When Google does things, huge swaths of the tech community reorganize our companies to match what Google does because Google does it, even if it turns out to be objectively stupid or only relevant at Google’s scale.
I remember when damn near every company had a brain teaser part of their interview loop, because that’s what Google did. It turns out that that was a terrible way to interview engineers, but Google’s clout accidentally made a trend.
On paper, Google announcing this means that only Google engineers will be affected. But Google also trend sets, so if Google starts cancelling WFH for spurious reasons, such as the personal idiosyncrasies of their executives, then a lot of people who don’t work at Google suddenly got their WFH opportunities put at risk for no good reason.
Google definitely did this - somewhat famously with that billboard campaign which made the national news - but that trend started much earlier at Microsoft (Bill Gates apparently loves puzzles).
Totally fair. It’s not just Google that other companies cargo cult based on. Google is just currently on top, like how Microsoft once was during the Gates era.
Pichai became the CEO 5 years ago and many of the deprecated product launches predate this CEO appointment. You can legitimately blame him for product cancellation but I don't think it makes sense to blame him for "throwing everything at the wall".
I chuckled, but more importantly, think of the comp savings when you hire from outside the Bay Area (if Google can get a decent remote hiring process in place, much smaller companies have but TBD if Google has the fortitude to). Lots of folks who otherwise couldn’t work for Google now can, and will get paid more than their market probably allowed for previously.
> think of the comp savings when you hire from outside the Bay Area
Just considering the US, I wonder how many engineers are talented enough to work for Google, are interested in working for Google, and aren't already there, even in a satellite office? I'm sure there are some, but between a variety of office locations and good pay, I'm not convinced there's a large untapped pool of rural tech talent.
As far as I can tell, and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like there are a lot of positions in AWS’s consultancy arm that were always hiring in “virtual locations”. My position was advertised as one.
Y'all need to log off at 8 hours worked. I used to work 8:30 - 4:30 (read: get up at 7, shower, bus at 8, in work at 8:30). Now I work 7 - 3 most days (literally roll out of bed and sit down at my desk). If I'm tired, I'll snooze my alarm for an hour and work 8 - 4. My life is significantly better working from home.
We will have this back and forth pull over working from home and on premises. However the needle has irrevocably moved on the scale towards working from home and that is not changing. What I mean by that is its universally acknowledged that WFH is not an automatic "slacking off" and "not productive" and its on par with working in the office. So yes there are other reasons execs will say makes on site is better but productivity is definitely not one of the reasons any more.
Exactly. And furthermore, execs got to where they are because they enjoy having power and control over others. It's easy for the introverts to forget that power feels absolutely amazing. Managing invisible agents filing Jira tickets will never be as satisfying as commanding a large open office of people you can watch grind away. Power and status is an enormous motivator and I have recognized it in nearly every single person in a position of power I have ever met or worked with. Some hide it, others flaunt it. Offices are going nowhere.
I think what people with enough instrumentation and metrics collection, like google, are going to find are there are teams that are 10x to 100x more productive during the pandemic and other teams that are 1/10th to 1/100th as productive during the pandemic.
There's no one size fits all but for teams or people who perform WAY better in WFH having it as an option that isn't looked down upon is very comforting. I may be able to move far away from the city at some point in my career. I am extremely eager to do so and I don't think I am alone.
For what I pay for rent I could be buying a large house in other parts of the US or central America
Largely depends on the people, the team, and the area you work in.
For areas that need to "just build" you'll probably see massive performance improvements. People in their internal accelerator Area 120 this is probably great for them. For people who need to play politics, get buy in, and do a lot of team-based collaboration you'll likely see a massive hit. I'm assuming this is going to really kill a lot of their internal infra stuff that needs to do a lot of meetings to make sure things are backwards compatible and get buy in on decisions.
Although, I've worked with many people with very bad social anxiety who I'm guessing are doing fantastic in a work setting right now since they've developed the online communication skills from talking to a lot of people online throughout their life.
At a FAANG company, there are seldom any "just build" areas. Anything that is being built requires design, scheduling, marketing, documentation, etc. agreement across many teams in order to put out a coherent product or service.
Once it has been determined that your position can be effectively filled with someone working remotely, you will be competing with all those in the same timezone/jurisdiction.
If the current tolerance for remote work persists, I fully expect salaries in companies of the S.F. Bay Area to drop significantly. With a fraction of the rent, this might still work out for the employee.
Luckily I don't live in the Bay Area or California. I live outside of a major city and just deal with a longer commute most times.
I'd guess the super inflated Bay Area pay is likely going to deflate but the average global pay for SWEs will inflate as those companies start looking for people who can add the same value as a local employee for a reasonable price. Where I work we've been hiring engineers from outside the US recently and we've been giving them US-like salaries which are massive jumps from previous local jobs they had in their country.
I'm assuming other scrappy companies who are in a growth phase right now are doing the same. This is likely especially the case if you need to wisely allocate capital.
I think this is an important takeaway. The current situation doesn't convert anyone and everyone from offices to WFH, but it DOES validate WFH as a viable alternative that can't be dismissed as the fantasies of a few renegade employees.
I was a believer in office work being superior to working from home. Then with covid I had to work from home. I hated it for the first 2 months. Then perhaps I became institutionalized because now I prefer it. Without a commute I have more time for sleep and child care related things. Plus I am more focused.
If the office ever reopens then I will probably only go in one or two days a week, and all of my employees can choose their own schedules also. We will just mandate coming in for certain meetings.
I'm the opposite. I used to think working from home would be great, and that the office was fairly irrelevant given all my work was on a computer anyway.
Six months in, the main thing that this experience has taught me is that I never want to work a remote job. It's miserable.
Working at an office is free social interactions. If you live alone and can't muster the energy to organize meeting people at least you still get to meet your colleagues every day. If instead you work from home it is pretty easy to get into a downward spiral where you don't socialize, get even more miserable making it even harder to socialize until you get depressed.
The problem is corona - our social spaces are not "wrong" per se, they are rather unsafe to visit in times where about half the US population and a sizable chunk of every other country's population except Spain and Italy claim that mask mandates are restricting their freedom.
These anti-maskers are ruining our livelihood. How many months or years until we take justice into our own hands? I don't want to live like this forever. I'm ready to get some spikey 6 foot poles to start poking people with.
Not really. Even without corona it's hard to socialize when WFH. Suburban sprawl causes this, but if you try to solve that by going urban, then you lose the home office.
I see "free social interactions" as neither a benefit nor something that can only be obtained on-site.
These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive.
That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.
Lack of social interactions makes most people miserable, lack of productivity is irritating but you can live with it. And although you can fix social interactions without an office it demands effort, so isn't free unless you live with people like spouse or kids. At work they pay you to talk with people, so social interactions there are free since trading effort for money is the purpose of work and the social is just a side effect.
On Slack or Zoom you can't take a walk around the office to clear your head/take a brief breather and inadvertently bump into a person who asks a question about your t-shirt or new Apple watch, which then leads to a longer convo, which leads to grabbing coffee in the kitchen, which leads to you hanging out with that person and their group of friends over the a weekend.
I can understand this. For me its' very different as I have my family, so I really love WFH. I can get up early, go run, come back have breakfast with my kids, drop them off at school and sit down at my desk for 9am. Sometimes, I will take a few hours out of the day to my own thing (go trail running) and I just work a little later into the evening (which is no big deal as there is no commute).
However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
It is dangerous to rely on office relationships for your social needs. When you move on to your next role, those relationships go up in smoke. This should be a signal to cultivate stronger ties to friends and family.
Office does not provide for social needs but provides a baseline level of social activity 5 days a week. I don't expect to make any friends in office but I am certain to talk to a few colleagues, have lunch in a group and make small talk every day of the week.
There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
> “I’m not good at making friends therefore no one is”
I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it.
I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore.
Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes.
I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc.
We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
> But none of them are comfortable even eating outside
They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
For me it's mostly about ease of collaboration. I love hashing out math/design problems on a whiteboard. Even with good tools there's nothing that allows the same sort of natural, dynamic conversation. Meetings turn into a series of loosely connected speeches, especially when there's large numbers.
I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.
Thirdly video calls are super draining.
It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
> I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
I'm noticing at our company those who are married and/or have kids seem to prefer remote working and those who miss the office tend to live alone.
There are obviously many factors that can affect a person's happiness and it's always good to hear people's perspectives. Why do you find it miserable?
When I was younger I would have been less happy, but I was lucky enough to grow up near Boston, went to school in Boston, and have a software career in Boston, so all of my friends and family live around here and I never needed work to have a social life.
TBQH I think a lot of young people no longer know how to make friends outside of the rigid structures of school and work. All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. If I hadn't grown up in Boston I probably would have stuck around where ever my family was located. I think the pandemic is forcing people to analyze their own lives and many are discovering things they don't like about themselves and their choices. Hanging out on social media all day is unhealthy and is not a replacement for true friends and family.
> All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career.
The economy grows faster when people sacrifice their personal lives for work.
Not saying I like it, but it seems obvious why incentives are aligned that way.
It's not obvious in the longer term. Economic growth, which is affected by technological and scientific advancement (among many other things), depends on insight and creativity, not just hard work.
Maybe the economy grows more in the longer term if the people working in it were raised as healthy, happy children in more of a "family values" sort of situation.
To clarify, I don't intend my comment to be read as suggesting "family values" automatically results in healthier, happier children or is superior in some way. Especially not "traditional" family values.
(Personally I hold much more of a progressive, pro-LGBT+-visibility, love-and-let-love type of position than what are sometimes called traditional family values.)
Rather, I want to suggest that long term economic growth almost certainly depends in some way not just on people sacrificing their personal lives for work now; but also qualities that future generations grow up with, i.e. how children are raised, schooled, looked after, the attitudes they are surrounded by and so on.
I'm not informed enough to know how personal life in the present affects multi-generational economic growth. But I'm sure it has an effect, and that everyone maximising work in the present at the cost of personal life is almost certainly not the path to maximum collective prosperity as measured by economic growth in the long term.
I think you bring up an important point that may be an uncomfortable truth about modern society. I personally have been weathering the pandemic/WFH situation well, in no small part because my spouse is a stay-at-home parent anyways. I don't need to juggle work and monitoring children much because they are available to do so. If anything, its been a boon to be able to "tag-team" occasionally, to give my wife a break/back her up, and also be a presence in my kids life more than just after work hours and on weekends.
For many friends and colleagues with children, however, its been a disaster, and it seems the largest culprit is that they both work, and therefore they struggle to do their jobs while also watch their children all day. I don't blame them for their situation. Society has made it so that having a stay at home parent is a luxury that many families simply can't afford, and it has also devalued the idea so much that even the families that can afford it are almost embarrassed to do so (my wife personally likes being a stay at home mom, but feels judgement from friends and former colleagues for quitting her job as a chemist to do so). Its good that we moved beyond expecting women to exclusively be the homemakers, as that is needlessly sexist, but it would have been far more healthy to replace that with normalizing one parent, gender-agnostic, devoted to child-care, rather than normalizing both parents working and relying on daycare/schooling to watch kids for most of the day.
> those who are married and/or have kids seem to prefer remote working and those who miss the office tend to live alone
I would have thought to be the other way around - parents miss office as they have to supervise and educate their kids while also doing their regular job.
We have family watching the kids during the day, and if we didn't we would hire help. But even with help, it's just easier not having to commute, being able to do laundry / chores / etc. while taking meetings, etc. I am more productive overall.
What it seems to be is that people prefer having people around for part of the day but not in their way while working. People with families but no office to get away from everyone struggle and people alone 24/7 struggle.
Personally I live with 4 other family members but have a dedicated room with a dual monitor setup so I find this to be ideal.
One, you cannot do those two things at the same time and be productive. Two, having kids implies having a shitload of housework. Not having to sit two hours in a car staring at other cars helps with that.
I'm the opposite. Married with 2 kids, but I had to rent a private office 10 minutes from home so I could focus.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Now when I come home i get the biggest hugs you've ever seen and we start playing.
I’m on paternity leave right now with my first kid. I worked a little bit before taking the leave and that was all the time I needed to determine that having a separate “office” is a must. We’re moving away from the Bay Area to be closer to family, and I’m seriously thinking about purchasing a cheap ($40-$60k) hut/cottage with a pretty view about ten minutes away from wherever home ends up being. I’ll set up a desk, couch, espresso machine, and treat that as “work”.
> they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Ugh, I do this all the time and didn't think about how bad it is. A gut punch, but glad I'm now conscious of it.
I'm honestly not sure why that's a gut punch? I grew up with a work from home parent. There was nothing particularly confusing about it and if anything, it taught me to respect the attention-space of others from an early age. Make sure to set up consistent visual signals of what working looks like such as a closed door and be consistent in explaining that you're in your work-zone. When work is done, then be present to your family and leave the laptop in the home office.
Exactly, I was thinking about how a visual sign could communicate the idea well. I have to work from my living room shared with a bunch of other individuals at home. It gets pretty nutty at times. I might repurpose some old desk nick-knack thing to be my now-working sign post.
That's a good idea. Maybe a desk lamp that gets turned on? Think about how you dress as well. Clothing is an excellent signaler. Consider rearranging the furniture to create a barrier between your desk and the rest of the room. Those folding standup room dividers are like $100 on Amazon in a variety of styles and you can hide it in the closet after hours if you are short on room.
Yah, that's what we wound up doing spontaneously today when something spilled in the kitchen this morning. We have a kitchen island on wheels, I wound up rolling it out of the kitchen out of the way and wound up just continuing on over and creating a side wing/short wall next to my seat and keyboard tray. So far so good.
Some people feel the need to baby children when they are nearby, but are comfortable ignoring then when they are away, instead of actually being their all day or teaching the child a balance including self-reliance.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
No doors? Seems like there are many ways you could make the signal less ambiguous.
Yeah, this is a setup issue, not a work-from-home issue. If possible a separate office with closable door is ideal, then just be really strict that when your office door is closed, you're at work and not to be disturbed. It took me a few months to train my family to respect this but they're pretty good about it now.
Well in that case the problem isn't "working from home", its "working from this particular home which isn't setup in any way for success". Its not reasonable to expect everyone to have a living situation setup to accommodate working from home given the way the current situation was thrust upon them, but its just an unreasonable to judge the efficacy of working from home based on those same people's experiences. Its equivalent to removing all the desks and furniture from an office and then basing your assessment on the ensuing disaster.
As you alluded to, if you only judge something in its most optimal setting, then of course that thing seems very workable and successful. There are very few objective truths when it comes to WFH policies; there are only compromises that people are willing to make/accept. People always seem to make it about one-size-fits-all X is Good Y is Bad.
That's interesting. I also find it pretty miserable, mostly due to the isolation. I kind of feel like a microservice that takes JIRA tickets as input and outputs code these days.
My home office is great: nice desk, chair, good lighting, extra monitor, more than enough space. The literal work facilities are certainly better here for me than at the office. I just miss seeing coworkers, and I even miss my train ride a bit (that used to be my reading time).
And, yes, I live by myself (with my dog, fortunately).
> I kind of feel like a microservice that takes JIRA tickets as input and outputs code these days.
That sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem—insufficient autonomy? no "seat at the table"?—that is, at most, being exacerbated by remote work. What specifically about your culture makes you feel this way? What makes you feel this way more now than previously?
Well, that wasn't a literal description of my job. I was exaggerating a bit for effect, to emphasize the isolation bit.
Like many of us, I have wide latitude in exactly how I go about meeting the requirements of the project I'm on, and I have some amount of freedom in choosing those projects. My manager is not looking over my shoulder at how many LOC I commit.
What's causing me to feel this way is a combination of isolation, every fucking thing that's happened in 2020, and my deteriorating mental health as a result. I may not last another year in a remote work + COVID environment.
This seems to be lumping a lot of things into remote work that really shouldn't be. There is universal isolation now, for most of us. But post-COVID you presumably won't be so isolated, even if you were working from home.
I'm married with kids and, pandemic or no, I perpetually feel like a microservice that receives child demands and outputs dining and entertainment services.
Yep. Just like I don't want my life insurance to be dependent on my job, I also don't want my social life to be. It's not healthy, it works in favor of the employer by making people more attached to their jobs, and we shouldn't optimize for it.
I'm sorry this is happening to you. This isn't what remote work is really like. Before covid you could easily make the rounds to a few local cafes to work at from time to time and also you could hang out with friends after work. All of that was taken away at once and we won't fully understand the mental health ramifications for years, if ever.
Depends on the age of kid :) schools are already open but bay area in particular most schools are still doing remote education. Families voted it that way.
That's not quite what happened. Parents were asked to pick between a full year of distance learning or a hybrid option with partial classroom time. However most county education departments are still forcing classrooms to stay closed, so everyone is still on distance learning regardless of how they voted.
As a childless person with a roommate, the current WFH situation has been not ideal.
I live in an apartment complex that normally features amenities and is located in a neighborhood with lots of shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc. All of the third places are currently closed or under very heavy restrictions (e.g. in Seattle you can only dine indoors with members of your household), so now I'm stuck in a two-bedroom apartment. I can still go for walks but it's not quite the same.
There's also the issue of everybody else. On paper, I have gig internet. In practice, I don't think the fiber here was designed for everyone to be simultaneously working from home. And especially with kids staying at home instead of using up their energy at school or at the playground, apartment noise has become more significant.
Work from home would probably be nicer under less strenuous circumstances. Working from home or a coffee shop of your own volition is one thing, working from home because you have to is another. I'm onboarding to a new team and personally I've found it difficult to get the quick 30-second validation I need to see if I'm setting things up right or have the right assumptions, because it very easily snowballs into setting up formal meetings.
IMHO biggest variable is company itself. If it’s not setup as remote & distributed-first, then you going to suffer. Same with what you actually do. Developing a product is much easier alone than a service in a consulting company.
This is not what working from home is normally like for parents with kids. In normal times, you would still have the kids in school/daycare or have a real stay at home spouse.
- my spouse is stay at home, and therefore is supervising the kids while I work
- I have a study/office at home that allows me to close the door if necessary
- more of my daily time is spent programming than in meetings or interacting with people
If any one of those things wasn't true, I too would probably be struggling more with the WFH situation. As it stands, its a massive improvement as I can still work effectively, the lack of commute means I have more time for seeing my family, and the flexibility of my daily schedule now allows me to do things like take a break to hang out or have lunch with my kids.
To a lot of people it is the same thing. If you didn't have an active social life before then not much changed in your life except that you now work from home, and those are the ones the most hurt by being unable to go to an office.
Those are the ones hurt the least. Didn't socially interact before and now everyone is forced to do it. Feels like they have been traininng their lives for this.
same. I started a remote job in 2018 and was just looking to go back to onsite when covid hit.
I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers.
Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
If you're the type of engineer who likes to be given requirements and sit in your home office and code all day in silence then power to you. Not for me.
> I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers. Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?
It's worth noting that this is NOT what remote working is really like. During regular times you can more easily go work in your local cafe for a few hours, more easily hang out with your friends after work to get socialization. If you're a social person this is a double-whammy, you lost socializing at work and socializing with friends at the same time. I'm not suggesting you would ever like normal remote work, I have no idea. I just wanted to say this isn't what remote work is really like.
Strange, I had the opposite experience - hated working remote in the past but been mostly OK with WFH during COVID - I think the main reason is that during COVID everyone else was also working from home, not just me. So the company had to come up with procedures that suit well remote workers, and I never felt "out of the loop" compared to others.
I find being "out of the loop" to be one of the best parts of being remote. Whatever small amount of useful things I'm out of the loop on is dwarfed by the benefit of being out of the loop on all the political/personal drama. Of course this is a very individual experience so everyone's mileage will vary greatly.
I have a mixed bag of feelings regarding WFH. I realize that the current situation at my employer is not comparable to a real remote (and asynchronously organized) setup. Way too many people try to emulate the office, while at home. I have meeting in meeting staring at a screen not getting any meaningful work done during the regular hours most people are active. To be able to deliver on deadlines I needed time in the very early mornings and late in the evenings. This led to massive overtime and also to the situation that my significant other and I weren't seeing each other nearly as much as before Corona while both working from home without a daily 1.5 - 2 hour commute.
Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case.
So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.
I suspect many people can't work at the local cafe as something might leak if a person took a picture of their screen.
And I know, just for me. On scale of 1 to 10 if for me WFH is a 3 then work from cafe is a 5 and work from office is a 10 (note: this is with cool people on cool stuff, those numbers and even order might changes of those 2 things were not true). I don't generally talk to anyone at a cafe so I don't get any social interaction quota. I can't bounce ideas off people at the cafe, they aren't generally fellow SWE. So while it feels less isolated than WFH it's not a substitute for me.
When I switched from in-office to remote work a decade ago I had to make a conscious effort to increase my out-of-work socializing. I want to stress that I agree/understand remote work will never be for everyone and many people will prefer an office and I hope they get that option. At the same time everyone sort of got thrown into this by surprise and we've done a poor job of helping people make the most out of this transition. I'm a team lead and the last 6 months I've mostly been a therapist helping people cope with stress and transitioning to new ways of doing things. Mental health is so important and as a society we've failed to address that on all levels, not just remote/on-site work.
I'm on your perspective but we are all too binary, black/white about this. It is a preference. Some people prefer home. Some people prefer in office around co-workers. Neither is wrong. Can we start discussing this as a preference instead of a fact?
I've been working remotely for 6 years now, and 5 of those was at Pivotal, a culture famous for pairing. I love it, and I have turned down offers that cannot guarantee me a similar situation post COVID.
We used Zoom since ~2015 regularly, and Hangouts before that, and given that the company had many offices around the world, and the majority of teams were distributed (largely optimizing for the same timezones), being home office-bound was no different that being on another office. We constantly experimented with the latest tools and practices to be more productive at a distance. For example, some pairs were connected on video all day, in addition to keyboard/screen. It wasn't easy for everyone, but ended up achieving the goals.
Post COVID, my current company is in the process of re-imagining office work, more towards intense collaboration spaces. Most of the work can still be done remotely, getting together for specific activities every once in a while. I really believe this model could represent the future for this type of work in tech.
If the company culture is such that remote employees are not second class citizens and HR has set rules to back that up, anything is possible.
Working from home is OK. I did it for years. It was ok when my son was a schoolboy. It was ok even with my newborn daughter, even when I had to type with one hand because the other was busy rocking the baby.
It became insufferable when both parents and their school-age children were forced to stay home. Even the nerdiest child can spend only so much time glued to a screen, or otherwise being self-occupied. Children genuinely need attention, communication, care — and this all steps the way of your concentration.
I've worked mostly from home for years. Any time I have to commute to the city, I can't believe that anyone would voluntarily do this every day. 1.5-2h per day wasted in transit plus $30+ per day in parking is insane, and that's better than what many people suffer.
I never felt productive working from home during my previous job and dreaded having to do it more, but I've gotten used to it. I still don't feel as productive as I do at the office, but so far it works.
That said, I think I prefer working from home over open-office hotdesking. If an employer wants me at the office, the least they can do is assign me a well equipped desk, ventilation, lighting, a decent screen, that kinda thing.
I don't get (and yet I do, sigh) why some companies seem to treat their highly paid knowledge workers like cattle / sweatshops. I don't get why some people prefer working in those conditions.
Because the rent in SF and NY is insane and there is no way they can afford enough space for most people to have offices. So they make up BS about the reason being how great the open office is for collaboration.
interestingly enough the WeWork model might get more popular post-covid - either for individuals to have some office outside the home or for companies to rent out of as satellites for remote workers
Coffee shops, too. I have a friend who owns a coffee shop (I live in Europe) and I was afraid that he’d have to close it down for good. He’s been allowed to open again since 3-4 weeks, and even though the first couple of weeks after re-opening things were slow lately I’ve seen more and more people going there during the day in order to work. Things are not yet at the pre-pandemic level, but we’re slowly getting there.
Take it from someone working in a remote office. This only works so long as everyone is remote. Once the majority of folks are back in an office suddenly those not there are seen as “other” and not part of the core team.
It's a good thing this will not be as normal as it used to be. The rest of us who think it's poor quality operation will get to be more picky with who we choose to work for.
This is exactly what I have been thinking. The hybrid models don't feel like they will work very well. (with existing level of training and adhoc adoptions)
Also things like you have a meeting and someone is late - when everyone is remote, it is very easy to expect and accommodate it. But when most or many are in office and in a room and one person that is remote is late - probably won't be as well received.
Yep we have done this even before lockdowns. If even just one person is remote, we ask everyone to call in rather than going to a meeting room, to force the meeting to be run in an accommodative manner. You need these practices if you collaborate with teams in different offices anyways.
Is that good? Doesn’t that breed resentment? “Oh, since there is a remote person in the meeting we all have to deal with poor audio, lag, and no eye-contact?”
I should say I was remote for 5 years and the meetings where everyone was remote were much longer, extra overhead, slower responses, and less engagement. They were bad. I’d rather be not an equal participant in a good meeting than fully equal in a bad meeting.
Though to be clear, the question is whether the benefits of treating the entire team uniformly outweigh the disadvantages of imposing telecoms frictions on all members, rather than just a portion.
Remote first has to be the culture for it to work. GitLab is pretty good at this. We have worked hard at our little 20 person consultancy to have a nice remote work culture. It takes effort and sticking to enabling remote first.
I’ve actually already experienced this. Once part of the team is in the office they will have quick informal conversations to decide how to do things. Only the decision is recorded and not the reasoning. Now with everyone remote everything is done in writing and everyone is included. I think hybrid setups will be the worst for employee happiness and productivity over time.
Not everyone, but it certainly is a cultural thing that needs to be managed, and a group being mostly in-person and a few remote is indeed problematic. Best-working example I know wildly combines people from different offices - so while many "go to the office" and have a local group of colleagues there, the work is always done mostly remote and not in-person. And even then, you need to pay attention to include remote people in the informal information flows.
When critical mass is in physical proximity, oral communication (fast, enjoyable, efficient - and dangerous) creeps in, and you're left to collect the leftovers of discussions.
I did it for about 10 years, as the only one officially remote in the team, ending now.
It worked OK, but part of the trick was that I was very senior, and the rest of the team was split across several time zones with me sitting basically in the middle. Another part was everyone knew I was remote because the team was far from where I lived, not because I wanted to WFH per se.
That's also the case with some senior people in adjacent teams: the people who are truly "core" get to live where they want, or at least that's been my experience over the last 20-ish years.
I definitely wouldn't advise it as a career strategy, mostly for the reason you cite.
Yeah I think your point on being senior is important here however senior can mean varying things in different circumstances management or tech senior if your company divides things that way.
The other thing I’ve seen that effects the balance is time zones. It’s not as bad as being remote but it factors in to a general availability / can be relied on to be there aspect.
Totally agree. I imagine work politics will take over and people will be more or less forced to come back into office. To be fair, I think it’s a big part of work culture that will be very hard to formulate in virtual settings.
I hope so but I do think there is merit to an office sometimes as well. Hybrid model may be doable but expensive and likely requires more discipline then either or.
Ι confirm and i also enjoy the hybrid (2-3) model, but i don't think companies will keep it in the long run. When it's going to be fully remote for some of these, the majority of old-school employees will beg to return to the office or switch jobs.
I spent a couple of years as field service as part of my job. What I came to appreciate was every form of communication has it's uses. Sometimes there is no good substitute for face to face. And once you'd been to a site and dealt with the people face to face it was a lot easier dealing with them remotely.
Biggest advantage of being in an office over being fully remote is that a non-trivial portion of work includes things which should not be documented - convincing some stakeholders, navigating inter-/intra-team politics, catching your VP for a quick 2 min resolution while he is walking to the cafe to quickly grab his lunch between his back-to-back-to-back meetings, observing body language to infer what your colleagues are thinking about but NOT saying etc.
This is particularly true when you become more senior and replicating that over Zoom is nearly impossible. There are things you simply don't want to put in writing or say over Zoom which are most certainly monitored by the company. And if there are some colleagues who are in office and some who are remote, the ones in office have a massive advantage when everything else is the same.
This matters for senior management only, i.e. those who make decisions. This doesn't matter for middle management (even though they act as if they are senior managers) and that's completely irrelevant for line workers who don't need to "read body language" to get their linear work done.
Line engineers totally need to read body language. Presenting a paper or design? You need to read when your audience is drifting. Discussing a contentious code review? Body language can tell you loads about how much they are committed to their approach. Mentoring other engineers? Running an ops review? Asking for approval for something?
There's a million scenarios where understanding body language makes you a more successful line engineer.
Another great reason I want to continue working remote: Why would I want to leak any information in my body language to coworkers or management?
I have no idea what they are going to do with said information, and the fact that I'm not already saying whatever it is my body language is communicating means that I would not like to supply it.
Umm what? Based on my 15+ year experience in tech sector (similar for my partner), my take is that in-person interaction is absolutely necessary for the middle management layer (though certainly not sufficient). They need to interact with both the bosses and the trench soldiers. If everything else is held constant (same org, same talent, same level, same effort), an in-office middle manager will absolutely outperform a similar person in a remote setup.
I'd go even one step further and say that in-person interaction is critical not only for middle managers but also for those individual contributors who want to jump to management or tech-lead positions.
> catching your VP for a quick 2 min resolution while he is walking to the cafe to quickly grab his lunch between his back-to-back-to-back meetings
Wouldn't this particular scenario be made more effective and efficient with asynchronous communication?
> This is particularly true when you become more senior and replicating that over Zoom is nearly impossible.
Most office jobs are not senior roles. In fact, the more senior a person is, the less office face-time they seem to have.
> There are things you simply don't want to put in writing or say over Zoom which are most certainly monitored by the company.
Phone call? Meet at a cafe?
> And if there are some colleagues who are in office and some who are remote, the ones in office have a massive advantage when everything else is the same.
I think people should be allowed to play the game as they see fit. If my plans involve a lot of office plays and social maneuvering, of course I'd prefer to be at the office, and I should be allowed to do that alongside the other people that want to engage in such activities. If my plans are to be a reliable worker with no desire to shuffle on the ladder, I might as well enjoy a quiet stay-at-home life with occasional office visits when it suits the projects I am working on, my team members and / or myself.
> Wouldn't this particular scenario be made more effective and efficient with asynchronous communication?
No way. My VP doesn't have time to read and respond to my carefully crafted email. He might be having 1500+ unread emails. Same with DMs.
> In fact, the more senior a person is, the less office face-time they seem to have.
This is so contrary to what I have seen. Most senior people (including ICs) are busier in meetings compared to more junior guys.
> Phone call?
Meh. No body language, no eye contact, less energy in the conversation.
> Meet at a cafe?
Sure. And once you reach middle management, you will have so many of these cafe meetings that going to the office would be scalable, where you meet everyone. Once a few people do that, everyone who needs these cafe meetings will start doing it because the office is where everyone is.
> I think people should be allowed to play the game as they see fit.
I mostly agree on this with one caveat. If your remote employees are going to suffer in their career trajectories because of an apparent disadvantage, a company has to be super careful that it won't become a New York Times front page story. Imagine if Microsoft allowed this and a majority of their remote employees are women and a majority of their remote employees are getting promoted at a slower rate than in-office people. It will be an unnecessary headache. Better to nip the problem in the bud.
Once the majority of folks are back in an office suddenly those not there are seen as “other” and not part of the core team.
If sitting on a specific chair is how people know you're a member of the core team, or if people forget you exist because you're not in the office, then your work isn't very high impact or noticeable, and people don't respect your knowledge enough to actively seek your input. That is the problem you need to fix, and it's a very a different problem to whether or not people see your face every day.
I would be more productive in an actual office - a private quiet space where I can focus but unfortunately that isn't what I have either at home or 'on site'.
I think this is forgotten a little by the advocates of WFH vs in-office.
I live alone in an apartment with 2 bedrooms, of which one I converted into an office space. It's easy for me to "commute" and have a separate area for work and switch off when I go into the lounge. It's not so easy for people who are in shared accommodation or in studio flats and so on, or young families in small apartments.
Similarly, lots of people move to work and don't have a social circle yet, so their job is their social circle at the beginning. Of course, you don't necessarily need to move for that job any more, but at the same time if you have, then you lose your only social contact if you have by working from home.
It's not as simple as people make out, there are benefits and disadvantages to everyone.
I'm a big fan but I can only talk from my position which is quite fortunate in terms of circumstances.
This is why it shouldn't be required either way. People who want to work from home should be able to work from home. People who would prefer to come into the office should be able to do so. It disappoints me to read comments here about people proclaiming absolutes in either direction. To be clear - I'm an advocate for full-WFH: I am fortunate enough to have a space for working and a space for other. ... but I recognize that some people have different situations at home.
The downside of the mixed approach is, as an earlier commenter said, that you can end up with an "us vs them" mentality, where the people who see each other every day and get to have small-talk and get to know each other grow closer and then the people who work from home are somewhat on the periphery.
I've seen this before, I've been working remotely for a lot of the last 7 years and there's a distinct difference in social dynamics. Even if the people in the office need to use Slack or whatever for communicating, they have their in jokes that they sprinkle in and you can feel a bit alienated or ostracised if you're in a minority of work-from-home employees.
Equally, if some people are not able to work from home, that can build resentment or envy.
So the company culture can be affected by different amounts of in-office vs home-office, every company will have their own sweet spot, but I agree with you, there is no simple one size fits all solution.
Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration, and that trend ended up being a terrible mistake for a lot of companies that followed just because it was the latest fashion in office design.
I had bad experience with it, in the context of a Media Agency, to the point where I found that more than 10 people in an open space starts to become too much. 15 to 20 you need to have headphones cranked up in order to be able to do any work.
So bare in mind that just because it's Google doesn't mean they should be the trend setter. Google does what Google thinks will work for them.
What strikes me is the high level of communication and coordination across individualS required to do that work. This seems to be the quality that newsrooms and trading floors are optimized for.
If it actually had the cost that people in this thread are claiming do you really think they would continue to build these sort of offices, year after year for almost two decades? Do you seriously think that they have not looked at the impact and determined that the claimed productivity benefits of private offices are so slight as to not even be worth the effort?
Google has been reducing the average spend per engineer (in terms of benefits and workplace conditions) for quite some time. That is indeed where they have decided to pinch pennies. Real estate costs are non-significant.
I've never seen anyone say they did open plan because it was cheap, they just say "improved collaboration, more open space environment" etc. Of course the main motivation is likely to reduce cost, but I haven't seen people say that explicitly.
So I think that the propaganda in favor for open space offices really sped up their adoption. If Google now produces a lot of propaganda in favor of this hybrid wfh model then it will likely also help speed up adoption, although the main reason to do it would be to save office space costs and not the propaganda blurbs we will see.
Corporate environment is rarely honest even if everybody knows what given thing means. You can literally compose dictionary to normal speech at some point.
I have a theory this environment slowly corrupts a character in subtle ways, till folks wake up one day being full of shit while being polite and smiling and when asked everything is fine.
Since there are at least a few comment pointing cheaper being the reason. I have to ask, what sort of cost reduction are we looking at ?
I cant imagine Open Office being a significant cost reduction in overall office renovation. Let alone the human cost and capital far outweighs renovation cost alone.
How could cost saving ever be a reason for Open Office. Am I missing something obvious?
You can pack people more densely, and therefore the office space you need to pay for is smaller for the same number of employees.
At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.
My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.
Thank You. In other words, it was not Open Office, per se that was cost saving, it was using Open Office as a tool to give less space to employees that was cost saving.
I mean you could have small cubicles too, I once worked in a office cubicles that physically could not fit anyone taller than 6"2. There are simply not enough leg room.
Note the dividers in the center area extend back to the sides of the chairs, even though the chairs are not pushed in. If you tried to do that in the first image, you would block the walkway. (You certainly couldn't do the design of the farther-away cubicles; they take up much more room per employee.)
Because it doesn't happen during a renovation. An office is moved or opened and they don't buy cubicles in the first place or spend time and money to move them.
Then perhaps the claimed productivity loss is not really as big as many claim on sites like HN? While it is not easy for an individual to measure any productivity loss, a large company or an entire industry would probably be able to put some serious numbers behind a cost/benefit analysis. Since many of the companies that have open plan offices have a rather large per-employee revenue I think it would be relatively easy for them to determine the impact. Since these companies have not only persisted in building open plan offices but have built entire campuses around such plans I think the evidence is quite clear that they are not actually the productivity sink claimed by many.
Give two people the exact same task. Enough times to get useful statistics. It would be very hard from observation only, you kind have to set up experiments like this to know.
Open plan offices worked great; it’s just that the promotors of it were lying about why they were doing it.
The main point of an open plan office is to reduce the cost of said office. That’s it. Everything else is about trying to find a nice, polite fiction about productivity and communication.
It’s been repeatedly debunked that in terms of real estate and operating costs, open plan offices don’t save money compared to one-office-per-worker designs, not even in super dense urban centers. To boot, many tech companies actively spend money to tear down privacy features and install open plan features, even when there is no growth plan or need for higher worker density per square foot, often even splurging ridiculous money to make the office have excessively opulent features like gourmet dining, coffee bars, alcohol bars, roof decks, etc. - despite hugely financial losses from the destructive effect on productivity and lack of privacy.
Offices are not chosen for short term cost savings, except possibly very early stage startups. Beyond that, offices are juvenile shrines to the company executives and founders.
>It’s been repeatedly debunked that in terms of real estate and operating costs, open plan offices don’t save money compared to one-office-per-worker designs
Source? I can't imagine there would be enough space for individual offices larger than a phonebooth per employee in the same space as open offices.
Anyway, to play the devil's advocate for the move fast and beak things type of companies, open offices are not only about cost, but about the ease to move people and teams around instantly as projects/resources change and more people are onboarded without having to constantly tear down and erect walls to accommodate the various sized teams.
Sorry, I’m not going to google it for you and filter out the confirmation bias effect.
This topic has been debated so extensively that it’s no longer acceptable to throw in a super lazy “citation needed” kind of rhetorical deflection.
The burden of proof runs the other way. It’s mundane and uncontroversial to state that open plan offices fail to save money. If someone wants to claim the opposite, they need to bring extraordinary evidence.
If it's been debated so much and so obvious, a reference should be trivial to supply. That it isn't doesn't point towards someone else's laziness (how are they to know what aspects of the arguments you think are correct and which are "confirmation bias?), but instead towards the topic probably not being as decided as you seem to think.
No, truly and emphatically not. People throw around “citation needed” style lazy remarks on HN very often. As a rhetorical device it’s critical to not treat that as legitimate, especially for well-known subjects.
It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to look up confirmatory material, rather it has to do with rejecting disingenuous attempts to goad people into citation spam debates.
> People throw around “citation needed” style lazy remarks on HN very often.
First, that isn't always used as a rhetorical device as you state. Sometimes (a lot of times) it's people asking so they can look for themselves, either to confirm the data or educate themselves as to how they are wrong.
Second, why does anything you say on the subject have weight? Do people know who you are, and have you previously shown yourself to be an authority on the subject in question? If not, why would you expect someone to take your word as fact when no evidence is supplied, and no reasoning is either? Would you accept the same from me?
If you look closely, the person that asked for a source noted why they thought it would be otherwise. Instead of reading it as "you're wrong and I'm going to use a rhetorical trick to eat up your time" I read it as "where can I read more, since this goes counter to my intuition, which I just laid out for you."
> It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to look up confirmatory material, rather it has to do with rejecting disingenuous attempts to goad people into citation spam debates.
If you can't back up your statements, don't make those statement as fact. That also avoids citation spam debates, as those that aren't actually contributing don't contribute to the spam. Citations aren't spam, they lend credibility and facts to a debate. Having a lot of them on both sides at least lets people see more details on the subject. Unsupported assertions of fact? Those are spam.
These aren't school essays, these are conversations with other people. Taking a definitive stance in a discussion without the facts to back them up isn't conducive to a useful discussion here, or likely anywhere, from what I've seen.
Hacker News is not an encyclopedia or doctoral thesis. There is no expectation here that people provide a citation for every statement they make or always start from first principles.
When people won’t simply discuss and instead keep falling back on “citation needed,” it’s a form of rhetorical trolling called Sea-lioning [1]
> Hacker News is not an encyclopedia or doctoral thesis.
I think you took my comment about a school paper the opposite way than I intended. I'm not saying we should be professional, I'm saying we should be respectful to those we are communicating with. That means not presenting yourself as absolutely right and others as wrong without evidence. School papers often (depending on type) want you to take a position and argue it assertively and as if absolute. That's not how sane people discuss things.
I'm not saying that people have to source what they say, but if they are going to make a broad assertion of fact, they should at least be able to back it up or accept that they don't have a lot to contribute that's useful.
That doesn't mean keep your mouth shut if you can't site a source, it means state it as opinion so people feel like they're part of a discussion and not a lecture. If a lecture is what you want to give, have sources, or be authoritative enough by the nature of who you are that your opinion matters.
If mthoughts2018 had sprinkled a couple "from what I've seen", "I think", or "to me"'s in their original response, they probably wouldn't have even been asked for a source. But if you present yourself as authoritative, it's only natural for people to ask where you got that authority from if it's not obvious.
Edit:
As a simple example, if you're presenting yourself in a way that you wouldn't to a new acquaintance at some mixer, maybe that's a sign you're not being a good discussion participant. If I was discussing something with someone in that situation and they asked me how I knew what I was presenting as fact, I would try to point them towards things I had read, even if I couldn't source them exactly. What I wouldn't do is tell then to figure it out themselves, because it's obvious, and I shouldn't have to explain myself because that's just a rhetorical method to keep me from spreading the truth. How rude would that be?
> The burden of proof runs the other way. It’s mundane and uncontroversial to state that open plan offices fail to save money.
What? That seems to be the opposite of what most folks would reasonably intuit.
More space per worker means more offices means higher cost. I'm surprised to see someone suggest they somehow you could use twice as much space for the same cost.
> It’s mundane and uncontroversial to state that open plan offices fail to save money.
I've never heard this before so I certainly don't consider it the self-evident fact that you do. If you agree that open offices are denser in terms of workers, would that not imply you are paying for less space and thus it is cheaper in terms of rent? And if you don't believe that open offices are denser in terms of workers, why not?
The burden of proof absolutely lies with you if you're going to make such claims. If you can't or won't back them up with a source or citation then I'm just going to ignore you, what you write can't be trusted.
You can’t force people to enter disingenuous citation spam wars just by threatening to ignore them if they won’t. You are of course free to ignore me or believe whatever you want. But burying your head in the sand doesn’t make you right or principled. As much as you criticize me for needing to back something up with a source, your comment is no better, just a bald gainsaying assertion with no support in the other direction.
This is exactly why we should push back on “citation needed” spam comments. It completely derails productive discussion. Especially in cases like this where the underlying topic (that open plan offices don’t save money) has been so, so widely written about and supported for many years.
Google never cared about costs. It bought Boston Dynamics as a personal playground for Andy Rubin, and then when Rubin was exposed as a serial harasser, they gave him a $90m severance package.
Google cares very much about cost. That's why they always terminate their own projects and services even if people enjoy them. They just happen to care more about their friends.
We have to move people to space (filled with old weird lab and office rooms) and are considering open space simply because it’ll be many months sooner we can move, since only demolition is required.
Similarly, rearranging teams is much easier and faster in an open plan office.
One of the big issues here is that developer happiness and productivity doesn’t show up clearly on a balance sheet, which is why open plan offices continue to dominate.
Is it really easier? In an open office you more or less have to sit by your team to not be disturbed by standups and other BS cermonies that really should be in an meeting room or someones office.
With single office there is no rush to move at all.
I'm an engineering director involved in planning space for 5,000+ software engineers. I went into this strongly preferring individual offices, or a shared office of 2-4 people. We spent a lot of time talking to people over the past year (before COVID).
What I learned was pretty surprising:
(1) Most of our people prefered an open floor plan. They like the sense of community that comes with it.
(2) People hate "noise", but what they consider noise is interesting. They like noise from their own team. It helps them stayed plugged in & informed. What they hate is noise from other teams. Stepping back it makes sense. If Alice is talk to Bob about Foo, and Charlie works on Foo, he's glad he overhear it. On the other hand if Danielle is on another team & has never heard of Foo, it's just a distraction.
So in the end, despite starting out as basically hating open floor plan, that's what we're doing & I'm strongly supportive. We're still being thoughtful about noise, and will have ways so teams don't hear the noise of other teams, but we're basically doing an open floor plan.
And while there are a lot of cost considerations, it wasn't a factor at all in making this decision.
(And, fwiw, I still retain my own personal preference for individual offices, but I'll have a desk in the open just like everyone else.)
Por que no los dos? Give offices to those who need to focus and open plan to those who like getting distracted all day. Seems like a win-win to me. What's with this dogmatic "everyone must sit in a bull pen" trend?
I do wonder if some of the preference is dependent on stage-of-life too. When I was younger and had fewer friends I enjoyed open offices more. As an older employee with a family and more non-work friendships the disadvantages of open plans are more obvious
Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it. Create an open floor plan with say 100 engineers. Survey job satisfaction before and N months after. At that point decide how people can be the most productive.
People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows.
>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."
An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:
>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.
>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.
> Rather than asking a hypothetical, it probably would have been better to test it.
IBM did test this. Back in the 1970's.
Single offices with a closable door were best for productivity.
Everybody just chose to ignore all the research because re-architecting the available space in San Francisco in 1998-1999 (a lot of warehouses) would be so expensive. So, they set up "open office" plans and ran ethernet and power on the exposed beams (CHEAP!).
At no point did anybody decide open floorplan was better (witness all the programmers with noise cancelling headsets).
Because on COVID our office is closed and at home i have two kids, and sometimes i really need to concentrate to get things done. So one day i tried to go to my nearest library and work from there. It's "open office" but it's quite there even if there are people around doing their work.
I was so productive as there are no distractions. No temptations to go to fridge, no passing by colleagues to say hello, no noise. I've done things in couple hours that would have taken whole day at my normal office.
So i think open office is not a problem, problem is whats happening around you in that open office.
>...So i think open office is not a problem, problem is whats happening around you in that open office.
Yea libraries have created the only type of 'open office' where people can actually be productive. The way they do it is to prevent all noise and distractions.
The main rationalization people use to promote open floor plans is that it increases collaboration but the only way an open floor plan can work is to dramatically decrease collaboration. This article covers some of that research:
>...A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration
The problem is that companies of all sizes are most innovative when people are able (and encouraged) to collaborate without destroying the productivity of those around them.
Are you serious? Maybe this person is using evidence gathered from before WHF? Would you also argue that you can't talk about open floor plans at night because technically all the engineers would presumably be at home sleeping?
I came into an open plan workplace with low expectations due to so many complaints seen on community sites like this. But I was pleasantly surprised and found I like it a lot better than being isolated in an office. Keeping a team sitting together like you said is key. I also feel it's a little easier visiting other teams, since you can see them from afar and just walk over. Coworkers are generally good about being mindful about noise and grab a nearby meeting room when needed.
One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.
How many years have you had an office with a door and how do you compare that?
I've never worked in a completely open plan. The closest was this sort of "pod" setup where it's semi open and it can be terrible. It's not terrible if you have some premium corner or window spot where you are semi-isolated, if you're anywhere close to where people are walking or are surrounded from all directions then you (well I) can basically do not real work the entire day. In that latter scenario I pretty much did all the "real" work by staying late after everyone went home. I've seen setups where people are packed into huge rooms and I'd need to be in pretty dire straights before I ever consider working there.
Where exactly are you situated in this open plan? Are people walking right in front of you for example? Or immediately behind your back? Let's say you want to get a coffee, are you walking immediately behind someone's back or immediately in front of their faces? How many people have headphones on all day or try to insulate themselves from the environment in other ways? When people get sick, is the entire office sneezing and coughing? Curious minds want to know ;)
This is really well said and I hadn't thought about it quite like this. It's true, I really don't mind when my colleagues on my team are talking within earshot or even adjacent teams I may tangentially support. What I hate though is engineers on teams I have nothing to do with or, worse, non engineering teams talking nearby.
After my last job with a noisy open office, I was so happy that we had to start working remotely. I loved my company, coworkers, the technology I was working on, pay was decent, etc.
But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again.
Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid.
I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.
Are you an extrovert? Do your people have actual deadlines or shipping products? Because for an introvert it can turn into a sort of pressure cooker sometimes. Noise yes, but visual distractions too.
I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.
I would treat this as an example of people not knowing what they want. How many of those people who preferred an open floor plan have worked somewhere where they had an office with a door? I'll hazard a guess, <5%? How can they tell? It's like asking someone from the Sahara desert how they think they'd do in the north pole.
A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...
I've seen places where people leave their office door open when they are fine with being visited, or just want to see other people go by. Where a closed door means don't visit or at least knock, but it's not usually closed.
I basically have a private office right now (WFH, lol) and I'm the only person on the project right now, so for me it works. But previously I've always worked in teams, 3 - 8 people. The noises from one's own team is almost never noise, because it's pertinent to the project you all are working on (if everyone is working on something else you're not an actual team). The noises from other teams though, ugh.
Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things.
I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much.
I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.
It's more than that. Open floor plans make it impossible to talk with your team. Because if you do talk you're bothering everyone else. Working from home, it's much easier to do phone conferences, because people don't have to lower their voices to not disturb other office drones.
Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?
I doubt that. All the evidence would suggest Google is maximizing employee comfort anf productivity to the exclusion of all else. They are already spending literal billions on real estate in pretty much all the most expensive metro areas in the world. If they thought smaller offices were more successful they’d do it. Pretty sure that the success of open floor plan is based on solid scientific evidence.
Personally I enjoy working in open floor plan. It’s only when I’m having a bad day I don’t feel like it. But I wouldn’t feel like being in any kind of office environment at that point.
Google is actually notoriously bad at office and capacity planning. Over the years, significant chunks of time, my teams were literally sitting in hallways. Usually it’s impossible to book a meeting room, and so on.
Basically problems like this are not easily quantifiable and nobody gets bad review because of this, so they don’t get solved.
We have a really small web agency (5 people) and I agree that we don't need to be in the office, that we share with other people of the same company of another division, to get good work done. We need to be together to boost ideas more. Technology and remote tools stigma don't allow you to substitute that for now.
> Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration
I don't think that's true. First, open-space offices predate Google by many years. (Frank Lloyd Wright invented the open-plan office in 1936. They were common in tech companies long before Google.) Second, Google used a mixture of enclosed offices with doors and open-space.
My experience is that in open space where everybody are following basic noise hygiene rules, most of the sounds you got are keyboard and mouse clicks and sometimes mouse wheel crackle. Setting and enforcement of said rules are in mutual company's and employees interest.
Good example, yes. Like a library. Just some basic rules like "talk in a whisper or use a meeting room", "set your phone on silent and forward notifications to your workstation", and so on. Passages wide enough to go without disturbing people nearby.
They did not follow it just because it was fashionable. They followed it because seating people like that requires like 1/4 of the space and cost of offices, and real estate in big cities is incredibly expensive.
Misleading title. It gives the impression that Google tried WFH, found it to be inadequate, and took a U-turn, saying 'on-site work' is the future (as well as the past, and WFH was a failed experiment).
But in the body of the article, the CEO is advocating a hybrid model, with increased flexibility for WFH, so much so that working from office are being declared special days (meetings), labelled 'on-site days' ('on-site meetings').
I've been working at a company that was remote for 7 years. We are DEALING with remote work. We're making it work, over many years of experimentation. It only works because everyone is remote. And the only reason they hire remote is because new startups cannot compete with FANG for talent in hubs.
I’m disappointed in Sundar’s tone deaf vision for the future of work.
A hybrid model requires employees to be on site some of the time, and forces them to live nearby. It will also make people feel like they HAVE to come in to the office so they aren’t othered.
This also sacrifices some of the major benefits for employees like the freedom to live wherever we want, suiting our financial needs, familial needs, political/cultural needs, etc. We need to avoid having gigantic concentrations of our society in a few locations, and COVID lockdowns have proven we can make it work in knowledge industries.
> This also sacrifices some of the major benefits for employees like the freedom to live wherever we want, suiting our financial needs, familial needs, political/cultural needs, etc. We need to avoid having gigantic concentrations of our society in a few locations,
The freedom to live wherever you want is great, but it is not without costs.
Major cities aren't going away. They are the creative hubs of society. Most group human endeavors are the product of cities. To be part of that creative community, you have to be near a city.
However, we could afford to have some diversification in tech industry beyond the big hubs, but in Google's case they've already done this (i.e. Boulder, Ann Arbor). Bear in mind that there will be resistance in those places, also, for very rational reasons (i.e. escalating housing costs).
There is undoubtedly a societal reorganization underway, but it is highly unlikely to satisfy either the purely remote or purely in-office preferences.
Depending upon what getting together sometimes looks like, it can still give a lot of flexibility. If it's come in 2 days per week, you probably still need to live a 2-3 hour drive away. (Not that some consultants etc. don't sly to a work location every week.)
But if it's the odd off-site/2 day team meeting, people can live pretty much anywhere--at least domestically in the US.
I have the opposite take. Having some work from home means those who can’t stand working that way such as myself are forced to completely restructure how we communicate and collaborate to enable those that want it.
I am still surprised by how many early startups have offices.
After seeing it burn two different startups I was at, I am baffled why they burn money to have offices in a big city when money is tight (or they should be acting like it, rather than assuming they will always get another round at favorable terms)
When you are stable and profitable, having an office isn't that big of a deal. When you are burning money and looking down a cliff, maybe a $25k+ / mo expense is better spent hiring someone. Plus you can ethically pay people under market and both sides are happy (employee cuts their expenses by 50%+, you cut your payroll by 25%). Your employees will be happier, you get to pay them less, no need to buy desks, you can scale your business infinitely and you get rid of likely your biggest expense.
Startups could even spend a tiny fraction on improving their employee's offices. $1k yearly home office stipend would be huge for an employee, but a drop in the bucket compared to $1k / employee / month office expense.
Don't know about other places, but in Europe office space in central metropolitan area is as low as 1-2 employee's monthly wage. For 10+ people, the community benefits are clearly there.
The bigger question is, can the company quickly scale with finding on-site people around the area quickly enough?
Depends on the location. In NYC, at least, that's definitely not the case (and it's a big reason why Manhattan is quickly turning into block after block of Starbucks followed by Chase Bank followed by Chipotle).
Remote makes communication harder and startups generally lack good process. Bad communication + bad process = a disaster. Startups can't have good process because they don't know what they're doing yet so process would be a slow down. Startups can also be very stressful and without the human empathy component (that is hard to gain remotely) small arguments can explode into epics nuclear explosions.
Startups are about balancing a bunch of things rather than having some type of optimal stable configuration. Working in an office let's you balance a bunch of other things more easily.
There's a large amount of software built on free time by much larger teams than are staffing new startups that are nearly exclusively remote. For example Linux has always been developed remotely from what I can tell.
The point is that there are lots of failed oss projects. Further, a startup has a lot more requirements than an oss hobby project. For your hobby you can send an email to a listserv and say “burned out, taking a three month break” or you can focus exclusively on the code.
But a startup needs to make money or it can’t pay people. You don’t just need code. You need a product and you need to sell it.
A lot of the Apache projects came from companies. Although some of these were more like one person at the company developed it and the company funded and maintained it.
Did Kubernetes start in person as in in the same room? It was built by multiple people but I don't know if they shared an office space. I thought it was that they shared a building.
All of the other ones though are pretty solid examples of team-driven OSS work.
The world is different now. The remote world will become the norm.
Startups are about building a new business: and the new business needs to ready for this brave new word.
Startups are about building new businesses, but not necessarily new business practices. Each startup is different, just like any other business. From culture to team makeup to line of business, no two companies are exactly alike.
I imagine that many startups can and will be successfully fully-remote from Day 1, whereas other startups won't possibly be able to work successfully without close and constant in-person communication.
Wait, sitting at an office and still using Slack makes on-site work much different than remote? You think in-person meetings at work are productive? I can't forget the nice excuse to have an hour-long meeting, which lasted only 15 minutes, but people had a proof on their calendar that they "worked" for an hour. Or "starting work" at 9am... but really having coffee and eating breakfast until 10am... or having a 2-hour lunch break, which was supposed to be just one hour. Oh, wait, it was a working lunch. Although offices open at 9am, nobody dared to schedule meetings before 10am or in the 1pm-2pm interval for the above-mentioned reason. Can't forget also the blood-sugar spike right after lunch when people were falling asleep during the afternoon meetings.
I've been working remotely in the past 10+ years and I'm never looking into on-site work again! The time "invested" in commute with all the risks associated with driving are not worth it - even if it pays slightly better. But usually it doesn't. For example, in Orange County, CA you can't find a well-paying job - the best jobs are remote and OC is not a fringe case!
Remote work is the nightmare of micromanagers! Everybody else loves remote work!
> Pichai said that Google is "reconfiguring" its office spaces to accommodate what he called "on-sites" — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office.
I love it when the corporate speak isn't even intelligible to the business press.
Is "on-sites" days where people work on site? Is it people who work on site? Is it something completely different that Google is creating? The sentence is guessing it's the first, admitting it could be anything else.
The sentence does appear to illustrate that neither the writer nor anyone who edited the story is close enough to the industry to understand some common terminology. It lowers my confidence in the publication’s analysis on related subjects.
Not sure if the article title changed since it was posted, but the HN title is not at all reflective of the content and the actual title on BI now is: "Google's CEO says the future of work involves a 'hybrid model' and that the company is already reconfiguring its offices for employee 'on-sites'".
From the article:
"Pichai said that Google is "reconfiguring" its office spaces to accommodate what he called "on-sites" — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office."
If anything he's saying that work from home is going to become semi-permanent, it's just that there will be times when people will need to come in and work together in an office and they're making plans to support that. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
As I see it there are a lot of advantages and few disadvantages in WFH.
Advantages:
- No need for commuting. This is maybe the lowest hanging fruit if you want to reduce CO2 emissions and pollution in general.
- Geographical independence. A company is not limited from the pool of candidates willing to move physically close to its premises, and workers have more companies to choose from.
- Potential for higher productivity, since a worker can choose how and when to work.
- Lower cost for companies (fewer physical offices).
- More meaningful family life for workers.
- Less potential for office politics (I hope).
- More opportunities for disabled workers.
Disadvantages:
- In mixed teams, those who work remotely may be considered 2nd class citizens.
- Some people may miss the kind of socializing they do at work.
- Potential for lower productivity, not all homes are suitable environments for work, and also more potential for slacking off (but I doubt it, slackers are going to be slackers no matter where they are).
- If you are a pointy haired manager, you might find yourself out of a job.
As I see it the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. I know WFH can't work for everyone, but I see that most objections come from people who feel threatened by this model (i.e. managers, often pointy haired). Also some of the disadvantages may be remedied with simple solutions (for example, make your teams entirely office based, or entirely remote, since mixed teams don't work too well).
Wonder why California doesn't have any outdoor offices.
Respitory viruses are pretty much limited to spreading indoors. I also assume having a nice green outdoors view would be much less stressing to the workers when compared with a traditional office environment.
It's really easy to set up and disband. Just run power and internet cables, set up some desks and off you go. No need for expensive construction.
Outdoor spaces are generally not good for tech work. You can’t see your screen because of glare, run out of power because there isn’t an outlet to power your laptop, am uncomfortable because of the seating position, have a gust of wind blow away your notes, don’t have enough screen real estate, can be too hot or too cold, etc...
Interestingly, of campuses I have been to, the Stanford campus seems to have been the best designed for this. Plenty of verandas and balconies protected from light and wind, outlets everywhere, good WiFi. The original campus buildings were designed to protect people from the sun. Glad they carried it over to the new buildings. Facebook with their courtyard is also good.
Yeah, I have a nice deck and even extended WiFi so I could work out there. But, in practice, glare/temperature/etc. means I don't really like working there. Even if I'm fine working on a laptop on my lap (which I often am), I have a sunny room that's just generally more comfortable. Maybe if I had an outdoor location that was better screened and shaded.
One of the advertised upsides of remote work is reduced carbon emissions but I wonder how that works out when you have required on sites as well.
Back of the envelope math suggests if you have remote works flying in from, say, NYC to SFO, it's not clear whether there's a net carbon footprint reduction.
I think WFH can be better for the economy and quality of life due to more people spread to cheaper suburbs thus revitalizing suburb economy. It also will contribute more to the diversity of people, racially, socio economically and poltiically in the suburbs.
In the short term at least, the suburbs are not able to absorb a big surge. Some places are seeing two or three times normal demand. There’s no way they can adapt fast enough and prices in those places are rising.
How are the suburbs going to boom when many suburban folks want to keep mandatory single family zoning and do away with inclusionary regulations like Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing? If they can’t build up to support more the economy will stagnate, diversity will remain the same, and the burbs will continue to be an area of swing voters.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadIf so, I’m not exactly enamored with his leadership as is, I don’t know why I should care about his take on remote vs. colocation.
Say that to all teams that have been reorganised around two pizzas.
What do you mean?
I remember when damn near every company had a brain teaser part of their interview loop, because that’s what Google did. It turns out that that was a terrible way to interview engineers, but Google’s clout accidentally made a trend.
On paper, Google announcing this means that only Google engineers will be affected. But Google also trend sets, so if Google starts cancelling WFH for spurious reasons, such as the personal idiosyncrasies of their executives, then a lot of people who don’t work at Google suddenly got their WFH opportunities put at risk for no good reason.
Just considering the US, I wonder how many engineers are talented enough to work for Google, are interested in working for Google, and aren't already there, even in a satellite office? I'm sure there are some, but between a variety of office locations and good pay, I'm not convinced there's a large untapped pool of rural tech talent.
I work at a “virtual location”. It was in the job description.
There's an element of seriousness in your sarcastic comment for more than just companies.
They won't put it quite that bluntly, but it'll be the underlying reasoning.
There's no one size fits all but for teams or people who perform WAY better in WFH having it as an option that isn't looked down upon is very comforting. I may be able to move far away from the city at some point in my career. I am extremely eager to do so and I don't think I am alone.
For what I pay for rent I could be buying a large house in other parts of the US or central America
Even for a company a large as Google, this seems to broad, unless something was utterly broken in the team. I'd expect a range more like .25x-4x.
For areas that need to "just build" you'll probably see massive performance improvements. People in their internal accelerator Area 120 this is probably great for them. For people who need to play politics, get buy in, and do a lot of team-based collaboration you'll likely see a massive hit. I'm assuming this is going to really kill a lot of their internal infra stuff that needs to do a lot of meetings to make sure things are backwards compatible and get buy in on decisions.
Although, I've worked with many people with very bad social anxiety who I'm guessing are doing fantastic in a work setting right now since they've developed the online communication skills from talking to a lot of people online throughout their life.
If the current tolerance for remote work persists, I fully expect salaries in companies of the S.F. Bay Area to drop significantly. With a fraction of the rent, this might still work out for the employee.
I'd guess the super inflated Bay Area pay is likely going to deflate but the average global pay for SWEs will inflate as those companies start looking for people who can add the same value as a local employee for a reasonable price. Where I work we've been hiring engineers from outside the US recently and we've been giving them US-like salaries which are massive jumps from previous local jobs they had in their country.
I'm assuming other scrappy companies who are in a growth phase right now are doing the same. This is likely especially the case if you need to wisely allocate capital.
If the office ever reopens then I will probably only go in one or two days a week, and all of my employees can choose their own schedules also. We will just mandate coming in for certain meetings.
Six months in, the main thing that this experience has taught me is that I never want to work a remote job. It's miserable.
These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive.
That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.
However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
Co-workers often make good friends since they have a lot in common. Some of them will be acquaintances, some will be good friends. It’s normal
I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it.
I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore.
Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes.
I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc.
We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.
Thirdly video calls are super draining.
It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
There are obviously many factors that can affect a person's happiness and it's always good to hear people's perspectives. Why do you find it miserable?
TBQH I think a lot of young people no longer know how to make friends outside of the rigid structures of school and work. All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. If I hadn't grown up in Boston I probably would have stuck around where ever my family was located. I think the pandemic is forcing people to analyze their own lives and many are discovering things they don't like about themselves and their choices. Hanging out on social media all day is unhealthy and is not a replacement for true friends and family.
The economy grows faster when people sacrifice their personal lives for work.
Not saying I like it, but it seems obvious why incentives are aligned that way.
It's not obvious in the longer term. Economic growth, which is affected by technological and scientific advancement (among many other things), depends on insight and creativity, not just hard work.
Maybe the economy grows more in the longer term if the people working in it were raised as healthy, happy children in more of a "family values" sort of situation.
(Personally I hold much more of a progressive, pro-LGBT+-visibility, love-and-let-love type of position than what are sometimes called traditional family values.)
Rather, I want to suggest that long term economic growth almost certainly depends in some way not just on people sacrificing their personal lives for work now; but also qualities that future generations grow up with, i.e. how children are raised, schooled, looked after, the attitudes they are surrounded by and so on.
I'm not informed enough to know how personal life in the present affects multi-generational economic growth. But I'm sure it has an effect, and that everyone maximising work in the present at the cost of personal life is almost certainly not the path to maximum collective prosperity as measured by economic growth in the long term.
For many friends and colleagues with children, however, its been a disaster, and it seems the largest culprit is that they both work, and therefore they struggle to do their jobs while also watch their children all day. I don't blame them for their situation. Society has made it so that having a stay at home parent is a luxury that many families simply can't afford, and it has also devalued the idea so much that even the families that can afford it are almost embarrassed to do so (my wife personally likes being a stay at home mom, but feels judgement from friends and former colleagues for quitting her job as a chemist to do so). Its good that we moved beyond expecting women to exclusively be the homemakers, as that is needlessly sexist, but it would have been far more healthy to replace that with normalizing one parent, gender-agnostic, devoted to child-care, rather than normalizing both parents working and relying on daycare/schooling to watch kids for most of the day.
I would have thought to be the other way around - parents miss office as they have to supervise and educate their kids while also doing their regular job.
Personally I live with 4 other family members but have a dedicated room with a dual monitor setup so I find this to be ideal.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Now when I come home i get the biggest hugs you've ever seen and we start playing.
I pay $400/mo (all inclusive /w internet) for my little office. That would take me 5 years to recoup at my current rate.
I got my company to pay for it though so its technically free.
I’ve considered an office shed too, but I’m a bit worried that’s still a little too close haha.
Here's the main page: https://www.studio-shed.com/products/signature-series/shed-t...
Ugh, I do this all the time and didn't think about how bad it is. A gut punch, but glad I'm now conscious of it.
Just because I go to an office doesn’t mean I baby them or don’t teach self-reliance.
> instead of actually being there all day
Most parents aren’t present, even if they are in the same room.
> Most parents aren’t present, even if they are in the same room
Seems like you're probably not aware of the irony.
No doors? Seems like there are many ways you could make the signal less ambiguous.
So many people are working at a kitchen table right now or similar. I.e. in a communal area, due to lack of spare rooms to make into an office.
Imagine two adults trying to work at a kitchen/dining room table all day with children around.
My home office is great: nice desk, chair, good lighting, extra monitor, more than enough space. The literal work facilities are certainly better here for me than at the office. I just miss seeing coworkers, and I even miss my train ride a bit (that used to be my reading time).
And, yes, I live by myself (with my dog, fortunately).
That sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem—insufficient autonomy? no "seat at the table"?—that is, at most, being exacerbated by remote work. What specifically about your culture makes you feel this way? What makes you feel this way more now than previously?
Like many of us, I have wide latitude in exactly how I go about meeting the requirements of the project I'm on, and I have some amount of freedom in choosing those projects. My manager is not looking over my shoulder at how many LOC I commit.
What's causing me to feel this way is a combination of isolation, every fucking thing that's happened in 2020, and my deteriorating mental health as a result. I may not last another year in a remote work + COVID environment.
Dream job in my opinion. I personally hate interacting with coworkers and meetings.
What made it feel any different in the past?
I live in an apartment complex that normally features amenities and is located in a neighborhood with lots of shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc. All of the third places are currently closed or under very heavy restrictions (e.g. in Seattle you can only dine indoors with members of your household), so now I'm stuck in a two-bedroom apartment. I can still go for walks but it's not quite the same.
There's also the issue of everybody else. On paper, I have gig internet. In practice, I don't think the fiber here was designed for everyone to be simultaneously working from home. And especially with kids staying at home instead of using up their energy at school or at the playground, apartment noise has become more significant.
Work from home would probably be nicer under less strenuous circumstances. Working from home or a coffee shop of your own volition is one thing, working from home because you have to is another. I'm onboarding to a new team and personally I've found it difficult to get the quick 30-second validation I need to see if I'm setting things up right or have the right assumptions, because it very easily snowballs into setting up formal meetings.
My married friends complain more about WFH than otherwise. I think it depends on how many kids you have, and how big your house is.
I have a coworker that I haven't seen for weeks now because of their new part-time job as a homeschool teacher.
Childless couples and single people seem pretty happy with their new free time, even if they’d eventually like to return to the office.
- my spouse is stay at home, and therefore is supervising the kids while I work - I have a study/office at home that allows me to close the door if necessary - more of my daily time is spent programming than in meetings or interacting with people
If any one of those things wasn't true, I too would probably be struggling more with the WFH situation. As it stands, its a massive improvement as I can still work effectively, the lack of commute means I have more time for seeing my family, and the flexibility of my daily schedule now allows me to do things like take a break to hang out or have lunch with my kids.
I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers.
Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
If you're the type of engineer who likes to be given requirements and sit in your home office and code all day in silence then power to you. Not for me.
What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?
Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case.
So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.
And I know, just for me. On scale of 1 to 10 if for me WFH is a 3 then work from cafe is a 5 and work from office is a 10 (note: this is with cool people on cool stuff, those numbers and even order might changes of those 2 things were not true). I don't generally talk to anyone at a cafe so I don't get any social interaction quota. I can't bounce ideas off people at the cafe, they aren't generally fellow SWE. So while it feels less isolated than WFH it's not a substitute for me.
It's definitely been better since I've been able to get out and see friends, but I'm still itching to get back to the office.
We used Zoom since ~2015 regularly, and Hangouts before that, and given that the company had many offices around the world, and the majority of teams were distributed (largely optimizing for the same timezones), being home office-bound was no different that being on another office. We constantly experimented with the latest tools and practices to be more productive at a distance. For example, some pairs were connected on video all day, in addition to keyboard/screen. It wasn't easy for everyone, but ended up achieving the goals.
Post COVID, my current company is in the process of re-imagining office work, more towards intense collaboration spaces. Most of the work can still be done remotely, getting together for specific activities every once in a while. I really believe this model could represent the future for this type of work in tech.
If the company culture is such that remote employees are not second class citizens and HR has set rules to back that up, anything is possible.
Totally anecdotal but among my colleagues it looks roughly like:
- Those at home alone all day miss the social contact they got from being in the office.
- Those with kids and other distractions at home are annoyed because it interferes with focus.
- Those with a quiet home that includes other people are often quite happy with the work from home situation.
I'm in the last group and I'm happy and I'm with you on frequency. I'd prefer to only go in 1-2 days per week and live much further from the office.
It became insufferable when both parents and their school-age children were forced to stay home. Even the nerdiest child can spend only so much time glued to a screen, or otherwise being self-occupied. Children genuinely need attention, communication, care — and this all steps the way of your concentration.
That said, I think I prefer working from home over open-office hotdesking. If an employer wants me at the office, the least they can do is assign me a well equipped desk, ventilation, lighting, a decent screen, that kinda thing.
I don't get (and yet I do, sigh) why some companies seem to treat their highly paid knowledge workers like cattle / sweatshops. I don't get why some people prefer working in those conditions.
Also things like you have a meeting and someone is late - when everyone is remote, it is very easy to expect and accommodate it. But when most or many are in office and in a room and one person that is remote is late - probably won't be as well received.
The field is levelled.
I should say I was remote for 5 years and the meetings where everyone was remote were much longer, extra overhead, slower responses, and less engagement. They were bad. I’d rather be not an equal participant in a good meeting than fully equal in a bad meeting.
Though to be clear, the question is whether the benefits of treating the entire team uniformly outweigh the disadvantages of imposing telecoms frictions on all members, rather than just a portion.
When critical mass is in physical proximity, oral communication (fast, enjoyable, efficient - and dangerous) creeps in, and you're left to collect the leftovers of discussions.
It worked OK, but part of the trick was that I was very senior, and the rest of the team was split across several time zones with me sitting basically in the middle. Another part was everyone knew I was remote because the team was far from where I lived, not because I wanted to WFH per se.
That's also the case with some senior people in adjacent teams: the people who are truly "core" get to live where they want, or at least that's been my experience over the last 20-ish years.
I definitely wouldn't advise it as a career strategy, mostly for the reason you cite.
The other thing I’ve seen that effects the balance is time zones. It’s not as bad as being remote but it factors in to a general availability / can be relied on to be there aspect.
This is particularly true when you become more senior and replicating that over Zoom is nearly impossible. There are things you simply don't want to put in writing or say over Zoom which are most certainly monitored by the company. And if there are some colleagues who are in office and some who are remote, the ones in office have a massive advantage when everything else is the same.
There's a million scenarios where understanding body language makes you a more successful line engineer.
I have no idea what they are going to do with said information, and the fact that I'm not already saying whatever it is my body language is communicating means that I would not like to supply it.
Typically, try to make sure that you are comfortable? Humans communicate nonverbally, just like most social animals.
Umm what? Based on my 15+ year experience in tech sector (similar for my partner), my take is that in-person interaction is absolutely necessary for the middle management layer (though certainly not sufficient). They need to interact with both the bosses and the trench soldiers. If everything else is held constant (same org, same talent, same level, same effort), an in-office middle manager will absolutely outperform a similar person in a remote setup.
I'd go even one step further and say that in-person interaction is critical not only for middle managers but also for those individual contributors who want to jump to management or tech-lead positions.
Wouldn't this particular scenario be made more effective and efficient with asynchronous communication?
> This is particularly true when you become more senior and replicating that over Zoom is nearly impossible.
Most office jobs are not senior roles. In fact, the more senior a person is, the less office face-time they seem to have.
> There are things you simply don't want to put in writing or say over Zoom which are most certainly monitored by the company.
Phone call? Meet at a cafe?
> And if there are some colleagues who are in office and some who are remote, the ones in office have a massive advantage when everything else is the same.
I think people should be allowed to play the game as they see fit. If my plans involve a lot of office plays and social maneuvering, of course I'd prefer to be at the office, and I should be allowed to do that alongside the other people that want to engage in such activities. If my plans are to be a reliable worker with no desire to shuffle on the ladder, I might as well enjoy a quiet stay-at-home life with occasional office visits when it suits the projects I am working on, my team members and / or myself.
No way. My VP doesn't have time to read and respond to my carefully crafted email. He might be having 1500+ unread emails. Same with DMs.
> In fact, the more senior a person is, the less office face-time they seem to have.
This is so contrary to what I have seen. Most senior people (including ICs) are busier in meetings compared to more junior guys.
> Phone call?
Meh. No body language, no eye contact, less energy in the conversation.
> Meet at a cafe?
Sure. And once you reach middle management, you will have so many of these cafe meetings that going to the office would be scalable, where you meet everyone. Once a few people do that, everyone who needs these cafe meetings will start doing it because the office is where everyone is.
> I think people should be allowed to play the game as they see fit.
I mostly agree on this with one caveat. If your remote employees are going to suffer in their career trajectories because of an apparent disadvantage, a company has to be super careful that it won't become a New York Times front page story. Imagine if Microsoft allowed this and a majority of their remote employees are women and a majority of their remote employees are getting promoted at a slower rate than in-office people. It will be an unnecessary headache. Better to nip the problem in the bud.
If sitting on a specific chair is how people know you're a member of the core team, or if people forget you exist because you're not in the office, then your work isn't very high impact or noticeable, and people don't respect your knowledge enough to actively seek your input. That is the problem you need to fix, and it's a very a different problem to whether or not people see your face every day.
I live alone in an apartment with 2 bedrooms, of which one I converted into an office space. It's easy for me to "commute" and have a separate area for work and switch off when I go into the lounge. It's not so easy for people who are in shared accommodation or in studio flats and so on, or young families in small apartments.
Similarly, lots of people move to work and don't have a social circle yet, so their job is their social circle at the beginning. Of course, you don't necessarily need to move for that job any more, but at the same time if you have, then you lose your only social contact if you have by working from home.
It's not as simple as people make out, there are benefits and disadvantages to everyone.
I'm a big fan but I can only talk from my position which is quite fortunate in terms of circumstances.
I've seen this before, I've been working remotely for a lot of the last 7 years and there's a distinct difference in social dynamics. Even if the people in the office need to use Slack or whatever for communicating, they have their in jokes that they sprinkle in and you can feel a bit alienated or ostracised if you're in a minority of work-from-home employees.
Equally, if some people are not able to work from home, that can build resentment or envy.
So the company culture can be affected by different amounts of in-office vs home-office, every company will have their own sweet spot, but I agree with you, there is no simple one size fits all solution.
Remember Google was the promoter of the open-space office configuration, and that trend ended up being a terrible mistake for a lot of companies that followed just because it was the latest fashion in office design.
I had bad experience with it, in the context of a Media Agency, to the point where I found that more than 10 people in an open space starts to become too much. 15 to 20 you need to have headphones cranked up in order to be able to do any work.
So bare in mind that just because it's Google doesn't mean they should be the trend setter. Google does what Google thinks will work for them.
What strikes me is the high level of communication and coordination across individualS required to do that work. This seems to be the quality that newsrooms and trading floors are optimized for.
So I think that the propaganda in favor for open space offices really sped up their adoption. If Google now produces a lot of propaganda in favor of this hybrid wfh model then it will likely also help speed up adoption, although the main reason to do it would be to save office space costs and not the propaganda blurbs we will see.
I have a theory this environment slowly corrupts a character in subtle ways, till folks wake up one day being full of shit while being polite and smiling and when asked everything is fine.
I cant imagine Open Office being a significant cost reduction in overall office renovation. Let alone the human cost and capital far outweighs renovation cost alone.
How could cost saving ever be a reason for Open Office. Am I missing something obvious?
At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.
My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.
I mean you could have small cubicles too, I once worked in a office cubicles that physically could not fit anyone taller than 6"2. There are simply not enough leg room.
And here is a random picture of a small cubicle design: https://cubiclebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Works...
Note the dividers in the center area extend back to the sides of the chairs, even though the chairs are not pushed in. If you tried to do that in the first image, you would block the walkway. (You certainly couldn't do the design of the farther-away cubicles; they take up much more room per employee.)
You could do something like this: https://www.quill.com/content/index/resource-center/office-f... But I'd probably call that an open office layout, honestly.
I guess I need some time to think deeply about it before it sinks in.
but the trick is that the management chain "saving money" and the management chain that gets screwed by the reduced productivity are different
It's hard to measure productivity, too, so it might not be clear how much the open office is really costing a company
So many great companies fall apart because that is just not true at all.
The main point of an open plan office is to reduce the cost of said office. That’s it. Everything else is about trying to find a nice, polite fiction about productivity and communication.
Offices are not chosen for short term cost savings, except possibly very early stage startups. Beyond that, offices are juvenile shrines to the company executives and founders.
Source? I can't imagine there would be enough space for individual offices larger than a phonebooth per employee in the same space as open offices.
Anyway, to play the devil's advocate for the move fast and beak things type of companies, open offices are not only about cost, but about the ease to move people and teams around instantly as projects/resources change and more people are onboarded without having to constantly tear down and erect walls to accommodate the various sized teams.
This topic has been debated so extensively that it’s no longer acceptable to throw in a super lazy “citation needed” kind of rhetorical deflection.
The burden of proof runs the other way. It’s mundane and uncontroversial to state that open plan offices fail to save money. If someone wants to claim the opposite, they need to bring extraordinary evidence.
It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to look up confirmatory material, rather it has to do with rejecting disingenuous attempts to goad people into citation spam debates.
First, that isn't always used as a rhetorical device as you state. Sometimes (a lot of times) it's people asking so they can look for themselves, either to confirm the data or educate themselves as to how they are wrong.
Second, why does anything you say on the subject have weight? Do people know who you are, and have you previously shown yourself to be an authority on the subject in question? If not, why would you expect someone to take your word as fact when no evidence is supplied, and no reasoning is either? Would you accept the same from me?
If you look closely, the person that asked for a source noted why they thought it would be otherwise. Instead of reading it as "you're wrong and I'm going to use a rhetorical trick to eat up your time" I read it as "where can I read more, since this goes counter to my intuition, which I just laid out for you."
> It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to look up confirmatory material, rather it has to do with rejecting disingenuous attempts to goad people into citation spam debates.
If you can't back up your statements, don't make those statement as fact. That also avoids citation spam debates, as those that aren't actually contributing don't contribute to the spam. Citations aren't spam, they lend credibility and facts to a debate. Having a lot of them on both sides at least lets people see more details on the subject. Unsupported assertions of fact? Those are spam.
These aren't school essays, these are conversations with other people. Taking a definitive stance in a discussion without the facts to back them up isn't conducive to a useful discussion here, or likely anywhere, from what I've seen.
When people won’t simply discuss and instead keep falling back on “citation needed,” it’s a form of rhetorical trolling called Sea-lioning [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
I think you took my comment about a school paper the opposite way than I intended. I'm not saying we should be professional, I'm saying we should be respectful to those we are communicating with. That means not presenting yourself as absolutely right and others as wrong without evidence. School papers often (depending on type) want you to take a position and argue it assertively and as if absolute. That's not how sane people discuss things.
I'm not saying that people have to source what they say, but if they are going to make a broad assertion of fact, they should at least be able to back it up or accept that they don't have a lot to contribute that's useful.
That doesn't mean keep your mouth shut if you can't site a source, it means state it as opinion so people feel like they're part of a discussion and not a lecture. If a lecture is what you want to give, have sources, or be authoritative enough by the nature of who you are that your opinion matters.
If mthoughts2018 had sprinkled a couple "from what I've seen", "I think", or "to me"'s in their original response, they probably wouldn't have even been asked for a source. But if you present yourself as authoritative, it's only natural for people to ask where you got that authority from if it's not obvious.
Edit: As a simple example, if you're presenting yourself in a way that you wouldn't to a new acquaintance at some mixer, maybe that's a sign you're not being a good discussion participant. If I was discussing something with someone in that situation and they asked me how I knew what I was presenting as fact, I would try to point them towards things I had read, even if I couldn't source them exactly. What I wouldn't do is tell then to figure it out themselves, because it's obvious, and I shouldn't have to explain myself because that's just a rhetorical method to keep me from spreading the truth. How rude would that be?
What? That seems to be the opposite of what most folks would reasonably intuit.
More space per worker means more offices means higher cost. I'm surprised to see someone suggest they somehow you could use twice as much space for the same cost.
I've never heard this before so I certainly don't consider it the self-evident fact that you do. If you agree that open offices are denser in terms of workers, would that not imply you are paying for less space and thus it is cheaper in terms of rent? And if you don't believe that open offices are denser in terms of workers, why not?
This is exactly why we should push back on “citation needed” spam comments. It completely derails productive discussion. Especially in cases like this where the underlying topic (that open plan offices don’t save money) has been so, so widely written about and supported for many years.
Joel Spolsky said it in 2000 in his "Joel test". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... (see #8)
> Joel Spolsky said it in 2000 in his "Joel test".
What makes Joel Spolsky so certain? And what makes you so certain he's right? It's all just personal opinions.
One of the big issues here is that developer happiness and productivity doesn’t show up clearly on a balance sheet, which is why open plan offices continue to dominate.
With single office there is no rush to move at all.
I'm an engineering director involved in planning space for 5,000+ software engineers. I went into this strongly preferring individual offices, or a shared office of 2-4 people. We spent a lot of time talking to people over the past year (before COVID).
What I learned was pretty surprising:
(1) Most of our people prefered an open floor plan. They like the sense of community that comes with it.
(2) People hate "noise", but what they consider noise is interesting. They like noise from their own team. It helps them stayed plugged in & informed. What they hate is noise from other teams. Stepping back it makes sense. If Alice is talk to Bob about Foo, and Charlie works on Foo, he's glad he overhear it. On the other hand if Danielle is on another team & has never heard of Foo, it's just a distraction.
So in the end, despite starting out as basically hating open floor plan, that's what we're doing & I'm strongly supportive. We're still being thoughtful about noise, and will have ways so teams don't hear the noise of other teams, but we're basically doing an open floor plan.
And while there are a lot of cost considerations, it wasn't a factor at all in making this decision.
(And, fwiw, I still retain my own personal preference for individual offices, but I'll have a desk in the open just like everyone else.)
People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows.
>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...
>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:
>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.
>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...
IBM did test this. Back in the 1970's.
Single offices with a closable door were best for productivity.
Everybody just chose to ignore all the research because re-architecting the available space in San Francisco in 1998-1999 (a lot of warehouses) would be so expensive. So, they set up "open office" plans and ran ethernet and power on the exposed beams (CHEAP!).
At no point did anybody decide open floorplan was better (witness all the programmers with noise cancelling headsets).
Because on COVID our office is closed and at home i have two kids, and sometimes i really need to concentrate to get things done. So one day i tried to go to my nearest library and work from there. It's "open office" but it's quite there even if there are people around doing their work.
I was so productive as there are no distractions. No temptations to go to fridge, no passing by colleagues to say hello, no noise. I've done things in couple hours that would have taken whole day at my normal office.
So i think open office is not a problem, problem is whats happening around you in that open office.
Yea libraries have created the only type of 'open office' where people can actually be productive. The way they do it is to prevent all noise and distractions.
The main rationalization people use to promote open floor plans is that it increases collaboration but the only way an open floor plan can work is to dramatically decrease collaboration. This article covers some of that research:
>...A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...
The problem is that companies of all sizes are most innovative when people are able (and encouraged) to collaborate without destroying the productivity of those around them.
One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.
I've never worked in a completely open plan. The closest was this sort of "pod" setup where it's semi open and it can be terrible. It's not terrible if you have some premium corner or window spot where you are semi-isolated, if you're anywhere close to where people are walking or are surrounded from all directions then you (well I) can basically do not real work the entire day. In that latter scenario I pretty much did all the "real" work by staying late after everyone went home. I've seen setups where people are packed into huge rooms and I'd need to be in pretty dire straights before I ever consider working there.
Where exactly are you situated in this open plan? Are people walking right in front of you for example? Or immediately behind your back? Let's say you want to get a coffee, are you walking immediately behind someone's back or immediately in front of their faces? How many people have headphones on all day or try to insulate themselves from the environment in other ways? When people get sick, is the entire office sneezing and coughing? Curious minds want to know ;)
But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again.
Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid.
I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.
I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.
A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...
I've seen places where people leave their office door open when they are fine with being visited, or just want to see other people go by. Where a closed door means don't visit or at least knock, but it's not usually closed.
Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things.
I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much.
I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.
Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?
Personally I enjoy working in open floor plan. It’s only when I’m having a bad day I don’t feel like it. But I wouldn’t feel like being in any kind of office environment at that point.
Basically problems like this are not easily quantifiable and nobody gets bad review because of this, so they don’t get solved.
I don't think that's true. First, open-space offices predate Google by many years. (Frank Lloyd Wright invented the open-plan office in 1936. They were common in tech companies long before Google.) Second, Google used a mixture of enclosed offices with doors and open-space.
Are you thinking of Facebook perhaps? Google used to favor the 4-to-a-cube/office configuration.
But in the body of the article, the CEO is advocating a hybrid model, with increased flexibility for WFH, so much so that working from office are being declared special days (meetings), labelled 'on-site days' ('on-site meetings').
Remote work is a compromise, not an advantage.
for you, maybe.
A hybrid model requires employees to be on site some of the time, and forces them to live nearby. It will also make people feel like they HAVE to come in to the office so they aren’t othered.
This also sacrifices some of the major benefits for employees like the freedom to live wherever we want, suiting our financial needs, familial needs, political/cultural needs, etc. We need to avoid having gigantic concentrations of our society in a few locations, and COVID lockdowns have proven we can make it work in knowledge industries.
The freedom to live wherever you want is great, but it is not without costs.
Major cities aren't going away. They are the creative hubs of society. Most group human endeavors are the product of cities. To be part of that creative community, you have to be near a city.
However, we could afford to have some diversification in tech industry beyond the big hubs, but in Google's case they've already done this (i.e. Boulder, Ann Arbor). Bear in mind that there will be resistance in those places, also, for very rational reasons (i.e. escalating housing costs).
There is undoubtedly a societal reorganization underway, but it is highly unlikely to satisfy either the purely remote or purely in-office preferences.
But if it's the odd off-site/2 day team meeting, people can live pretty much anywhere--at least domestically in the US.
Exactly. IMO most people would prefer a few less days of commute, and a less grueling commute overall due to the possibly reduced congestion.
I’ve spoken to many others who feel the same way.
After seeing it burn two different startups I was at, I am baffled why they burn money to have offices in a big city when money is tight (or they should be acting like it, rather than assuming they will always get another round at favorable terms)
When you are stable and profitable, having an office isn't that big of a deal. When you are burning money and looking down a cliff, maybe a $25k+ / mo expense is better spent hiring someone. Plus you can ethically pay people under market and both sides are happy (employee cuts their expenses by 50%+, you cut your payroll by 25%). Your employees will be happier, you get to pay them less, no need to buy desks, you can scale your business infinitely and you get rid of likely your biggest expense.
Startups could even spend a tiny fraction on improving their employee's offices. $1k yearly home office stipend would be huge for an employee, but a drop in the bucket compared to $1k / employee / month office expense.
VC funding causes people to make dumb decisions.
The bigger question is, can the company quickly scale with finding on-site people around the area quickly enough?
Startups are about balancing a bunch of things rather than having some type of optimal stable configuration. Working in an office let's you balance a bunch of other things more easily.
But a startup needs to make money or it can’t pay people. You don’t just need code. You need a product and you need to sell it.
There's a lot of failed start ups in general. Doesn't seem like its a feature unique to remote-only projects.
A lot of the Apache projects came from companies. Although some of these were more like one person at the company developed it and the company funded and maintained it.
Did Kubernetes start in person as in in the same room? It was built by multiple people but I don't know if they shared an office space. I thought it was that they shared a building.
All of the other ones though are pretty solid examples of team-driven OSS work.
I imagine that many startups can and will be successfully fully-remote from Day 1, whereas other startups won't possibly be able to work successfully without close and constant in-person communication.
Larger companies can live with the slower pace the remote communication creates - exasperating as that can be.
I've been working remotely in the past 10+ years and I'm never looking into on-site work again! The time "invested" in commute with all the risks associated with driving are not worth it - even if it pays slightly better. But usually it doesn't. For example, in Orange County, CA you can't find a well-paying job - the best jobs are remote and OC is not a fringe case!
Remote work is the nightmare of micromanagers! Everybody else loves remote work!
Business is a cargo cult
I love it when the corporate speak isn't even intelligible to the business press.
Sorry if that was unclear.
[Edit: clarity.]
From the article: "Pichai said that Google is "reconfiguring" its office spaces to accommodate what he called "on-sites" — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office."
If anything he's saying that work from home is going to become semi-permanent, it's just that there will be times when people will need to come in and work together in an office and they're making plans to support that. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Advantages:
- No need for commuting. This is maybe the lowest hanging fruit if you want to reduce CO2 emissions and pollution in general.
- Geographical independence. A company is not limited from the pool of candidates willing to move physically close to its premises, and workers have more companies to choose from.
- Potential for higher productivity, since a worker can choose how and when to work.
- Lower cost for companies (fewer physical offices).
- More meaningful family life for workers.
- Less potential for office politics (I hope).
- More opportunities for disabled workers.
Disadvantages:
- In mixed teams, those who work remotely may be considered 2nd class citizens.
- Some people may miss the kind of socializing they do at work.
- Potential for lower productivity, not all homes are suitable environments for work, and also more potential for slacking off (but I doubt it, slackers are going to be slackers no matter where they are).
- If you are a pointy haired manager, you might find yourself out of a job.
As I see it the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. I know WFH can't work for everyone, but I see that most objections come from people who feel threatened by this model (i.e. managers, often pointy haired). Also some of the disadvantages may be remedied with simple solutions (for example, make your teams entirely office based, or entirely remote, since mixed teams don't work too well).
Respitory viruses are pretty much limited to spreading indoors. I also assume having a nice green outdoors view would be much less stressing to the workers when compared with a traditional office environment.
It's really easy to set up and disband. Just run power and internet cables, set up some desks and off you go. No need for expensive construction.
Interestingly, of campuses I have been to, the Stanford campus seems to have been the best designed for this. Plenty of verandas and balconies protected from light and wind, outlets everywhere, good WiFi. The original campus buildings were designed to protect people from the sun. Glad they carried it over to the new buildings. Facebook with their courtyard is also good.
Back of the envelope math suggests if you have remote works flying in from, say, NYC to SFO, it's not clear whether there's a net carbon footprint reduction.