation in my mind (and I have an apartment, so no "work desk"). Being quite depressed also makes a big difference, as work gives a social life I otherwise don't have.
i believe it's not a problem of socialization ability, it's a matter of personality - it's just who we are. as an introvert, i'm not comfortable just striking up conversations with strangers, let alone making friends with them.
even if you don't make friends at work, being physically around people has an impact on a person. being in an office has a much higher social component than working from home.
All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
> All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
Equally;
In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons
I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.
After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.
One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.
Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.
The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.
Wfh is better but going out to lunch, the whole notion of a lunch break, or everyone eating at about the same time everyday is something I miss about offices.
Offices are also like the schools we grow up in. There's a continuity through life that's been lost.
I've been much more productive working at home since the 1980s, when we had to use a dolly to take the computer and CRT monitor out the office to the trunk of the car, home for a few days to get some peace to focus.
I’d love to see a study on the carbon and energy impact of WFH vs commuting to an office. I would assume that for knowledge workers, WFH would be more efficient.
The answers here seem to only allow for one solution: where no technical requirements exist in favor of RTO, one should provide employees the choice. Each person has their own place where productivity is good, and it may even change between RTO and WFH.
Force should not be applied, or else one might start wondering if e.g. the commute time should be paid time, or pay should increase in a WFH case since the employee suddenly shoulders more costs.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Amazon used to pride itself on behaving like a (very big) startup, trying to be scrappy and focused - but now it has very definitely joined the league of ordinary corporations.
A corollary is that they existing big-tech companies will never embrace remote work. You need to start new companies which are remote-first and then replace big tech with them.
I don't think that's a useful generalization. It's pretty clear that company culture changes over time (in tandem with changing management and workforce).
The point of the Planck quote is that many people (especially the "important" people) have large egos and therefore (among other reasons) are unwilling or unable to change their minds and learn new things. This then significantly hinders progress.
The equivalent to your claim in science would be something like "particle physics cannot change, you need to let it die and start a new scientific discipline" (I guess you'll find some people who think that but I don't).
Articles like this are talking past the RTO mandates. Ignore what the mandates say in the emails. They are trying to lay people off without suffering the PR downsides. They do not care how productive you were or are going to be. They need to fix the balance sheet for the next quarter, THEN they can worry about productivity.
But but but.... Won't somebody please think of the hurt feelings amongst the commercial landlord community.
Seriously though, any of those a-hole CEOs, like Amazon or Intercom may as well come out and say they don't trust their staff, all the while getting chauffeur driven into the office themselves and have legions of housekeepers and nannies taking care of things at home for them.
I'd really like to see how the American libertarian copes with the return to office mandates.
I've had a lot of American colleagues that do not wish to return to office, the types that believe in "freedom", "individual responsibility" and "if you do not like the job go work somewhere else".
As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
They are still on their pleading / "negotiating" phase at the moment, but let us see.
>I'd really like to see how the American libertarian copes with the return to office mandates.
The American libertarian will just move to a job that allows remote.
>As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company. RTO companies better have some damn good reasons to work there if they require asses in seats. Companies that don't (most) will struggle and wither.
> Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company.
This process might take years or even decade of decay until company feels the pain. They might lose in the long run, but unless all high productivity employees leave in an instant you’re the one to lose in the short run.
>all high productivity employees leave in an instant
That almost never happens, unless a company enacts a very unpopular policy and there are many opportunities for high productivity tech employees elsewhere. That sounds a lot like right now.
I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue.
I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric.
There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity.
This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.
It might be efficient to work 60 hours week. Doesn't mean we should agree to it. Remote work improves quality of life. I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice. Companies should adapt and if it means that their efficiency will decrease, so be it.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
You better be good then or have a niche/rare skillset. There's no intrinsic right to remote work. Things will mostly revert to pre-covid, where only the best/most disciplined/highest performers are given the freedom to WFH. Sure, some companies will be 'remote first', but for the most part, you'll need to be a special hire with an exemption carved out. I'm already seeing this in my workplace. Managers are begging leadership for remote headcount but getting Bay area headcount instead. The teams getting remote headcount are the hardest to fill/most in demand skillsets, and almost always very senior.
Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom as companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without
This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.
I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.
(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)
Unfortunately, once you go one way the 2 days are no longer of focus work. Not all people schedule the same type of work at the same time .
Or the opposite - companies with the most draconian and rigid RTO mandates end up with high attrition. Anyone who can work anywhere else does so, and the company becomes a collection of misfits over time.
Currently the hard-RTO companies in the news are clearly doing it for silent layoffs reasons as there are simultaneous leaks of 5-figure attrition targets.
Maybe a strong FTC/DOJ stance on antitrust, plus the top-down mandates will lead to more small company innovation as well.
Companies need to make money. High performers will go to companies that make tons of money, even if relo to Sahara is needed
Sure but it's often a cycle right, the high performers go to innovative companies that create lots of money.
The companies that make lots of money then end up being softer & more extravagant with their employee (ahem, GOOG and a lot of Mag7/FAANG) until some equilibrium point where they're so soft they lose their edge.
Then a new up&comer rises and the cycle repeats.
> Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom
This works as an argument against 8h work day and 5-day work week too.
Ultimately if something is better for the society (and WFH obviously is - commute time, carbon footprint, land prices, housing crisis - it helps with almost everything) - we should just force companies to use it by regulation, so that there's no "race" in that regard cause the conditions are the same for everybody.
The exact regulation is tricky, but sth in the spirit of "if your job can be WFH you should have an option of WFH" is a good starting point.
I agree that WFH is better for society, but anecdotally, it probably caused more of a housing crisis here in CA. Folks took their bay area salaries and moved to cheaper suburbs and totally wrecked the RE market. And I have read stories of similar things happening in other places that techies flocked to, like Austin, though I don't think it's necessarily fair to blame that on remote work because there were other factors in play there (politics for example)
> Folks took their bay area salaries and moved to cheaper suburbs and totally wrecked the RE market.
Isn't that what we want? Land prices averaging out? Then we can build where it's cheaper so more people have homes (with access to good jobs).
It probably won't be limited to suburbs, if you can WFH from the same state - you can WFH from another state.
Land prices averaged up, but local salaries aren’t doing the same.
Isn’t that improving the housing shortage in the bay?
And many high performing companies famously expect employees to work more than 8h/day and/or weekends.
Some people steal, does not mean stealing is fine or that we shouldn't ban it.
> companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without
This is unlikely. Notice the parent post said:
>> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost […]
So you have a situation where:
- Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.
- Most of your employees are focused on optimizing their lifestyle rather than the quality of their work.
Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.
Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person, the latter company will outcompete the former.
I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."
> Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person
This is a nice image you've painted but this company doesn't exist except in the minds of some CEOs and startup founders.
You know what actually happens? A CEO announces RTO, people are outraged, everybody is looking at their options, those who manage to do it switch jobs immediately, those who can't do it at the next opportunity, the ones who are left are a combination of extroverts who finally can have endless interactions with those who want them and those who don't, and a bunch of disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck about your company because of the way you treated them.
> You know what actually happens? […] A bunch of disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck about your company because of the way you treated them.
I'm sorry you've had bad experiences. I hope you'll heal and be okay or find work that makes you feel appreciated and rewards you.
I remember being stealth fired simply because I was never in the office and those who were assumed "he doesn't really work here anyway". Out of sight out of mind, and Zoom couldn't fix that. Colleagues just forgot about me despite the Zoom calls.
> I'm sorry you've had bad experiences.
No, actually I haven't. I just have many colleagues who share their feelings with me. In my niche, all best-paid positions are remote only, I basically cooperate with teams from different continents, it's very rewarding. If someone tried to offer me a job forcing me to sit in an open plan office, I would laugh in their face, it seems so ridiculously absurd and unnecessary. The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.
> No, actually I haven't.
Ah. Well, second hand anecdotes are certainly appreciated. Thanks for sharing.
> The possibility of WFH (for those who want it) is one of the best that happened to the working class since 5-day workweek.
Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "knowledge worker"?
Nonetheless I agree with what you and others have said: wfh is great for optimizing an individual's lifestyle. Such a person, focused on their lifestyle, would probably do just as well if they were paid not to work.
As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?
> Does "working class" have a different meaning today? When I entered the job market it meant "blue collar" or manual labourer. You seem to be indicating that you're what used to be called "knowledge worker"?
If you stopped "working" tomorrow and had no means to generate income e.g. from ownership of capital you're working class.
So if you make bread, car wheels or SaaS for a living it doesn't matter, only whether you own the output and can sell it. Social class is a distraction from this economic reality.
> Does "working class" have a different meaning today?
It’s always had multiple meanings depending on context. Working vs capital class, wealth/income-based, job-based.
Being British, class here is tied strongly to your birth. My dad rents out multiple properties, I earn a good living as a software engineer. However we’re both working class because we were born working class. No amount of money can buy our way into the upper echelons of society because our accent will shut those doors.
>As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?
I would guess having employees that feel valued for their productivity and contributions would be what is best for the business, no?
> I would guess having employees that feel valued […] would be what is best for the business, no?
It depends. I think what's best for a business is having employees who want to win and want the business to win, as a primary goal.
It's not really easy to make an adult feel valued because individuals have very different motivations and personalities, so good feelings as a goal is a shifting target.
Of course, if it were easy to answer the question, probably the Harvard Business Review would be a single article and not many decades of publication, and the debate about WFH wouldn't even exist because everyone would feel valued already and the problem would be moot.
> As a business owner however, the question is: what is best for the business?
It is very simple: you need best people. In tech industry, people are smart, they know how to optimize things, and they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit. You can choose from a limited talent pool. If you give yourself and them a choice, including the WFH option, you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people. (Also the ones "prioritizing company interest", provided such people exist at all.)
Also, if your company is in a remote area or is in a very specific niche, you basically might not even have that much choice.
> It is very simple: you need best people
Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?
> you statistically increase your chances of finding the best people
Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.
> they rarely believe in "company values" bullshit
Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission? That's amazing.
If you wish to maximize A, you will need to lower your standards for B, C, and D. This is the nature of any selection process: choosing a home to buy, breeding crops, writing legislation, etc. It us no less true for hiring employees.
There are a very limited quantity of perfect employees, and you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hire one. The vast majority of employees have a mixture of good qualities (e.g., being hardworking) and bad qualities (e.g., expecting a higher salary). Your best strategy is to prioritize those characteristics that are most important to the role you are hiring for and be flexible on characteristics that are less important.
If you get your priorities out of order, even if inadvertently (e.g., by asking unverifiable interview questions that select for better liars), you will make suboptimal decisions.
> Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?
I oversimplified it not to stray away from the main topic but actually they need to have very specific features like the willingness to collaborate, the ability to communicate when the time is right, being technically proficient and so on.
> Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.
Let A be the set of people who like to work remotely and B the set of people who love to do hybrid. (I leave out the set of people who love full RTO because I haven't yet met such a person, even hard-core office lovers admit a day of remote work is doing wonders to them.) Let A1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set A, and B1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set B. From the basic properties of real numbers one can infer that A1 + B1 is at least equal to B1.
> Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission?
Actually, they rarely ask it these days. Maybe the hiring folks are tired of this meaningless ritual? I once said I applied by mistake and they still wanted to hire me (I declined the offer as it was a different time zone, I realized this too far in the recruitment process and was quite embarrassed by mistake.)
Anyone who is dependent on labour rather than capital for their income is technically working class. The Marxist classifications don't really work for knowledge workers or professionals.
> The Marxist classifications don't really work for knowledge workers or professionals.
I see. Thanks for that clarification. Most of the people I've worked with earn money by running fleets of servers and software that do the work that generates income. It feels weird calling them "working class."
> earn money by running fleets of servers and software that do the work that generates income
If they're owning the servers and/or software, that's a capital asset. That puts them in the "petit bourgeois" category, like small shopkeepers.
If they don't own the capital assets they're economically dependent on, that roughly corresponds to sharecropping. We've had a few stories on here of what happens when the landlord decides to obliterate such businesses by changing the terms.
> That puts them in the "petit bourgeois" category, like small shopkeepers.
Got it. Thanks! :-)
How much are you paid? Total comp?
I'm reluctant to provide details as these days you can be doxxed by just one's writing style but I manage to save 85% of my salary and rent a private 50sqm office with all amenities just for myself.
Was trying to gauge whether you are underpaid because you only accept remote work.
Economy will be the one that will determines the ultimate outcome, especially for tech companies, as they compete globally
Why would you prioritize company success in a world where the company has zero loyalty to you? You trade off your lifestyle in return for no equity and get made redundant at zero notice? Why would you do that?
> Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.
There are only so many hours in the day.
I get where they're coming from as excellence does require grinding - the idea of a 3 week bootcamp into mastery (of anything) is a pure sales pitch; on the flip side the grind's a means to an end, usually, and I am doubtful that goal is "become indentured to a company" when they've just built up the skills to found one.
> Why would you prioritize company success in a world […]
Exactly. If you don't want to work, or don't care about your work, that's fine. There are other people who care and want to work, and care about their colleagues, and they'll show up or the company will go bust.
> Why would you do that?
Everyone has to figure that out for themselves. It's the same as asking "why do I work here?"
I'm thinking of the games industry: https://theconversation.com/the-video-game-industry-is-boomi...
You have people who care about their colleagues, care about the product, want to work, often crunch voluntarily, the company makes a profit, and they still get laid off. That is .. well, it's sustainable in that you can always find more fresh grads willing to work in games, at the expense of leaving a trail of burned out and disgruntled former employees behind you, but it's also driving unionization.
I think part of this is because most work today is not strictly "necessary to society". The basic needs of the population are provided by maybe 10% of the workforce now. So of course people see work as less important, because for most jobs at least - it IS less important.
> Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.
As one of “these people”, I enjoy my job, but I can recognize the fact that it’s just a job. I’m amazed that you would classify people that don’t center their whole life around their job as people that would be just as happy without a job.
I have a lot of other hobbies. I definitely would not be happier if you just took one of them away and gave me money instead.
> I enjoy my job, but I can recognize the fact that it’s just a job.
There's an old saying that "you become what you do". It's fine if your employment is "just a job" for you and you have hobbies you prefer.
But don't be amazed that there are people who define themselves by their careers as much as others define themselves by their hobbies. That's who you're competing with.
Competing very effectively in many cases.
I personally have not seen that workaholic employees get consistent preference in workplaces. Often they get shafted the hardest, particularly in highly competitive workplaces (where, for example, supervisors may undermine their best employees who might threaten their own ambitions).
And the hardest workers are also prone to burnout, which often leads to catastrophic career failures: quitting suddenly with no backup plan, changing careers, having a breakdown and ending up nonfunctional for months at a time.
I have worked in a variety of workplaces, some that were circling the toilet, some that were leading their industries and nonetheless still shooting higher, and some that thought/hoped they were the latter but just didn't have what it takes.
The most consistently successful companies I've worked for have their employees work like tortoises, not hares. They want us to work hard, but sustainably. They discourage all that hypercompetitive nonsense that rewards backstabbers over hard workers, and they encourage us to have a life outside of work to keep us sane. They do this not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they are insatiably greedy and focused: they want our next 20+ years of productivity and experience.
> I personally have not seen
At this point we're all just speculating wildly from subjective biased anecdotes.
Data is required.
>I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."
I know 2 Boomers who have 8 figure networths and own their own businesses(manual work, think maintenance and installing stuff). They frequently take the opportunity to self congratulate("I worked so hard for 30 years") and complain about younger people("They don't work hard at all, always on their phone during their shift").
Can't say I was surprised when I found out that back when they started their businesses these fields were basically completely unregulated, that the regulations for these areas were in part lobbied by them(and by others like them) once they got off the ground and that both were sitting on juicy government contracts because the guy in charge of the finance department of the canton was in their unit during obligatory military service. And that's just the stuff I am aware of.
The point being: Older people really did live to work, but they never mention that their marginal rewards for extra work were much greater in most areas of the economy as compared to today.
Survivorship bias. You will see the same thing with your generation in N years. I expect you’ll be posting here about how young people are lazy now etc
> The point being […] marginal rewards
Yes, times change and each generation has to figure out how to succeed in their own unique epoch. I agree.
It's adorable but my modern German car came plagued by software glitches, from a development team of 6000.
When your project tracking is a fax machine that’s no surprise.
Show me one example of this.
I was just referencing ops statement about how wfh is better even if it’s less efficient. I love wfh. I miss it.
Why do you think bosses overwhelmingly want RTO?
I think they want it because they fear productivity losses that mean lower profits, and ultimately lead to the threat of becoming uncompetitive.
If you agree with that, is your position that these fears are irrational (because in your view, no such productivity loss would occur)?
Bosses want rto because they’re paying rent for empty office space. I’ve been wfh for a decade in the consulting business, only time I’m not wfh is meeting a client. My teams are distributed across the world and our stock price says wfh is fine.
Bosses want rto because they can’t stand paying rent for empty space.
You may be right that a big part of it is the psychological weight of that sunk cost. But if that were the only reason, there would be an easy win-win: Rent less office space and let people WFH.
You're right but commercial leases for offices are usually multi year and larger companies usually sign longer leases (20, 30 years or more). They can be costly, though not impossible to wind down.
So for those large companies, the sunken cost is larger.
At the same time if they get worse talent because of it they could get lower productivity because of it
Agreed. So I think the question is: Which effect dominates?
Both effects depend greatly on whether most other employers in the industry agree amongst themselves on whether to allow WFH: If everyone allows WFH, or everyone forbids it, there's no incentive to change employers, so these are stable equilibria, all other things being equal. Employers prefer the no-WFH equilibrium since (they believe) that leaves productivity highest.
Small benefit with externalized costs, I think.
There are benefits to in office work. I don’t consider them valuable enough to offset the cost of 10hrs of uncompensated time every week or doubling my mortgage cost. I hope tax codes will incentivize allowing remote work options given the reduced burden to transportation infrastructure.
> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost, as long as I have a choice.
This is a double edged sword. You don’t care about the company, you care for yourself. Your company sees that and gives you a certain treatment. If you don’t care just quit?
Your company already doesn't really care about you (for the vast majority of them at least), so there is a conflict of interest but you personally shouldn't take the side of the company.
There’s an element to that, for sure. But can it be generalised to a whole planet? I’m certain you have met people on your way who genuinely rooted for you. Companies are made out of people.
It sounds like you're advocating for a legally protected right to WFH. Are you?
I'm just expressing my opinion with regards to WFH. I work from home currently and it significantly changed by life to the better. Whether WFH should be legally protected, I don't know. I, personally, would be all for it, but at the same time I might underestimate some factors.
Probably it makes sense to start with disabled people. There are not a lot of them, so potential negatives wouldn't hurt society that much and helping disabled people generally is well received. So basically if disabled person want to work in a job that could be done remotely and qualified for it, you must allow remote work, or something like that. Then you can follow with people caring for kids or disabled elders, they often must be at home, but at the same time they might have enough time to allow for some work. With enough statistics smart people could make an informed decision, whether forcing WFH worth it or not.
The problem I see with that is that anyone who is legally granted the right to WFH becomes much less employable, similar to the way that young women are often passed over in favour of men now because employers don't want to risk someone getting pregnant and taking lots of time off.
Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC.
For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus.
For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.
They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.
Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.
Part of the job as a senior+ is training entry/mid-level software engineers. Their job, at least part of it, is to ask questions and learn.
Agreed, however some teams/orgs have skewed ratios such that the senior job basically becomes fielding interrupts all day and then coding at home after dinner.
Fine if thats the job, but don't call it senior engineer and treat as an IC role that is also expected to clear lots of Jiras (hey! seniors should be able to do 3X story points if juniors are doing X.. what are we paying them for!).
A lot of "flat organizations" delude themselves with 30:1 IC:manager ratios where what's really happening under the hood is - 5 seniors on the team each fielding 5 juniors worth of interrupts all day, with 1 manager on top whack-a-moling crisis management.
I’m 40+ and I still just work on my laptop. I do have an office setup but I dunno I just kind of like sitting in bed with the laptop.
I totally agree with the core of your comment since that's exactly what I'm telling people when we have discussions around the topic.
But I'm surprised how truer and truer this part sadly is :
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
Your comment was at the top so I read it first. Then I browsed through the other threads and... Yes, that's quite sad.
It's just simple empathy. You know what's good for you/what you want, that doesn't mean everybody should live their life the same way.
It really depends on the people you're dealing with and their motivation. I've been working from home 100% since early 2016. You can make it more efficient in almost everything (I don't do creative work - so I don't know how that would go). Add to it better wellbeing, lower environmental impact, better access to skilled workforce and lower cost for the company and there should be no doubt WFH works 100% of the time in 99% of companies. I often had small team leaders, or mid managers tell me, "but I don't really have that close personal relationship with some of the people WFH". Yeah, sometimes you don't. When you have a tough problem in the office and your boss comes down you can show him how everyone is so busy trying to resolve it. You have a group of guys looking very busy here, a loud meeting over there. And you can just run from one group to the other looking extremely involved.... When people WFH you actually need to know what they are doing (very rare a manager will have a knowledge to fully understand a deep tech issue at such level) or you just trust people are doing their best. And that is very difficult to do when you don't know if they aren't having a birthday party with their kid and pretending to work when your world is caving in. The solution? You have to have good technical team leads and you rely on them in such situations.
The horrible non-solution some companies try? Monitoring. Desktop casting, webcam always on. As long as you do that the productivity will plummet far below that of the office. Why? Because you give people another tool to show how busy they are "at work" other than the work itself. If you have no monitoring you have to prove you're working by doing actual work. We all know the products called "mouse jiggle" and such. If you cN get away with looking busy for the camera and moving the mouse many people will. All these people that pretend to work are a huge untapped economic potential. The key to utilising it is making them want to do the work.
> I think a lot of people are talking past each other.
Of course. Apart from the WFH majority there also vocal proponents of hybrid (and I believe some who believe in full RTO, although these seem to be very few).
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice. Yes, I worked for a few companies who do just that and everybody is happy! Those who want it, come to the office, those who don't, work from where they wish. Everybody's happy, and it's just that simple. The fact that most companies are afraid of even considering giving people a choice is a sign of... I don't know, a "tunnel vision"?
The solution to this conundrum is to give people a choice.
Except that if most choose full time remote, then those who favour hybrid (like me) or RTO have their choice made for them wrt collaboration and the other reasons given in the parent comment, so unfortunately, no, that's not really a solution.
A bunch of reluctantly-at-the-office coworkers isn't going to be the collaboration utopia you're hoping for. If you end up with an empty office because everyone chose WFH, switch companies.
Eventually things will balance out, with people in companies that have the right balance for them.
Many positives to remote work, but an improvement in collaboration and team ethos is hardly one of them!
If most people choose full time remote if given the option then it's pretty selfish to demand they all go to the office because you prefer it.
Its not as simple as a democratic choice, that was my point. Work isn't like that.
This is a good comment and I had to think about it for a minute. I do agree with you in practicality, but I also think in person works because most people flat out can’t or won’t take the time to communicate effectively in writing. Put them in a room and they’re suddenly forced to do it. But that said, just because most people can’t effectively communicate and instead use async communications like slack zombies is not my problem. If lawyers can handle contract negotiations over email, you can handle managing people with a ticketing systems and well written emails. I mean, by the sounds of it you won’t, and that’s ok, but that’s either a skill issue or a choice and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
For the vast majority of human existence the majority of communication was done verbally and in person.
We’ve never communicated this much with text and most of that increase has probably come in the past, what, 20 years?
I think rather than people being lazy/inept it’s more a case of our brains struggling to adapt to a way of communication that is thousands of years newer than speech.
People adapted pretty well to being glued to a screen and reading order of magnitudes more than they were used to... or do most people just spend 12h in front of phones just scrolling pictures and watching videos? I honestly don't know.
I really don’t understand what you’re saying here. Letters have existed for literally thousands of years at this point and people were able to communicate effectively through that. Several countries were founded and destroyed with coordination through written communication.
I know plenty of people that still study the letters that were used to communicate while founding the United States. It seems to me that the last 20 years has led to a massive decrease in the effectiveness of written communication because people don’t have to be clear or concise anymore.
Perhaps they still study those letters due to the ambiguity in understanding of what those people meant?
We also don’t know that they understood each other as effectively as they would have if they communicated verbally in person.
It is far easier to understand someone’s true meaning in person thanks to tone and body language. Communication in person is quicker because typing/writing is slow. That speed allows for faster ideation and iteration.
It’s not impossible to communicate in written form at all but I don’t believe it’s as effective.
To your first point, we write more emails, more DMs, more online comments, more text messages etc than ever before. We clearly communicate more in written form now than at any point in history.
hunter gatherers vs universities. one of these groups is dirt poor the other unimaginably wealthy in comparison
Written communication, and in-person interaction, are force multipliers, and universities have very high levels of both.
Most people struggle to be efficient and effective at written communication. There are a huge number of people with good technical skills whose writing skills don't go much beyond writing a string of one-liners on Slack. And particularly in the younger generations, there is an enormous amount of resistance to anything that looks like detail-oriented long-form writing. In-person interactive discussion is much easier for people without these skills.
It takes years of practice to become proficient at this, even if English is your native language. Everyone wants full-time remote but few people possess the communication skills to effectively work asynchronously and I see very few people intentionally trying to develop these skills or being willing to put in the many hours of work required.
This may be the primary essential gap for remote: people need to dramatically improve their written communication skills. Until they do, they lack the skills to work remotely effectively.
Ironically, we used to do asynchronous highly technical long-form discussions over email and on mailing lists. It is where I developed a lot of my writing skills, and this used to be the norm. It worked pretty well and some older open source projects still work this way. Now everyone hates email because it forces them to write.
You’re correct, you know.
If we’re talking about the IC work, the benefits of WFH are acknowledged even by its detractors.
The people struggling with the “management” problem in remote work are either looking at the wrong place or being oblivious that it’s solution will come from adjacent fields like lawyers or accountants. Perhaps it’s time for them to look beyond their own field?
Agree. I don't think there's enough discussion about how bad remote collaboration tools are beyond "Teams sux". We need low latency, large screen, high resolution tools like Google's Project Starline, which is a good step in that direction. Voice cloning and deepfakes offer a plausible route to achieve very high fidelity in low bandwidth, but I think Zoom et. al. may be reluctant to explore that path because of its [currently] creepy perception.
I personally had the opposite experience when it came to highly collaborative SMALL teams. In my last WFH project, lasting a couple of years, we worked 8 hours a day in a video call with our cameras turned on (most of the time). We did code collaboration in VSCode, design collaboration in Figma, and database/architectural collaboration in Miro. Everything else was via screen share. For our team it was HIGHLY effective. It didn't hurt that we all enjoyed working with each other. The choice to work in video calls with our cameras on was less about accountability and more about feeling connected. Nobody judged if your camera was off or you left the call. Easily the best years of my career.
WFH is best for focused work. Office is best for collaboration. I'm not sure I've found a tool that works for collaboration like a whiteboard. Digital solutions just never really worked in our company and we tried a few.
On the flip side, open source projects function just fine with 100% remote work in different time zones.
One thing I found with WFH pre-and-post Covid is the the 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it". Complex architectures in the minds of a few people, or the way creaky systems worked together, and so on. Or to put it another way, no documentation for offline folks, because no one considered it important. So much for all that boasting about business continuity plans.
Which is almost a justification for being in the office, just to ask 'those people' how things works. It should also be a big red flag to management that things need fixing. But that's in the category of the management not seeing the financial benefit of doing it as there isn't an instant measurable up-front saving.
(edit) 'those people' are typical senior devs, and senior devs are often most likely to want to, or can, WFH.
Documentation is not a complete fix. So you have 1000 pages of documentation. Which page has the answer to your question? At work you ask your coworker with more experience "Can you tell me how X works?" and get an answer immediately. On remote you type in to chat "Can you tell me how X works?" you get an answer in 5 seconds, or 30 or 5 minutes, or 10 or 3hrs later, or never. Where as in the WFO example you were back to work immediately with little to no context switching, in the remote example you might have to just go work on something else (30-60 minute context switch) while you wait for an answer, then once you get it do another 30-60 minute context switch to get back into whatever it was you were doing.
Maybe LLMs will solve this. Have them read the code and then be able to ask them questions about how it works?
It's not just docs though. Maybe it's going over an idea. "I'm thinking of solving this issue by doing X, what do you think?" Same, WFO, immediate answer. WFH, answer in 5 secs to 5hrs+ or never.
People will complain that getting a question takes them out of the zone. That might be true but it's never been true for any co-worker I've ever personally worked with. Nor with myself. It's always been easy and pleasant to answer a coworker's question. A few times a year I'm working on something so complicated I need to be uninterrupted for a few hours but that's rare, for me at least.
My workplace offers both WFH and in-office work (our choice). Before COVID, most people worked in the office, but COVID forced everyone to get set up for and used to working at home.
One of the funniest changes that came with this is that, even when everyone is working in the office now, we still communicate primarily through our WFH chat program because it is less intrusive.
It's also very handy for referring back to later — to the extent that when we do have an in-person discussion, we usually summarize it in the chat afterwards so that we can search for it in the future.
Mind you, we don't have the issues you describe (questions going unanswered for hours or not at all). With very few exceptions, such as when someone was out sick and I didn't realize, all of my questions have been answered within minutes. I imagine that is is because we are a relatively small team (albeit stretched across several timezones these days) and the chat is mostly pretty quiet.
My only complaint is that it has made the separation between work time and leisure time a lot more fuzzy. We all basically act as if we are on call all the time to answer questions, and it is common for my coworkers to even attend video call meetings from doctor's offices and overseas vacations just to say hi.
I think this is backwards. It's much easier to join Zoom meetings from home, and while you are on these meetings everyone can see that you're giving them at least partial attention. While heads-down work at home requires more discipline from you and more of a leap of faith from management.
In the office, quiet spaces to take a meeting from are scarce, but it's better established that your unscheduled time is actually spent on work.
> 'Feynman moment'- "If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it".
Unsure if you're attributing it to Feynman (although I do see the relationship in Feynman's thought process, but the quote is from Einstein:
> If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
... buuut really it's from Nicolas Boileau (1674):
> Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement. Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
Tx'd:
> What is well understood is told with clarity, and the words to say it come up easily.
As well as a few others that are right on point:
> Avant donc que d'écrire, apprenez à penser. Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure, l'expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure.
Tx'd:
> Before even to think one should learn to write. Whether the idea is more or less obscure, expression follows through, 'ther less sharp or more pure.
It's the sort of thing that's probably been coined/phrased independently dozens of times over the centuries.
Some people collaborate better in person, some don't. I work with people (deliberately) who collaborate better via text chat. We sometimes jump on a call with a screen share, but that is rare. I have tried everything over the past 30+ years and find there are some people who just 'need' the office as they thrive there, but mostly I found that people who insist on office hours and say they are more productive are just really not very good at what they do and compensate for that with an external cabaret of 'work' which really doesn't work at home.
By the way, LLMs really helped us here; we chat with a bot reading and extracting everything and storing it conveniently so it won't get lost for later.
When figuring out precisely what problem to work out, in person meetings are critical, and WFH is a huge obstacle towards progress.
Once a problem is well defined, WFH is more productive.
What is an “IC work” and what does it mean “being an IC”? Can’t get the acronym.
Individual Contributer.
It is my understanding that IC is individual contributor. So basically devs who are making their own parts of the code.
IC is usually meant in contrast to manager, meaning ICs are the engineers without anyone reporting to them.
The difference between "not a manager" and "working on their own part of the code" is important when you're talking about positions with a lot of seniority like staff or principal engineers, because those ICs are still expected to work on massive projects involving a lot of cat-herding and leadership that touch large chunks of a company's code, they just aren't doing it as the manager of a team.
Yup, you said it better than me.
Funny you mention whiteboard work. I agree that is one of the things that sucks remotely, but I also think it's because whiteboard support in video calls is universally awful.
Would it be as bad if everyone had a digital whiteboard next to their desk that synced with video calls? Probably not, but companies never pay for proper remote work setups (good cameras, microphone etc).
We're still stuck with Google Meet, which is honestly the best video call system (highest quality, most reliable) except that it doesn't support bloody remote control of other people's computers. So infuriating. "No click the next... down a bit. ok now type this... no not there in... no go back..." Ugh.
I agree it's not a black-and-white problem, but I don't fully agree with your statement about collaboration.
I am a senior software developer who was entirely against working from home until 2020. Now, I can't imagine ever returning to working on-premise without losing a lot of productivity and most of my motivation.
I am absolutely for meeting the people I work with in person occasionally, though. But we barely do any productive work at these meetings. We usually have workshops or something similar, but for me, it is more about socializing with people than really getting anything done. In my experience, some people are tough in online meetings, but they are suddenly the nicest if you meet them in person.
However, one of the aspects that has improved the most for me since Covid was collaboration, as strange as this may sound.
Before, we were all sitting in an ample open office space. If you wanted to talk to anyone, you walked to them and spoke directly with them. Some had the rule that wearing their headsets meant they were focused on a topic and did not want to be distracted for that time. That did not always work well because some people forgot this rule (strangely, these were very often the same sales guys), the developers forgot to put on their headsets, or they forgot to put them down after they were available again so often, that you just had to ask them anyway if you ever wanted to get your answer.
Also, we could not work in larger groups without getting into one of the meeting rooms, which were always in high demand. Then there was the simple factor of different people having their own issues. There are these guys with questionable hygiene, different preferences about temperature, the ones who don't like being too close to other people (social anxiety, I think), or people like me, who have awful hearing if there are too many people talking at the same time. And working on the same codebase was horrible. One person had to connect their computer to the meeting room display and either do all the typing or we had to take turns. And that was if we had a room with a display... If we didn't have a meeting room or one with a display, we all tried to somehow stand behind one person typing. If that was in the "open office space," it also often annoyed people around us because of our constant speaking.
When we started working from home, all these problems suddenly went away. We could meet online, connect our IDEs (and/or have one person share the screen), and everyone could sit in their own environment. We often had group calls open the whole day, and most of the team was permanently in them. Some were muted, and you only heard the keyboard clicking from others. If someone had a question, they just asked away, and anyone could answer. If we needed to ask someone else, we just pinged them. They joined the meeting room as soon as they could and left after we cleared whatever we had to clear with them.
I don't work at that company anymore and am now self-employed. However, I have a colleague with whom I talk about four hours a day via online calls since we work together on almost all of our projects. Apart from that, it still works with our clients as before. If we need anyone, we ping them to ask if they have time. This usually results in an immediate call or only up to a few hours later.
But we don't have to search for a meeting room or annoy other colleagues with our "constant talking." Collaboration is now basically unlimited, where it was a struggle before. The next in-person meeting with one of our customers is at the end of this month. It will be an ~ eight-hour commute for me (each way), and I expect it to be as unproductive as the last in-person meetings. But we see the people in person and have some human-to-human interactions, which is nice and helps improve the relationships with the people we're working with.
I am literally at least 10x when I work from home.
I have ADHD and through years of discipline, cultivating my workspace to suit my needs, and hard work I can be productive most of the day in the zone without (much) sidetracking.
Literally impossible for me to do in the modern software dev sweatshop.
I also make more money, can spend more time with my family because I don’t commute, and plenty of other positives.
I love the work, I enjoy working with my colleagues and I can set my own boundaries by setting office hours and scheduling meetings. There is very rarely anything that derails my day anymore. Everything is much better documented because everything must live in confluence or Jira or it doesn’t exist. The company saves tons of money on real estate.
If you can change your processes and workflow to take advantage of tools that suit remote work, it’s superior in basically every way.
Pry it from my cold dead hands.
A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning. It was not good for many.
A lot of the value of being in an office is to reduce the barriers to social grooming and communicating. It's an emotional morale advantage, and some things are fixed faster or discovered faster when people talk to each other, and people do it better when in person than they do over shitty video calls, where the majority of people have crap setups, and despite your best efforts, will continue to have crap setups. Most people don't have the emotional ability and seriousness to compensate for the barriers that remote work brings up and make sure this important part of the work gets done.
Sometimes the most productive times in an office can be coworker lunch and coworker lunch over zoom calls sucks ass.
I know I will get a lot of people here who seethe 'but for ME, I HATE socializing with my coworkers', or 'my coworkers do socializing wrong and it's a detriment!' and I say to you, good for you, but have you considered that those things might be a negative thing for the rest of your team and the company. The company hired you for your total value contribution to the system of the company, not just your isolated measurable personal productivity alone and to not be self centered about is something to consider, hypothetical person.
Just to add (as I'm sure the contributors are aware) parent comment and grandparent comment are both true.
It would be nice if wfh wasn't such a polarised issue.
> A lot of adult ADHD diagnoses came from the pandemic because a lot of people were suddenly without the structure of an office and became adrift and unproductive. The office provided body doubling, some executive functioning, some help with time blindness, a prosthetic environment and more and now they had to make it themselves without any direction while suffering from poor executive functioning.
Well, and now we have diagnoses and corresponding treatment, intentional & personalized interventions rather than accidental and incomplete ones.
I don’t think parent meant it as a negative thing. Those are all good things.
It is undeniably true, though, that the pandemic forced a lot of people to do a lot of self-analysis and reflection.
And adult ADHD diagnosis wasn’t a thing until not that long ago
Agree, I have a coworker with some addictions and only performs in close proximitry to other workers.
Btw which is something I also sometimes seek out, a hard working colleague is an inspiration.
You are the anomaly, not the norm. WFH takes discipline, work ethic and honestly the ability to manage a work life balance. Doing this is hard, like you said.
Problem is most people aren’t disciplined:)
I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.
More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.
Commuting is mentally draining.
I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.
Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.
I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park
And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.
So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.
This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.
So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.
> Commuting is mentally draining.
This is an understated problem.
Driving? Well, you have to be in at 8am so that thunderstorm, blizzard, morning twilight, yup, you have to drive through it. And the same the other way.
Catching a train? Is it on time? Will you get a seat or be standing for 30+ minutes. Will your connection arrive? If it's cancelled, what's the alternate route home if the line is closed.
Of course, your millionaire company owner has an apartment a short walk from the centre-of-the-city office.
In my experience, most people who struggle with WFH lack specific material things like space, a quiet home, a schedule anchored by the presence of loved ones who live nearby and a functioning community which they're a part of, good mental and physical health, coworkers who will help them without a fuss, and a million other things.
I think people who take the structure of their lives for granted say things like "problem is most people aren't disciplined:)", but this definition of discipline is directly related to how nice one's house and home life are. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality of "disincline" and "work ethic" lets you feel smug about the fact that you're doing better working from your nice home office as an L5 than your new intern who's working from the kitchen table in his family home next to three other people.
Hard disagree. Working from home is a skill that does takes time to develop, but it's no more out of reach than developing the skill of being productive in an office. It was a terrible decision for companies to yank away that opportunity from employees.
> WFH takes discipline
That is bizarre to me. I find the office takes far more discipline. Do people really get that distracted at home? What is so distracting?
Office is an external discipline forced on you while WFH is an internal discipline no one watching over your shoulders, that's the difference.
For an undisciplined person anything can be distracting: birds chirping, picking up a delivery, cooking, a friend dropping by, daily chores like washing, organizing things, etc... it's an endless list really.
> no one watching over your shoulders
That alone is distracting enough for me. I hate the "look busy" vs. actually being busy game people play in offices.
I have severe ADHD and I don't even know what discipline feels like. That's precisely why I can't work in offices. In fact, other people are more productive when I am not in an office with them as well.
I'm cursed with the fact that a lot of my hyperactivity manifests as talking. It's actually problematic enough that I have been reprimanded for talking excessively at points in my past. I am quite charismatic too, so people end up getting locked in these hour+ long conversations with me lol.
At home, there is no one talk to but my significant other who often works during the same time. So, WFH skyrocketed my productivity. I go in the office two days a week, and I basically lose two days of work a week now.
The trick is getting those two days of being in the office and talking and interacting to sum up to be things you can put on your perf packet. those two days aren't "lost". they can be a different kind of work, which culminates into leading teams and mentoring people. work comes in many forms.
I WFH, even work on weekends. I notice that after working weekends I feel tired on Mondays, so I decided to spend Mondays on less technical stuff, e.g. customer meetings, interviews, lead generation etc
It is not easy to say that I'm not a very "internally disciplined" person. I once spent half a year procrastinating instead of working on a personal project. But when you're working for someone (regardless of place), they are paying you for it, and you would like to continue receiving the money, how is this not externally enforced discipline?
I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
> I've been WFH since 2016 and I never had an issue with focus when doing paid work. I do want to get paid.
YMMV. When I was freelancing, I charged by the hour. Working for 2-3 hours per day was just enough to keep me and the family afloat with some extra money to spare. I haven't saved a penny in 5+ years and haven't had any money for a downpayment on the apartment we were supposed to buy.
Unfortunately, switching to per-project payments would be terrible for me. The deadline would be too far into the future for me to feel the danger of failing the project.
Undisciplined people distract themselves in the office and they happen to distract all other workers around them too.
If you can't tell whether your staff are working that seems quite orthogonal to WFH.
I don't have too much of a problem with it but there are some obstacles depending on your home life.
My wife is hybrid, and on the days she's working from home I have to be firm about boundaries or I'll get significantly less done than on the days where it's just me. If you have kids, or live with your parents, I imagine it presents similar challenges. My sister moved back in with my father in 2020 due to the pandemic, and he was bizarrely disruptive to her work despite _also_ being remote. I'm not saying offices don't have this problem too (many such stories of loud and obnoxious coworkers), but it can be harder to have these conversations with loved ones.
Lots of people live in distracting, annoying places. If I open my window, I will hear some idiot gun it off the line in their straight-piped car from the stoplight near my apartment, several times an hour. There is a constant din of tire noise from the nearby freeway. The firemen at the station down the block do their thing every now and then. If I close my window, it regularly reaches 78F+ in my apartment. I have been battling property management to fix my A/C for months now, and every HVAC technician they send does nothing to fix the problem. My old neighbors used to play shitty music during the day.
Especially in HCOL places with mega-offices where these RTO mandates often stem from, sometimes it really is just easier to work in an air-conditioned office where you can get free coffee, snacks, and maybe some quiet if you're lucky or can slink away to an unused meeting room.
I 100% agree with you though that, at least for me, the discipline of getting up early in the morning, being well groomed and presentable, and battling traffic both ways is greater for me than taking steps to make myself comfortable and productive at home.
During COVID, like everyone else, our company went to WFH. Conversely, when we had a round of redundancies some of the people that were perceived to be important or productive in the office, turned out to be nothing of the sort, and were surprisingly let go.
They talked. A lot. They worked... very little.
The discipline in the office is to do the work, not go to the 'water cooler' and chat to anyone that was there or organise frivolous meetings.
The 16 pings a minute. The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day. The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon. This is definitely not what it was like in the office.
Unfortunately, I recognize this doesn't change unless an org goes 100% back onsite.
> The "hey, can I call?"'s during what I thought would be my free half hour in the afternoon.
This happens in the office more. Someone just coming to you with whatever they need in the moment.
> The 6 hours of meetings a day because people aren't getting the information they need organically each day.
That is excessive amount of meetings. But also, that organic getting information was still a meeting, you just did not considered it one.
Why wouldn't it work with 2 or 3 unified days onsite and 2 or 3 days wfh, with a no-meetings, minimal-interruptions directive on wfh days? I think this structure, if well managed, would work even better than the old 5-days-in-office.
I agree that this would work, and be ideal. I think it only scales to a certain size organization though. At my company, I'd guess we have over a thousand developers across hundreds of teams, and more supporting staff. There's no possibility of getting everyone in at once.
You can't easily tell a coworker to go away when they start talking to you at your desk. You can mute your notifications and schedule calls. Sounds like you have bad organisation skills.
I have discipline problems but when I am on site, my days are more filled with bullshit, e.g. random conversation over projects that lead nowhere, background conversations on unrelated topics, explaining stuff that aren't worth it, coffee breaks etc.
So while I believe it helps in term of team cohesion and for this purpose, on site is better, in term of productiveness it's a net negative.
Every system in place for measuring output and bringing transparency to work done by office workers/software developers finally make sense in the context of working from home.
Either your tickets get done or you have a really good explanation for why they haven't but because you dug into the problem are able to display deep knowledge of the problem.
Discipline has nothing to do with this. Your work will have expectations and deadlines and they will either be met or another human being will grade you with an F. Whatever human trait causes people to do work under those circumstances might be shame, fear, social pressure manifesting itself as work output, I can say for certain it isn't discipline.
It seems too take more discipline to attend a workplace than to do the same work from home. I don't understand your position.
To me, what you're saying is like how banks won't give people mortgages when the monthly payments are half what their current rental is because of person's "inability to pay".
WFH requires discipline, but allows you more freedom to mould your environment to your needs.
It's taken me a decade to find the perfect balance, which is total complete silence, but I would be absolutely powerless in turning an open-space office job into the monk's retreat I need.
I think that he is the norm, actually. Slacking off in the work is easy too, there are many empty discussions that feels like a work, discussions that are not work at all but you still count it as working time. If no one sees your monitor you can watch the same youtube. But, since you are at office you clock at as working.
It also takes discipline to work at the office. and as you said, most people aren't disciplined. They just stay at the office, doing absolutely nothing productive and wait for the clock to tell them they can go home.
I'm not disciplined at all when it comes to my work and I'm still massively more productive at home. What are you talking about?
Having non-work activities that are fulfilling like cooking/cleaning to break up the work to get out of the rut of brain-fry is so nice. Having non-work non-screen things to at work is so necessary.
And yet the IMF report seems to suggest that, even if your data is correct, all aspects of the economy benefit.
Work from home is a productivity killer for me. While maybe I can get spurts of output, it's just harder to communicate and collaborate through digital means. (I'm on the spectrum and that has a lot to do with it.)
But I honor those who can do it. Good on you. I'm jealous lol
I am the exact same way.
I tend to be more on the hyperactive side, and I am far less distracted when I work from home sheerly because there are not others for me to go talk to.
I also have noticed that I tend to suffer from less mental fatigue in general when working from home. The only issue with working form home is that I tend to work longer. I might hyperfocus and pull at 12 hour day or something, but I try not to do this.
Yeah, at present I can't even imagine going back to the office. It feels almost crazy to me to go back to work in the office. Such a waste of time and efficiency.
Wasting time on looking proper, having to do everything at certain time, spending arbitrary hours at work even if there's nothing productive left to do, I would feel guilty leaving early so I just waste time in the office etc. At home I never have to "pretend work".
Weird how Covid overall worked out so very well for me. I wonder where I'd be without it. Of course it wasn't a positive event on the whole, but I can't lie that there weren't any positives.
Any tips or reading you would recommend about organizing the workspace to improve focus? I recently switched from a self-imposed 5 days in the office (obscenely short commute, homeschooled kids) to a mostly WFH arrangement (the commute to the new office is two hours each way) and despite having an office with a door lock at home, my productivity could be better.
I think the top comment reflects this - I have adhd too and I can’t be productive at home. I suffer a commute every day because my job performance tanked when I worked from home 8 mo strait. I’m much more productive at the office - I just wish my wife would agree to move closer to the office.
The benefits of which you speak, are pretty much I've to say, too. My present situation offers me above-average flexibility, but not to the level as yours. Care to share whom you work for, or where to find such roles?
It's basic common sense. Cut almost 3 hours of commute+preparation and not only you have saved yourself half a working day but also the fatigue and exhaustion.
It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
> Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence
In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
I really don't think this is the case... I believe more than anything it's about the kind of personalities that make up people who are in charge of these decisions... Think about the types of people who are c-suite executives. They are likely people who prefer to be in an office setting.. at least most of the time. I don't think they like it very much coming into an office and seeing it mostly empty... Partly because it diminishes their perceived value as a leader and everything they've worked for but also because they truly believe people work better in person because that's what they've always done and continue to want to do.
I think that's actually plausible, because yeah, if I was to put myself in their shoes. If someone is looking for status, and people looking up to them, etc, it would make sense that they would get much less that sort of attention if everyone is working remotely. Getting that through the Zoom is not exactly what it would be in real life.
While we’re debating whether it’s a conspiracy from the elites or not, that eludes debates on the real important questions for a team lead/founder like me:
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
> Does the office provide a better environment for building things together?
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to hire a great, motivated team. I have no doubt they are doing their things diligently and it's clearly visible even through Zoom since they talk about their technical challenges and it's clear what kind of effort they've put in. If they didn't put in the effort they wouldn't be able to talk about those challenges at such detail. And I do constantly think how great job we did hiring.
I'm going to need some data to prove this. I keep seeing this claim, but have not seen anything more than conjecture. There are just too many factors for this, and you would have to believe that a company is willing to throw away money for this to happen.
There are tons of articles out there about mayors/council members/ etc pressuring execs to get butts in office seats for the past few years. I don’t know if that counts as data to you or not, but they are relatively easy to find in a google search.
It’s the other way round many times. Companies get fat tax breaks to move into a particular town or city.
Those tax breaks are explicitly contingent on butts being physically in seats to add to the economy and tax revenue of that municipality.
Too few butts in seats triggers penalties or revoking of the tax breaks altogether.
>Too few butts
/Dr Mephisto enters the chat/
City governments have no leverage to pressure businesses with, though.
They already threw away the money by purchasing real estate and falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.
Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
It's all guesswork until we start measuring the impact of interruptions in open plan offices vs. homes (which is going to vary with families).
Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.
I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.
"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.
2/3 of corporate real estate are empty and the commercial real estate market is due for a major crash. a lot of assets on companies balance sheets are for the offices that they own. or leave empty while leased
> real-estate value
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
Ding ding ding … this is the most overlooked aspect of the RTO/WFH dynamic.
This might be the nr 1 reason.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me. They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to...
It's a layoff, but a really poor one losing exactly the people you don't want to lose.
As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
Absolutely and no publicly traded company is going to admit it.
not really. there used to be a system where the SF government of course provided tax benefits for Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block) to open offices to enliven Market Street. Jack Dorsey fell into this trap and actually did establish his office there, until the SF government decided to cash their Golden goose and take these tax breaks away.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
"RTO is definitely the play: the CEO says all his friends are doing it; activist-investors want RTO for their own porfolios, PR says breaking the lease on our newish HQ is embarrassing while Legal says it makes more work for them; Accounting says we'll pay more in tax unless we can prove X jobs created locally; our middle-managers need it in order to tell if work is happening, and HR notes that we can slim our workforce by prompting a lot of 'voluntary' departures! Seven key stakeholder groups."
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
While all of that is true, I wonder how much of it is re-affirmation of a social hierarchy.
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
Local tax benefits is the exception, not the norm. Just because 1% of the companies get that for 1% of the location, it doesn't prove 90% of the companies have WFH policy.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
so how is that verified, does the local tax authority come in and visually verify the butts in seats?
“Send us a count of employees whose home addresses is in state S (or city C). We reserve the right to audit that count.”
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
>In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
I keep seeing this being brought up, I haven't researched it too much, but it's a bit hard for me to believe that this could truly be the case, that there's such huge influence from commercial real estate owners on CEOs of much larger companies? What causes them to have such power over large companies?
The pressure is not from smaller RE companies, is from the biggest banks who control the comercial debt and see the writing on the wall. The banking industry can exert indirect pressure on lots of tech investors. Similarly for politicians in large cities and states who can control the tax side of the equation.
> is from the biggest banks who control the comercial debt and see the writing on the wall.
Okay but surely given all the pro-wfh people, you'd think at least someone would leak memos of banks pressuring lenders to institute RTO policies?
It's not like, a direct marching order.
It's just a general attitude that has filtered around C suites or whatever. Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
Just run of the mill cohort thinking. No big conspiracy.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have direct sight into all of that. Luckily, I think there's many start ups and other companies who are valuing and all in on the remote work. I haven't felt the risk at my company to have a strong urge of getting people return to the office.
>Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
As in a general, "what about city centers!" and "everyone needs to get back in the office just because!"
It's all feels and vibes.
Is this actually happening? I have seen this idea thrown out a lot online but it always feels like a conspiracy theory to me (akin to "fine art is a tax write-off")
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
Doubt Boston is alone in these propositions
Why would the city care about number of people in the office if they are deriving the money from commercial property taxes?
I don't understand the complete calculus but Boston is facing a $500mil shortfall and the mayor is increasing taxes to makeup the shortfall:
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/boston-reside...
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
- public transport - spending money in local stores - spending money on housing - spending money on local child care - etc etc etc
Why would the city care if no one is working downtown?
Because that’s what feeds local businesses especially shops and service oriented jobs. I’m not saying I care that happens because remote workers can do that closer to their home so it’s a net zero game, but not in the eyes of business owners downtown or the mayors of said downtowns.
People being downtown are people more likely to spend money downtown then someone who lives in the suburbs and doesn't come to downtown. Therefore more sales taxes collected, more businesses in downtown, etc...
For Boston in particular, governmental borders are close to downtown. The city is composed of several unconsolidated abutting Towns and Cities. The City of Boston[1] mostly extends from downtown to the south-west. So MIT/Harvard are Town of Cambridge, not City of Boston. Downtown-vs-suburb revenue tensions extend into the city.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhoods_in_Boston
Because then transit, services, restaurants, stores, dry-cleaners, gyms fail, and the taxbase collapses (every city has a different mix of commercial vs residential property tax vs sales-tax).
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
https://downtownrecovery.com/
Prior discussion on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
Prior discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
It's not just downtown that matters, it is the total population living in the city. People working from home will live away from Boston or other major cities. If they need to work in a downtown office the same people will be forced to live in Boston or close by.
Ends up destroying downtown (downward spiral)
The value of office buildings don't come from nowhere — they come from being used as office buildings.
What company?
I think it explains some of Amazon's choices, as they made multibillion dollar bets on office space and real estate in Seattle.
Yes, Amazon needs people to fill their expensive offices in Seattle, or otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
>> otherwise explain to investors that they wasted billions of dollars building new offices that were used less than 5 years.
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I agree in that I don't think explaining a write off is a problem, per se. But I do see Amazon taking a long term view of their real estate investment and saying "OK we have it in our power to make this payoff" which dynamic is not in play with most writedowns.
feel like that to me too
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it.”
George Carlin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
The conspiracy theory version is that it's the sole cause, rather than one of many causes.
This argument has never made sense. Commercial real estate exists to optimize the real cost (labor). There is no temptation to put it above the needs of labor.
Working in the office could be pretty nice with reasonable commute times and actual office space for employees. Like earning a top 10ish percent salary but the parking lot is full and people use bike locks on their office chairs so they don’t get stolen because they aren’t enough chairs.
Give me an office with a door and a reasonable commute and I’ll be happy to go in to work every day.
“Cost optimize” your office space until it’s hell for me and it’s a no until you double my salary.
And cities don’t need to be designed like they are, seas of residential that are miles away from any workspace and all of the offices crammed together in unlivable downtowns that only have living spaces for single young people.
Yes, all this. I have a 5 minute commute, an office with a door, and plenty of parking. Going back to the office is no big deal (and has some major advantages.)
But of course context will vary from one person to the next. Which is why sweeping generalizations is mostly fruitless. There are endless factors in play here on both sides of the table.
If we could all be like executives and only come into the office when we feel like it unless it’s a rarely important occasion and have actual offices, it would be a much different game.
It’s unfortunate that it has gotten so black and white. I’m a big fan of WFH. But I also think it’s beneficial to see people in the office and interact on a regular basis. Why can’t we have both?
> Why can’t we have both?
having both is equivalent to having WFH (but without the cost savings to the business regarding office rentals).
People who want an office are likely doing so in the expectation that there'd be people there. What actually happens is that the office is semi-empty on most days, and you'd get a few ghosts here and there (unless there's mandated office days).
So in the end, hybrid (without mandated days) is basically the same as WFH.
Ok thanks for breaking this down.
I’m actually rooting for hybrid with mandated office days (eg Tue-Thu) but without being super strict about it. If people can’t make it on a day or even two that’s fine.
I kind of think WeWork’s business model might have succeeded in the WFH post-Covid era.
It allows the company to be flexible with meeting space budget without being on the hook for permanent space.
My company ran out of space pre-Covid, so we would book random meeting spaces (within walking distance) around the city.
There are companies that have pulled off We Work style office renting successfully for decades.
Just without the crazy, megalomaniac founder CEO, without trying to spin it as being the savior of humanity, without a buttload of unrelated and extremely questionable side projects, without trying to sell it as a tech company and inflating the valuation to absurd levels.
But did the founders of those companies become as rich as the WeWork founder?
The issue seems to be less about wfh or not.
It’s just how well does a company culture support distributed work (many locations) or not.
“Company culture”… that’s the word they use for sure. Often it’s ego, sunk cost fallacies and other things that have to do with the culture in the C suite for sure. Pay people well and treat them with respect and you’ll end up with good and loyal employees, as always.
[flagged]
I don’t follow the male, female, disabled person argument at all.
The canonical example would be it's hard to have a serendipitous conversation with your male colleagues in the mens restroom if you're female.
That's the obvious one. Then we get to styles of conversation and engagement. I've had to defend promotions for female engineers from criticism based entirely on their communication. "She is not assertive enough." Ok, is she highly effective at her job? Yes. Ok, then what the fuck are we talking about?
And always what we're talking about is men communicate a certain way, and women don't, and the men don't want to have to change.
To answer the disabled question, there was a flight of stairs at the office, and the meeting would end and people would just head up the stairs. Except the dude in the wheelchair. I'm autistic and I have light sensitivity, and after a meeting in a nice bright window office, I am exhausted and don't want to engage in social rituals.
My point is that the examples that tech leaders give as the reason to go back to the office are simply male social rituals, held up as "how we have good ideas and develop new hires". They're not. They are all managers performing post-hoc rationalization theater And if those were the goals, they'd figure out an effective way to meet them that's better than "chatting to john while taking a leak".
And the most galling thing is that every single one of my most impactful career moments didn't involve having a serendipitous conversation. It involved researching things I was interested in.
I am for nerds and against tech-bros.
No one is having serious conversations in the restroom. That would be profoundly bizarre and weird.
And most people aren't saying that serendipitous conversations spur great big innovations or "aha!" moments, but rather that it just makes the process easier. Or that they prefer it. If yours are different then fine, but don't be so dismissive of other people's experiences and preferences.
I’m sorry but rude people exist everywhere and it’s not a tech thing. I’ve been in big tech for over a decade and I don’t have conversations in the bathroom. If you think WFH reduces these bro-relationships, you are being naive and they just become less accessible.
We simply are not going back, period. They are fighting the trend. Ask your analysis team and marketing about what happens to people that fight the trend.
If I am called back, I will come in, but only for as long as it takes me to move onto something else. It really is that simple.
On the other hand, executives are clearly banking on a good old-fashioned recession to rein in the unruly and ungrateful employees.
It's not just about RTO. The trend is bigger than that. It's just overall reality. If you need to go remote to fill a position then so be it. But some people have certain thoughts lodged squarely in their atrophied boomer brain about how everything has to be, no exceptions because feelings.
The companies that don't have fog stuck in their head are going out and hiring remote and they have great cultures and are oozing productivity. That's the trend.
The title of the article doesn't match the rest. Productivity is getting more from the same inputs, not getting more with more inputs.
First, there is very little data and just a couple conjectures thrown around. There isn't much substantive evidence of what it claims.
Second, even if people aren't commuting, it just assumes people work the same hours, but many people are probably working longer hours so you can't tell the impact on WFH on productivity.
Third, it doesn't look at outputs at all, especially the output of the company. While some (or even all) individuals might produce more, the group as a whole will have less communication and each employee might have less context of what else is going on in the company, so much of their contribution might not align as well with company objectives. Management of all the individuals would be more difficult and the company would be less of a team. This would support the idea that the increased productivity is only available to well managed groups. I think this sounds much more likely.
Fourth, much of the increase explained is from widening the labor pool. It explicitly mentions those with disabilities, stay at home mothers, and larger geographical inclusion. This isn't increasing productivity, just increasing the labor input.
This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
> This is more an opinion piece with some hand waving than actual proof
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, this is pot.
I despair a little at this. If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts. Client-facing stuff gets centralised to a smaller team of specialists, and the ship gets much tighter.
How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality? The management class and their unnecessary underlings like me have only been so resilient because companies are still on the last days of this post-covid efficiency wave, coupled with the buffer of capital from the money that was created in the last few years.
I'm usually not a doomer, but it's hard to see a way around the next downturn not creating irreversible culture change through AI offshoring and mass layoffs.
There are latent questions in your response. The fear is justified but equally, viewed from a distance, what is the "worth" of your price point, if the same job can be done and lift somebody out of poverty in the developing world?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm asking what an economist or social historian might say, much as if a Lancashire cotton worker asked if his job was disappearing into cotton factories in Bangladesh.
I share your fears btw. I'm just less sure I "deserve" the pay for my disappearing role(s)
In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
Completely agree. And it is funny how we put so much emphasis on developing our skills and abilities, when really our actual value is always determined by the market.
I'm personally at peace with that, and would have a pretty hard time arguing against the logic of off-shoring my job. However, it's also rational to want to hold onto a favourable environmental niche for as long as possible!
How has western society completely forgotten the point of a country? It is not the to create the most efficient economical configuration for routing wealth from the masses to the capital holders. Your value is not determined by the market, and those who tell you it is are only looking to exploit you.
There are people out there who haven’t succumbed to the nihilistic poison of modern liberalism, though the people in power have run a very successful propaganda campaign to convince you they’re evil (and I’m absolutely not talking about staple green cards to diplomas trump).
Can you explain this comment again? It intrigued me but I haven’t the foggiest what you are hinting at.
> If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.
This argument can be made for in-office work too. Offices in the "global south" are much cheaper to operate than in the first world. If the work involves interacting with computers connected via the internet, it can be done from any office.
I think you're onto something.
Even Indians are losing their IT jobs to Vietnamese. [1]
The squeeze is real.
Good time to start a business I guess.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1eckee9/oh...
I live and run a (non-tech) business in Vietnam. I've never tried to run a business in India but I've spent quite a while there, and have worked on occasion with Indin freelancers.
I can tell you that it's nothing to do with price point. There are cultural difficulties and language barriers, sure. But Vietnamese are generally highly conscientious, well educated, incredibly hard working people. And besides this, their culture (no strong religion, high value on women in then workplace, non confrontational, accepting of LGBT and different cultures) fits very well with Western values. It's not perfect - taking criticism on board is not a strong point of Vietnamese culture, for example.
I fully understand it's not fair to dismiss huge country like India, and there are certainly many amazing Indian workers out there, and I've had to let go a fair number of Vietnamese slackers while building our team (as I would in any country). But statistically speaking, you'll probably have a far better time outsourcing to Vietnam over India.
I work for a company that has satellites in both India and Vietnam (among others).
Working with Vietnam is much better, if someone knows English then they have a decent enough education; and their local institutions make it possible to verify credentials. They have less social issues besides.
Indian outsourcing is almost a bit outdated... Effective machine translation and globally widespread english education, they really don't have much to offer.
Their culture essentially makes it impossible to get predictable value out of a hire.
> our entire development team has been replaced. They can barely speak English.
The race to the bottom is real. xD. (ps: I've spent around a year in Vietnam and barely any software developer I met can speak any intelligible English. So I believe the OP).
I don’t understand this argument. It was called “outsourcing” 20 years ago when there was no AI.
Yeah, the argument made no sense. If "outsourcing" will work this time (and it might), it's because the global south have developed quite a lot in education and infrastructure (pretty much all of the global south has good internet now, sometimes better than the US).
Bingo! (Mostly, the AI stuff is a bit overblown)
This is already happening by large margins. Companies hiring contractors in India or Brazil to do the work that a full time employee used to do.
If WFH can be done in Arizona, it can be done just as easily in Colombia for half the price.
It's like saying you don't need a big ship to cross the ocean. If you have something that floats you can just get on it.
Ofc, it's true, you might get to the same destination. But the journey would be so different you can hardly call it the same thing.
It seems much less likely to me that this wouldn't have the effect of raising the global south up to the level of the global north, rather than drag down the global north to the global south, which would be a huge win for human flourishing. So I can't say I oppose it.
Just as importantly: If you think this is likely to happen, why not invest in those countries now? If I'm right, they're likely to generate outsized returns as they catch up. If I'm wrong, the money you have invested in the global north will actually decrease as time goes on, while the money you have in the south stays steady, leaving you in a much better position than you probably would be otherwise.
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match
Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigger.
Personally I think some industries will go this way and others will go RTO, depending on how competitive they are (especially around R&D). Wages for relocation/RTO will end up rising.
On the flip side: I've heard people saying software is going to be offshored and has no future at least since the 90s dot-com bust, they were still saying it in the 2000s when I was in school, so I'm skeptical that the growth of WFH will overcome all the barriers to global hiring.
Ultimately I think WFH wages will go down/stagnate (of course w/ higher quality of life for many) and companies that want it will have to pay significantly more for someone willing to RTO.
I also think it only takes one unicorn to say "we did it by having everyone RTO!" to flip everything back around.
>If I can do my job at home, then surely somebody can do it in the global south in tandem with AI for peanuts.
>How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
You don't have to wait long, it happened around 20-25 years ago.
They tried remote body shops, which was a disaster (we had "tested deliverables" that didn't compile). This time there seems to be more emphasis on opening your own remote office and hiring the strong candidates there.
> How long until megacorps and SMEs actually execute this reality?
This is the best case scenario. As a country, you want your megacorps/SME to execute this somehow while keeping control. The alternative is that new megacorps/SMEs get spawned in the global south and there you have no job and no cash flow.
Offshoring & distribution of remote work may be bad for you but very very good for humanity.
There will still be local opportunities and huge benefits of being in the first world due to better education and networks. Those benefits will be diluted by remote work/offshoring increasing, and others will benefit due to that.
Probably the increased productivity itself will boost everything for everybody (better matches of employees & employers = higher productivity & cheaper products everywhere... eventually) but in times of change it can be rough in the short term if your income depended on a tightly protected market and the protection just disappeared.
I mean, if you can do your job in-office, then surely somebody in the global can do it in their office? Or what if somebody could do your job in a branch office rather than in HQ?
Is your only differentiation really just being able to physically interact with management?
This was the perspective I was looking for to respond to my innate suspicions caused by the source of this post. Who are they signaling toward?
Hope for new job roles. A race to automate all the things needs a lot of human effort!
As for location... yeah shit may change. But hey at least we give poor countries a fishing rod not a fish. They get richer and you could always go live in cambodia. Digital nomad becomes something normal people do. Not travelling is for the rich!
> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
> And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management,
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
It seems reasonable that eventually it's easier to parallelize instead of having a single unit just do more stuff.
There is nothing that states that career progression must be a pyramid which creates the lack of bottleneck and parallelization.
We could have many parallel units and yet each unit can keep making technical progress.
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner).
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
Enlisted =>college (via GI Bill) => ROTC/OCS
The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees.
https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Co...
Yeah, exactly, there is a path, but it sort of involves quitting the army
I believe most contracts are 4 years active, 4 years reserves, so you can easily get a degree in the 2nd 4 years without leaving the military.
Online degree programs are very popular among active duty military, and have been for about as long as such programs have existed.
I believe this was the reason the warrant officer rank was created.
Not really. Command Sergeant Majors technically dont lead anyone. They are just advisors. Plenty of other senior NCO positions in the army are just staff advisors as well.
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
> he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
Interesting. How do you distinguish that notion from the notion of the "bourgeoisie"?
"bourgeoisie" refers to the capitalist class. Made more rigorous, we can say the set of people who do not need employment to pay their bills, they can live off of investment income. They often still perform labor, but as a part of their own businesses.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
The alternative of professional managers who never did anything didn’t work out so well either, especially in engineering.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
That's inevitable given how quickly the ranks of software workers have grown in the past 20 years.
I wonder, what do you see as a desirable alternative?
This is just as true in office. A bad manager is a bad manager no matter where they manage.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
Typically WFH would expect you (or your boss) to have availability similar to being in person, though?
I currently work somewhere where I can't WFH. And as a counterpoint to pretty much everyone here I prefer it. My last role I was able to WFH.
Reasons I prefer going into the office:
- when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
- not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work.
- easier interaction with colleagues.
I liked it at the start, and liked the flexibility, but after a while hated that my home was also my workplace. I also found it was too easy to do unpaid overtime from home. After a while my productivity fell.
Caveat is I live within cycle distance to work. I hate commuting too, and wouldn't do more than 30 minutes.
Tell me where this dream job is and I will apply. For over 20 years I commuted to the office. Some days I stayed late in the office and pulled 12 hour workdays. Most of my time was stolen by coworkers and managers who constantly interrupted or insisted I attend a meeting about some issue I knew nothing about. When I left the office after only putting in 8 hours, I would end up working 2+ hours at home to catch up for the work I couldn’t do on the office. Now with WFH, when people try to interrupt me on Slack, I tell them to send me a meeting invite.
as with all things your experience depends on context. if you are part of a business team that needs to request things off other people and build off needing something from others, then you love working from the office cuz the others are available for you
if in turn, you are someone who completes projects for other people to pay you back on, then you realize that you'd rather be able to heads down work and also take 100% credit for it
Haha dream job it is not, but a definite benefit is you never take it home. And I am never not paid overtime if I work beyond my hours. I could definitely get a better paid job but this one is good enough with a decent work/life balance.
> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
To quote Dilbert:
> Now let me get this straight. The time I spend in the shower actually thinking about solving problems is not "work." The time I spend at the office attending meaningless meetings is "work."
It's a mental separation kind of thing. When I've had jobs where I work at an office, I am able to mentally leave work at work. When I've worked from home, I struggle to do that and end up thinking about work when showering or doing dishes.
before covid, you had this 9 to 5 separation where people were required to come in so they basically did, and after they left they would just sometimes even leave the laptops at work
during covid you took afternoon naps. so then this liberty also traded for you to work other odd hours with a get-it-done-when-you-can mentality outside the 9 to 5
post covid now? the employers want to have their cake and eat it too; where they require you to come to the office, then go home and work on for some further hours. I even had a senior position where I had a 1 a.m. and a 2 a.m. call. suffice to say I left really soon after
> during covid you took afternoon naps
We didn't went through the same COVID period I'm afraid.
Hence why I'm now a consultant and get paid by the day/week.
I have no control over my brain switch, so I somehow need to be paid for the brilliant ideas I get in the shower. Also, I don't want to be required to sit 8 hours if I already do 4 hours overtime because my brain is working 24/7.
I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH. When I finish working, my laptop gets put in a bag and not taken out until I start working again and colleague interaction while remote is going to vary based on how your invested your company is in remote work. As far as your home being your workplace, you could always rent a cheap office to work from. The co-working space around me offers private offices for a few hundred a month.
Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
> I'm not trying to tell you that liking the office is wrong but most of what you said here applies to WFH.
I'm not saying WFH didn't work for me so is doesn't work for everyone. For me though as soon as the novelty wore off I found it a bad experience. Certainly for me none of it applied.
If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
> Hang on, why would I rent office space, to WFH? I don't mean to be blunt but I this seems ridiculous.
>If it works for you I'm happy for you. For me I like that clear separation where it's not easy to slip into working beyond your time.
You answered your own question. The article is using work from home as a catchall term for remote work but not everyone who works from home wants to literally work from home. Some companies will even reimburse you if you want to get a membership at a co-working space.
If I did I can't see it.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance for assuming we were talking WFH instead of remote working. I got confused when it stated work from home instead of remote working.
Either way "some companies" ain't mine, and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
>and I'm not being out of pocket for work.
Are you paid for the time spent commuting? Are your transportation expenses fully reimbursed?
That's a definite false equivalence.
You are being so incredibly silly and pedantic.
This is like if you said you prefer to stop at Starbucks on the way into the office and we replied: "Wait, but we thought you were talking about working from the office? We must be sooooo confused! Do you work at Starbucks???"
If it's silly and pedantic to assume we're talking about the thing plainly stated in both the title and body of the article, then yes I am.
Now if you're actual stance is that when someone says WFH you include all remote work then we are clearly talking about two different things. In which case it should be plainly stated. As it stands it just seems to me you were moving the goalposts.
For clarity WFH when I say it means a type of remote work where you work from you home. You can set up as many straw mans as you want but this it what I've been discussing from the start.
Ultimately WFH is a matter of opinion. I don't like it, you do; and that's fine.
Talk about moving the goalposts. I didn't speak of my preference to WFH. You're pissing your pants because we dare to hold you to a higher standard of discourse than you will ever hold yourself.
I sometimes work from a cafe next to my house. I don't say "I work from home and cafe" lmao. Nobody defines WFH like you do.
But you know that. You just can't be wrong, won't be wrong. Your office mates must fucking love working with you!!
You started by moving the goalposts, then set up strawman arguments, and now resorting to ad hominem attacks. Pathetic really.
But I stand corrected, apparently: WFH != WFH. Good to know.
> when work is done, I leave, and it's done
This might speak to the whip I have worked under, rarely has this been the case for me. Just demanding jobs with too much to do. Office is where you go in super early (or WFH super early) to focus for two hours, then office to do a bunch of meetings and unfocused work, and then home is where you get to pick back up for the real work. One gig, I'd call in wfh simply because I was working before commuting and got too carried away (ie: late) for it to actually be worth going in.
I very much agree with the potential drawbacks. Not having a twice daily 40 minute bike ride was a very major adjustment.
I have the opposite experience.
Reasons I prefer staying at home:
- when work is done, I turn off the computer, and it's done. At the office if work is done I can't leave immediately without raising eyebrows or I don't have a train/bus to get home.
- not using my resources (money for train,/bus.. my time) to get to work.
- easier interaction with colleagues. It's much easier to hear my colleagues from home than in the openspace. Besides most of my colleagues are on other offices. Also everytime I'm in the office I need to book a meeting room just to ensure they are able to hear me and vice-versa.
I do think face to face interacting is extremely important on certain occasions. Specifically onboarding new people and then periodically (once a week or every two weeks) to maintain the relationship.
Some counterpoints:
> when work is done, I leave, and it's done.
My experience from WFO is worse: task may be done earlier, but feels wrong to leave earlier, and colleagues may not take it badly.
>not using my resources (electricity / broadband / etc) for work
Gas is more expensive than electricity, so I'll take the tradeoff. Even better if you can reduce the number of cars in the family - purchase, annual fees and insurance, etc.
> easier interaction with colleagues
A pro and a con: good for collaboration, but also easier to be distracted when trying to focus.
I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?
(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)
IME software engineering is a mix of coding, which can sometimes be fairly independent of others and require focus, and a range of collaborative activities. Face to face meetings help building the relations that help the collaborative part go smoothly. But once the high level requirements are understood and the humam relations are in place, a team can complete projects online quite effectively, even as the requirements evolve.
Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.
I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?
There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings.
That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.
Funny enough, those of us who had to deal with international teams or offshoring had to develop those skills even before remote-first companies were a thing.
I remember some of my colleagues were working in an office doing WebEx or whatever it was calls all day already back in the early 2010s.
It's funny how the internet became widespread which enabled what you say in theory but it wasn't enough, we needed a global pandemic to push us to use it as intended and get over the stone age type of culture we had before (remember doing your taxes on a frickin paper? Working only from the office? Having to sign papers with a pen?)
It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.
Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.
I hope for WFH or hybrid to win the day.
It'll be determined by who can effectively train the next generations of employees.
If that's what the market wants.
Honestly, that I can't find that bet on polymarket is beyond me.
How would that contract resolve? Who may authoritatively declare a winner?
I would think Amazon RTO order is withdrawn within 10 days of start.
Fair enough, that is narrow enough to be a market. I'm also surprised it isn't one.
I love working from home and I plan to keep doing it.
But I can't deny that when a coworker needs help, rolling my chair next to theirs in office allows for a much larger bandwidth of knowledge sharing.
On the other hand my production skyrockets at home.
I am not sure. Remote working allows you to instantly pair with someone. No shuffling keyboards. There are a lot of software tools that help. Things like Loom let you async stuff.
What isn't is as good is social connection. I have not seen going out to a restaurant emulated well remotely.
Zoom's latency is a killer. It is still harder to have the kind of natural back and forth conversation I'm used to having in meatspace pairing. Maybe I should try Discord.
maybe I'm just super used to it at this point but I don't really notice any friction in 1-1's. larger groups there's some (4+), but tbh it's not that much worse than the friction of that size in person
Havent noticed that even on international calls. But it might depend on the type of convo. Latency for talk seemed a problem last in the 2010s skype era. Latency in what is shown on a screenshare.... yeah! A problem.
Maybe it's because I have fiber at home with Wifi6 but I never experience this lag.
My experience aligns with this as well. I work hybrid, and if a coworker needs help, I would go to the office rather than staying home & online.
There's something about the lack of cues that makes online conversations' flow more challenging and harder to read. In person, Visual cues like body language & facial expression helps signal when someone is about to speak, and that helps me tremendously.
How is that different from just making a call? It's much faster and you can both be looking at your respective screens with the same information
One on one knowledge sharing is the worst kind though. I can’t search through your verbal conversations.
That's fair but there's something to be said of physically being around someone constantly and learning off of each other. It's how I learned vim, it's how I learned about neovim, it's how I learned about the majority of command line tools I use everyday.
That being said, I do WFH and cherish the job for allowing me so but I wouldn't have a problem going into an office if it was a 30 minute walk from where I live. I feel like most people hate their commutes than working in an office.
If we could all be a 10 minute walk from the office, would more people work in them? I'd think yes, absolutely yes.
I've found that Tuple and (if people are okay with it) screen recording makes me more productive from getting knowledge transfers at home. Whenever the CTO would go on a tangent, that tangent was recorded. I'd rewatch those recordings and learn a lot more than if I'd had just been sitting next to him IRL.
I have to WFH 100% of the time because my company’s HQ is three time zones away. I think I would be more productive if I could go to the office once or twice a week and have face to face interactions with my colleagues rather than always only slack/videocalls… On the other hand, if I were working at the office every day I would yearn for some WFH days. The best is in a balance of the two, with the flexibility to decide when to do each.
> To explain the benefits of labor market inclusion, consider that fully in-person jobs can be filled only by nearby employees. A human resources or information technology position in New York can, for example, be filled only by a local resident. Even if there are people in Bulgaria, Brazil, or Belize who would be a better fit, they cannot do the job if they are not there in person. But as soon as positions can be filled remotely, employers go from taking the best local employee to taking the best regional employee for hybrid and the best global employee for fully remote work.
Before professionals in HCOL cities celebrate this article, a primary argument of it refers to handing the job over to better qualified labor in a nonlocal talent pool; that is, outsourcing.
This paper is the first one I've read that outlines a pretty good case as to why WFH is beneficial to both workers and society. I encourage everyone to share it with others.
WFH productivity is a matter of management. Pre-covid my company tried it and found that productivity declined. Also, the managers found it hard to trust that some of the workers were working and not doing other things.
Working at the office has its drawbacks too. As a developer, the worst one for me was working in an open area. It's extremely hard to concentrate without having to function like a hermit and alienating fellow workers.
I think some of that is still the case, but if managers define realistic expectations, I don't see why WFH can't continue to work. It's more work for management at the start but in time, as management and workers get accustomed, it will work out.
It seems to be a win for employees and companies.
In my field of IT consulting I find the opposite to be true. Developing a shared understanding of client challenges, getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email.
If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
> getting leaders to make and follow through on decisions, and learning our way around customer ecosystems takes forever over Teams, slack, or email. If we knew exactly what needed to be done and were just cranking code I see how solitude works. But the constant streams of low bandwidth meetings to make decisions is brutal.
When I was doing that work, even in office, all of those things took place over IM, email or remote meetings anyway.
My customers were not in the same building as I was. The vast majority of senior management were not in the same building as I was.
Sure sometimes I might go out to the client in person, and sometimes they may have come in to see me. But the vast, vast, VAST majority of it already took place remotely. And how could it not in a global business?
I would wager that there's a dead sea effect happening at these 'my way or the highway' RTO companies.
Top tier, upber-productive, marketable talents don't have to tolerate bullying, even in a weak employment market. So the companies pushing RTO the hardest see their hardest to replace talent evaporate quickly, and their most desperate (but thoroughly demoralized) staff cling on for dear life. Not as a rule, but definitely a tendency.
Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
> Meanwhile the most flexible companies can pick up talent easily, picking and choosing and building very tough rosters for quite reasonable prices.
While it sounds good on paper, hiring decent remote folks for a company is actually much harder, especially if you're a startup. It's way easier taking a bet on someone local where you don't have to second guess how productive they are. For similar interview performance, most companies would prefer folks who can come to office instead of full remote. Obviously, there are companies who have made it work (eg. Gitlab) for a long time, but I'd say they are the exception rather than the norm.
I do think there will be significant remote competition in the middle 50% ($101k-$167k) range [0], and at a given price point in this range the best candidates will be able to demand remote. But top talents can only get paid close to their market value at a few dozen companies structurally capable of affording them. These companies are competitive in the sense that they throw around a lot of money, but they tend to make HR decisions as a herd. Partly because they benchmark against each other, partly because they all copy Google and Facebook, partly because they illegally collude [1]. That's why everyone's waiting to see whether Amazon's move to 5 days starts a stampede.
For now there are notable holdouts, like Netflix and Airbnb, that pay in the levels.fyi scale but are still remote friendly. The other FAANGs are already at hybrid. If Netflix, the remaining FAANG-adjacent holdouts, and the HFTs go RTO then that is pretty much it for your chances of earning $300k+. It may still be worthwhile to leave comp on the table in exchange for the lifestyle and cost-of-living benefits, of course.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Number one benefit to companies to allow WFH: they can pay me a senior level pay for staff level seniority, and I still come out ahead living in the Midwest versus moving to SF or NYC.
Aren't there some companies that consider this (where the employee lives) when calculating their salaries?
I see this alot. Has always struck me as very unfair.
it is unfair, but it's very common.
also, we are very hypocritical about it. When it is about india etc, we (us and western europe) think it's normal to pay less, but when it's about different regions within our own countries, we think it's unfair.
In an ideal world, we would pay everyone based on role and output, but this is not how the world economy works at the moment. Dont ask me to explain, because I also dont know all the details, but it is reality
I'm in a company that doesn't do this—everyone gets paid the same amount, which is way above average for most of the country—and some of the Californians are actively lobbying for location-based pay.
I don't think they realize that they're actually lobbying for most of the company to get a pay cut so they can get a greater percentage of the total salary budget, but that's what it would amount to if they got their way.
They expect you to compete with nearby employers. If not, you should hire from less active markets and probably go more remote.
The company is fully remote and only a tiny fraction of us live in CA. Most are distributed throughout the lower-density regions of the country and are very happy with our pay rates.
most are
This is a good way to negotiate the value of your personal wfh arrangement.
But from the company R&D perspective, saving is kind of a loser argument. Cash is cheap. In pg terms we are trying to make the album that sells a million copies, not optimize the margins on nightly gigs.
Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
That’s fair, it’s definitely not as clear cut as some make it.
Anecdotally my team juggles all this well - we are relatively shielded from the rest of the business as our own unit.
Within our team or 15, we have introverts, extroverts - and some work from home alot (me etc) and others come into the office.
But no one in the team, not even the leaders think the RTO is the right call.
I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
> I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
> But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
So fuck all of the people who work from home and RTO is good?
All of what you said does not support any blanket return to office policies.
I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
You originally chose a job with 3hr of commute?
They might not have a choice (although this is somewhat relative); switching costs to changing jobs and a move elsewhere due to changes in family circumstances or rising rents might lead to a situation where one has to “accept” the 3 hour commute, at least until the right opportunity presents itself.
just curious how this works, do the kids just need a lift home and you can continue to work? Just wondering how you fit a full day in even with WFH (asking because both spouse and I are 3+ days in office and pickup/drop off kinda happen before/after the work days so WFH isn't make a big difference for us, personally)
with a commute like that I hope travel time is work time
I think framing the WFH argument in terms of productivity is a bad idea. It’s difficult to win that argument and it might not even be true.
Instead, call it a benefit, like paid vacation or health insurance.
Nobody argues that employers contributing to an employees 401(k) plan is good for productivity. They do it to attract and retain talent.
Benefit for the employee can be cut off any time.
Benefit for the company will go on forever.
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
Consistency and stability is a benefit to the company, but execs still periodically fuck that up for no reason with random reorgs.
Though I agree that framing WFH as a productivity gain makes RTO in the name of productivity harder to sell.
> Benefit for the company will go on forever.
I'm not sure about that. Companies are still made of people and people aren't always rational or even good at their jobs. Managers might prefer butts in seats because it's easier for them. Or maybe they fall for the sunk cost fallacy and want people in the office because the office space is expensive.
Benefits can be enshrined in law, you should see what European countries have legislated at the benefit of workers some time.
But they won't and it will be limited if anything makes it into law.
It's not difficult to win at all, if I'm more productive at home, I'm more productive at home, and a smart employer would enable me to choose that. If I'm not, I'd like to have an external space, perhaps the office, to go to and be productive. A stupid employer would ignore their employees and just decide that the office is a universal good.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
The point is that it isn’t a benefit if it’s productive for the company to.
It’s like calling “allowed to use a computer” a benefit.
I think though, that for hybrid or work from home to win in the shared mindset - productivity has to be accounted for.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Think it was the FT that reported, there's no data indicating RTO improves productivity. It is being done either on a hunch or as a form of stealth layoff.
> and it might not even be true.
And even if it is, it rarely matters.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)
Not OP, but less than a dollar for a great espresso that I don't have to wait in line or walk further than 100 feet for is practically free, especially considering the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to walk to the cafe at the office.
Free coffee? Dang, I have to buy mine at the grocery store :) at least I can drink my loose leaf tea at home though!
What do you do?
I’m fortunate to be a software engineer, I have about 4yoe and mainly work on frontend code.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
> gay little compromise
What an odd phrase.
It really isn't. For me, hybrid is genuinely the worst of both worlds. My internal sleep rhythm is screwed each week, just because someone had a bright idea that today will be everyone in office day ( and unsurprisingly almost never is.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
"gay" in that sense is a pejorative against homosexual people. You could almost make it work with the original definition though.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
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Tell that one to Amazon. It's really not all about productively.
There's more incentives for large businesses, whether that's tax breaks, existing office space obligations or just the feeling of lording over the workers.
I don't think that will change too much. A remote company has to be fundamentally remote on all levels otherwise it'd fall apart. That kinda buy in is difficult and usually companies who start remote work best like that. As everyone has already self selected for remote work.
I wrote this back in 2013, and I think much of it is still relevant. 11 years later I'm still WFH, and there's a fat chance you could ever get me into an office again.
https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/08/experiences-and-real...
Nice article. Small nitpick I saw, your articles has date of MONTH/DAY without the YEAR. I’d have love that to be the full date. Yes, I did see the URL but would still love a full date.
Thanks for reading. And yeah it's a small thing, I'll probably change it now that that blog is hardly ever updated. It's better for SEO if things aren't dated, generally.
When in office, I typically spend 70% of my time helping coworkers with their issues, since they feel like it's ok to just walk by and ask for help. When I work from home, my output skyrockets.
In essence, I'm a mentor, but have expectations to deliver high quality and reach tight deadlines.
I hate going to the office, since my commute is 45+45 minutes.
The moment I get forced to go to the office full time is the moment I take another offer where WFH is on the table.
Hire expencive, qualified workers who don't require hand-holding, and you won't have to care where they work from. Guaranteed.
> Hire expencive, qualified workers
> who don't require hand-holding,
> and you won't have to care where
> they work from.
But employees only get to that level of capability through early, engaged mentoring. WFH destroys that personal connection. So then you have new, or inexperienced, employees trawling through SharePoint trying to find some nugget of information about how and why X integrates with Y. Hours and hours are lost, I've seen it first-hand.
Whereas 15 minutes of face-time doodling on a page with an experienced analyst will accelerate the newbie's capability out of proportion to the time spent.
The person above said they spend 70% of their time helping others. That's great if that is their actual job and they are only supposed to spend 30% of their time on other things. But that's probably not the case at most companies. Employees don't stay around long enough for most companies to be able to afford paying senior level people to spend most of their time training inexperienced people when there is a good chance that many of those inexperienced people will use that experience to get hired somewhere else.
What companies that want everyone to be in the office should be doing is providing actual offices to the senior workers. Then when a senior worker is working on something that they need to focus on they can close their door and people can be told when the door is closed do not interrupt unless it is urgent. When they are doing less demanding stuff they can have their door open and inexperienced workers can come and ask questions.
In your particular example optimal would be to teach the new or inexperienced employees how to update the information in SharePoint so when they do learn how and why X integrates with Y (whether by spending hours digging around to find it or by getting someone more experienced to explain it to them) they can then make it so the next new or inexperienced employee will be able to find that on their own.
Someone more experienced can review their changes to make sure they are OK, but that doesn't have to be done right away so can be done at a time when the more experienced person does not have some higher priority senior level work they need to be concentrating on.
Well I went into the article expecting it to be the 143rd article in the ouroborous of articles that all reference each other and at the bottom of them all is that one single absolutely horrible WFH study that was done in Europe a few years ago, but I got stuck before even getting into the article.
The title: "Working From Home Is Powering Productivity" -> "X is Y".
The main headline: "A fivefold increase in remote work since the pandemic could boost economic growth and bring wider benefits" -> "X could Y".
Before even getting into the article they went from strongly claiming something to no longer claiming something but instead using a weasel word that could mean anything.
I could be the King of France. I could be 9 feet tall. Could doesn't mean anything.
Instantly closed the article, and not reading further.
I believe that Returning To the Office represents a significant step backward from a societal perspective. Governments should actively legislate against unnecessary in-person gatherings in offices.
To illustrate my point, I’ll share an anecdote that highlights the harm caused by this trend. I live in a major EU city, and last Wednesday, I had a doctor’s appointment in the city center at 4 PM, a peak traffic hour. Unfortunately, my bus was caught in a traffic jam. Despite the fact that buses typically have dedicated lanes in the EU, we were still stuck.
Suddenly, we heard the sirens of an emergency ambulance behind us. Unfortunately, the ambulance was also trapped in the gridlock. Other drivers tried to make way, but the road was too narrow to allow any effective movement. I don't know what the emergency was or who needed help, but it was clear that valuable time was lost—time that could be critical for saving lives.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, such traffic jams were virtually non-existent, as most people worked from home. Now, consider how many similar situations occur daily in cities around the world. RTO policies that force people to commute contribute to dangerous traffic congestion that can literally cost lives.
The societal disadvantages extend even further. When people work from an office, their homes still need heating and electricity; you can’t simply turn them off, especially in my climate. This means we end up maintaining two properties with full utility costs.
Additionally, there’s the increased wear on city infrastructure from more vehicles on the road, elevated levels of traffic pollution, and the under-utilization of office spaces that could be repurposed into affordable housing.
The push for RTO is clearly wasteful compared to the benefits of working from home.
Companies that require RTO, if they actually want their employees to return to office, should prioritize in their messaging the objective benefits/cost to working in the office. No vague-speak, no shaming people claiming that workers "don't work" at home, but rather objective analysis on what exact benefits they seek to accrue by mandating that work that could be done anywhere in the world must be done in separate rooms of a large corporate office space.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
It’s an open secret that there is no data that supports RTO. If there was, at even one company, it would be screamed from the rooftops.
(I don’t believe it’s all covert layoffs either - it’s imho the more banal reason of c-level personal feelings and groupthink)
Executive brain worms are real. They see each other do things, and they want to be like each other, so they feel safety in numbers, untethered to the data.
My company only stopped a strict company-wide RTO when they saw how much senior talent they were losing, and leaders were taken by surprise.
It's an open secret that we have no idea how to actually measure tech company productivity. That's why there isn't and will not be clear evidence for or against RTO.
Best you can do is pick a narrow enough sliver that it is measurable. Then claim it is the "important" view and wow, what a shock, the data supports your position!
I agree on an individual level, but at a company level it’s fairly easy to measure things like product feature shipping velocity, change in business metrics like growth etc. When you’re talking about company wide changes like RTO it would theoretically show up in these core metrics.
yes, working from home is one of the great solutions if you want a work-life balance. In my country, the term work from home became popular when the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, and til now several company (mostly tech, blockchain, and finance) still doing it. But honestly, if you asking about productivity working from the office is still a better choice.
no, please, I want to be in office and hear the coffee machine grinding coffee for everybody in the office /sarcasm
Why is it ICs will argue endlessly for and against WFH, while at least in the press the main story from employers is pro-RTO?
Embracing remote is such a huge win for hiring (access a way larger talent pool) and budgets (who needs a lease??). ICs overall are more open to remote than otherwise so it's decently rare you lose a hire because remote.
Are these companies just not giving interviews? I get it: other companies screaming RTO drive ICs into your arms, no need to draw attention to it...
Who wouldn't want their workers boarded up at home working all day for the man.
Won’t someone think of the commercial real estate investors?!
Sometimes politics comes into play at the office. "This is the decision. We're just informing you about it because we agreed in our informal hallway chat that it's the right thing to do."
Suddenly all of the doc comments and Slack threads become meaningless and are swept aside in favor of the consensus that a few people came to face-to-face. Remote employees will never be as politically effective as the employees in the hallway.
i definitely know myself that i'm less productive working from home than working on the office. the commute (or the ritual of it) and the different environment makes all the difference.
Same, home is associated with relaxation in my mind (and I have an apartment, so no "work desk"). Being quite depressed also makes a big difference, as work gives a social life I otherwise don't have.
then the problem doesn't seem to be with wfh but from your lack of socialization ability
i have my own social groups that aren't dependant on the people at work, i don't have a job to make friends but to make money
i believe it's not a problem of socialization ability, it's a matter of personality - it's just who we are. as an introvert, i'm not comfortable just striking up conversations with strangers, let alone making friends with them.
even if you don't make friends at work, being physically around people has an impact on a person. being in an office has a much higher social component than working from home.
All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
> All I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at home. Some people’s home and psyche isn’t good for wfh for various reasons
Equally;
In office work, all I know is some people like it some don’t. It’s based on the environment they have at the office. Some people’s office and psyche isn’t good for in office work for various reasons
I worked for a firm at one point that prior to acquistion, was filled top to bottom with people that enjoyed a quiet working environment that allowed them to think and do deep work. We were an engineering heavy firm doing complex work for large multinationals. I'll admit it was shocking to me when I first joined, you could have heard a pin drop in this place, it took me quite some time to adjust to it, but in time I did.
After the original founders decided they wanted to move on and so sold up, we merged with another org that was the opposite. The office became a place of multiple indepedent bluetooth speakers blaring music all day, teams of people walking around from desk to desk and holding incredibly loud non work related conversations at random next to people trying to do deep work, everyone was crammed closer together to assist in "collaboration" etc.
One by one, all of the original staff departed as the office had for them become a living hell that destroyed their ability to do deep meaningful or productive work. They didnt dislike their co-workers, they were not against some occasional social interactions, but ultimately, they were engaged with what they did and just wanted a good environment to do it in, an environment that was removed from them by force and thus too was their capability to be as productive as they once were.
Some people do better work from office as you note due to the environment they have at home and their psyche, but the exact opposite is also true for a not insignificant amount of people.
The problem is that business is going to pretend only one of these groups exists.
Wfh is better but going out to lunch, the whole notion of a lunch break, or everyone eating at about the same time everyday is something I miss about offices.
Offices are also like the schools we grow up in. There's a continuity through life that's been lost.
WFH has been a life saver for me. I cannot walk due to an injury and I have IBS, ADHD, and Mysophobia.
15 second cities now!
I've been much more productive working at home since the 1980s, when we had to use a dolly to take the computer and CRT monitor out the office to the trunk of the car, home for a few days to get some peace to focus.
never forget, that a need exists for people to travel ... working from home reduces the profit of the oil lobby significantly ...
i am sorry to point this out ... but its a primary driving point!
from the point of view from of the oil lobby ... well, it may be an unsustainabile practive if profits are dramatically reduved this way ...
I’d love to see a study on the carbon and energy impact of WFH vs commuting to an office. I would assume that for knowledge workers, WFH would be more efficient.
I think we have to go from the factory village to the village factory and start designing/building houses to work from.
Examples excluded on purpose. :)
The answers here seem to only allow for one solution: where no technical requirements exist in favor of RTO, one should provide employees the choice. Each person has their own place where productivity is good, and it may even change between RTO and WFH.
Force should not be applied, or else one might start wondering if e.g. the commute time should be paid time, or pay should increase in a WFH case since the employee suddenly shoulders more costs.
> Economics is famous for being the dismal science.
Economics is not a science. It’s politics dressed up as a science.
Explain to me why work that can be done form home can't be nearshored?
Take that, Jassy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It's an open secret that it is no longer day 1 at Amazon.
It’s like day 22.
What does that mean (genuine question?)
Amazon used to pride itself on behaving like a (very big) startup, trying to be scrappy and focused - but now it has very definitely joined the league of ordinary corporations.
A corollary is that they existing big-tech companies will never embrace remote work. You need to start new companies which are remote-first and then replace big tech with them.
I don't think that's a useful generalization. It's pretty clear that company culture changes over time (in tandem with changing management and workforce).
The point of the Planck quote is that many people (especially the "important" people) have large egos and therefore (among other reasons) are unwilling or unable to change their minds and learn new things. This then significantly hinders progress.
The equivalent to your claim in science would be something like "particle physics cannot change, you need to let it die and start a new scientific discipline" (I guess you'll find some people who think that but I don't).
I've definitely heard this as "Science progresses one funeral at a time" before.
As others mentioned, the shakiness of whatever this is (an opinion piece) doesn’t really convey much effort into a rock solid argument.
Put another way, if you are going to look at pro-RTO under a microscope and critique every single thing about it, you have to do the same for pro-WFH.
Thus far, I’ve yet to hear anything solid for either. Just flaky nonsense and non sequiturs and jumping from topic to topic.
Articles like this are talking past the RTO mandates. Ignore what the mandates say in the emails. They are trying to lay people off without suffering the PR downsides. They do not care how productive you were or are going to be. They need to fix the balance sheet for the next quarter, THEN they can worry about productivity.
No. Most businesses implementing RTO just want people back in the office, take the tinfoil hat.
But but but.... Won't somebody please think of the hurt feelings amongst the commercial landlord community.
Seriously though, any of those a-hole CEOs, like Amazon or Intercom may as well come out and say they don't trust their staff, all the while getting chauffeur driven into the office themselves and have legions of housekeepers and nannies taking care of things at home for them.
never forget that a need to return to office exists ...
its a need to travels ... to consume fossil fuels and to benefit effectivly some sharhe holders ...
its A primary reason.
I'd really like to see how the American libertarian copes with the return to office mandates.
I've had a lot of American colleagues that do not wish to return to office, the types that believe in "freedom", "individual responsibility" and "if you do not like the job go work somewhere else".
As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
They are still on their pleading / "negotiating" phase at the moment, but let us see.
>I'd really like to see how the American libertarian copes with the return to office mandates.
The American libertarian will just move to a job that allows remote.
>As the employers are closing in on them, they slowly start to understand that unless they collectively punch back they _will_ yield sooner or later.
Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company. RTO companies better have some damn good reasons to work there if they require asses in seats. Companies that don't (most) will struggle and wither.
> Believe me, companies stand to lose a lot more with an empty dev team than any dev stands to lose moving to another company.
This process might take years or even decade of decay until company feels the pain. They might lose in the long run, but unless all high productivity employees leave in an instant you’re the one to lose in the short run.
>all high productivity employees leave in an instant
That almost never happens, unless a company enacts a very unpopular policy and there are many opportunities for high productivity tech employees elsewhere. That sounds a lot like right now.
> That sounds a lot like right now.
Given mixed responses that I’ve heard about RTO - I doubt that.
No it’s not.
@Andy Jassy
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Duh....