maybe that's the price they're willing to pay for whatever benefits they get from remote work, and maybe they're missing out on what they consider bad things more than good, everyone is different.
An issue is remote people may be at a disadvantage because they are remote and therefore may suffer consequences of not being in the office (visibility, chit chat, camaraderie, etc.) but they (we, or some portion) may feel they are unfairly suffering from unequal opportunity. On the other hand, they/we specifically have made the choice to be remote despite the inherent disadvantages (and also advantages though in another dimension).
Agreed, as I said, some people will not consider things like visibility, chit chat, camaraderie valuable. I don't really want to be friends with people I work with, or generally spend time with my coworkers when I'm in the office since I already spend 8+ hours daily looking at them. Even when remote, people I work with are not my friends, those are a separate bunch of people, I'm there to do my job, solve problems and I don't need camaraderie, chit chat or visibility for that. On the other hand, relying too much on office chit chat tends to make knowledge more word-of-mouth than written down if there are no documentation practices in place, while its practically a necessity to write things down when you're working remotely and that's a huge gain in my book. I think it's really really hard to to decisively say that one model is better than the other, but it does smell like distrust and micromanagement from the higher-ups to me when office work is considered mandatory.
I've been remote a loooong time and that's always been the case. I miss out on so many 'oh, because Timmy in the SOC told me so' type things, spontaneous whiteboards, and much information. It certainly makes things a bit more complicated. Further, I found it harder to get promotions in general.
All in all, I still prefer it despite its drawbacks. But it's certainly not for everyone, especially people who get or had little social interaction outside of work, and those who are chasing ladder climbing.
From my experience, often being the only remote on the team...frankly, because you're generally forgotten about quite often. You aren't as chummy with your direct, you don't do lunch together, small gifts/favors, etc.
I don't mean that as a suckup or anything, just things people generally do with one another. If you have two equal performers, and one came to your wedding, gave you a jump, etc....and the other you often forget exists, the choice is quite natural. And I don't find any fault in that or hold any bitterness, it's human nature.
Also, you see your direct's boss in the cafeteria, or hallway, get to chatting, etc. I'd never just ping him or her on Slack to chat, for example.
Then again, I'm only speaking from experience at where I've been. I'm sure others are more strict about meritocracy, perhaps.
This is why I like fully-remote workplaces. That said, I've only seen remote work well in fully remote workplaces. Once there are some remote some not, things break down a bit.
Fully-remote workplaces are very rare, so it's a lot more likely that remote workers will lose out.
E.g. there is a task that requires the help of person A or B, where person B is working remote.
I'd argue that person A will be chosen 9 times out of 10 simply due to convenience.
To counter that, workers are required to spend 2 or 3 days in the office.
Slowly but surely some will go to the office one additional day, causing the remote workers to be left out of some tasks, while on-site workers form stronger bonds.
So i don't see a very bright for WFH, but it's all very new so time will tell.
I always have heard it said “if you have one remote employee on your team, everyone is a remote employee”, because if you don’t interact as if you are all remote, then the remote employee is going to miss so much.
There aren’t absolutes. But yes if end up hybrid expect to do video meetings and write everything down—the latter of which is a pretty good idea anyway.
Notably, it's always been emotionally easier to lay off someone who is remote or less like you than it is to lay off people who are in your immediate social group. Expect the amount of remote-only work to tank in the next economic downturn.
They don't link this data with something tangible like "profits" nor do they really try to quantify productivity in any way, so it is left up to the reader to decide whether the effects they observe actually hurt or help productivity.
Case in point, what they consider useful spontaneous interactions between disparate corners of the social graph could in reality be annoying distractions that decrease productivity.
Unintentional by accident remote work shouldn’t be considered the baseline for such comparison. This research does at best find results at Microsoft, thus it could be titled “effects of remote work at Microsoft” to not induce the sense of generalist research.
For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling.
Nevertheless, I admire Microsoft for conducting such research - congratulations to whoever had the initiative.
Absolutely! I started a scheduled call for a weekly "monorepo morning tea" for people interested in the mechanics of our monorepo and how we build/version/distribute software in-house. No agenda, no commitment, the meeting link is posted weekly via a Slack reminder to a public channel. It gets a couple of folks from our build farm team, a couple of people who are experts in specific languages/runtimes (Python, Node, etc.), a couple of SREs, a couple of random developers across the company who find this stuff interesting, etc. The topics tend to be pretty wide-ranging but it's a good way to find people doing interesting and relevant work that you might not ordinarily think of talking to and hear what's on their minds.
Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well.
If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.
Can you tool-in a water coolier on a different floor, a different building, or a different city? Because that’s the communication that has to happen at any large company. Very peopleiwork witharein my for now official office even if I went there.
1.) set up to do remote work because they actually created a plan for it and executed on it. Not companies reluctantly forced into it by a pandemic.
2.) look at companies that have been doing it longer than 6 months. Focusing on the first 6 months of 2020 as the baseline for how remote work is “going”. Is beyond unscientific.
I also don't understand how async communication is bad for knowledge sharing. I find that well written documents of what the team learned, tech specs, user research, etc, to be far more effective ways to knowledge share, while keeping records of the information for anyone to pick up later.
I was recently interviewing at a really compelling startup backed by YC and I asked them how they communicate and knowledge share. The cofounder showed me pages and pages of well structures bits and pieces of things and findings the team come across and document. It's easily searchable and it's well categorize. It's their internal wiki, and I believe it is one of the most valuable assets a company can have.
The startup relies on writing as the main method of sharing knowledge, getting async feedback, and gathering valuable information on important problems.
It is one of the main reasons I was intrigued and decided to join them. Their product is also awesome.
I agree that the title of this paper is misleading. I'm seeing more and more studies lately that try to extrapolate results conducted in noisy environments (microsft) to even noisier environments (all companies). Dunno wtf people are thinking.
This fits my experience pretty well. The available communication tools suck so much, people are for the most part not used to communicate effectively / frequently enough in remote setting.
I think it's solvable with better technology (something like Facebook's Horizon Workrooms), but at the same it seems very far.
At the end of the day, it's just hard to build and maintain relationships from afar. Any kind, be it business, platonic, or romantic. Humans are social creatures, meant for in-person interaction.
This is more or less the same train of thought that people first had about online dating. "It won't work", "it's not the same", "it's weird to meet someone online" etc.
I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your last 3 jobs etc.
Next paper from these guys will say: "the shift from an open office plan to private offices caused work to become more siloed. Previous research shows this may impede the flow of information through the network"
People need to stop fetishizing "breaking down silos" and "serendipitous hallway encounters" and all that nonsense and think about the big picture.
You're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your commute and shooting the shit in the office.
If your business model includes: "we put people in an office in the hopes that their random interactions will create value"...then that sounds like the problem is something else.
Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for.
> Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for.
Probably why I've never seen a Confluence that wasn't a disaster, magnified by turnover. This kind of stuff isn't interesting to business because it forces them to be accountable rather than deflecting accountability on the people in the trenches. Those people are expected to do all the heavy lifting for the org while business focuses on 'the bigger picture'
I can sympathize with this, given that truly high-functioning, collaborative work environments are anything but ubiquitous, but I think that these kinds of environments are still the ideal, however rare and difficult to achieve they are. I’ve only worked for two orgs that really got it right, and they were far and away the best work experiences I’ve had. I can’t imagine those orgs being able to thrive in a completely remote environment (I know factually that one has big attrition problems since COVID hit).
The problem is that it takes a lot of effort and attention from all levels of the company to really get it right. You also need a commitment to subsidiarity and shared vision, which most companies actively disincentivize, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
I get that some people love their offices and think they are amazing work environments, but when I probe, it always seems to boil down to emotional attachment. A lifestyle choice. Offices usually don't actually improve productivity, IMO.
That’s probably true in many, or even most cases. Even so, what do you think about the example of the formerly successful company that now can’t retain engineers? Even if the benefits were entirely intangible, this still ultimately has had an effect on productivity, right? Intangible benefits are… benefits!
I think the benefits were quite tangible in this case; I can elaborate as much as I can while maintaining my anonymity if you think it’s relevant.
I'd go one step further. I have done research on "silos" and actually believe they form naturally, even virtually, and we should be looking how to take advantage of the natural tendencies and make them more effective rather than eradicate them because it sounds like a good thing to do.
I'm not saying a return to pure tribalism here, but I am saying maybe realistic acknowledgement of tendencies and how to make those more effective/efficient and less problematic might be a good idea.
In other words, turn a negative into a positive. Work with the tendencies with incremental improvement.
There's another way of thinking about silos - call them organizational boundaries - and observe a complete shift in thought on the topic.
Boundaries, especially explicit ones with clear contracts, are healthy and enable innovation (via refactoring, automation, efficient onboarding, quality control). In the organizational recesses, hiding within unaccountable reporting, away from healthy boundaries, is where sociopaths grow most influential.
I think you bring up a good point. I do believe that, especially at large scale organizations with many suborganizations, the situation you describe can occur even more frequently.
At the end of the day, we are all surrounded by different scales of organization, whether it be a small family unit, formal and informal networks, societal organizations and institutions, businesses, etc.
There has to be a balance, because many organizations want flexibility, "democracy", the ability to change direction quickly, autonomy in suborganizations, etc. Yet, this must be balanced with the need for some kind of order against pure chaos or harmful organization actors (for instance). This implies some kind of governance, some kind of "ground rules" if you were, for things to function and be reasonably effective/efficient.
I think this is where organizational culture truly matters. I do think culture can be encouraged, and norms and behaviors modeled, and sometimes even formally enforced, but ultimately the net governance that emerges at scale is a sum of the parts (i.e. the whole is greater). I do not know if, at the kind of organizational scale I'm talking about (many thousands of people or more), it is possible to govern everything with absolute precision and control.
Rather, at scale, one can only model the desired outcomes, norms and behaviors, and/or set policy.
Utimately what the organization is - all its boundaries and suborganizations and networks all the way up and down the scale of an organization - is determined by the sum of those who participate and represent the organization. It does leave holes where those with personal agendas or sociopathic tendencies (for example) may take hold.
By all this, I mean to say that, I do not believe it is just in recesses where sociopaths grow most influential. I believe they grow wherever their influence has meaning and they have power/control.
The only thing that can protect organizations against such behavior ultimately is the collective will of the members of the organization, at all levels of scale. The culture, and members of the organization are the ultimate tool for protecting the organization against such threats.
Even with laws or policies, everything depends on enforcement. Enforcement also depends on culture, in addition to power and control. I believe though, that in the long run, everything depends on what culture allows, and only culture can stop sociopaths from being ultimately successful and protect organizations from such threats.
You're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your commute and shooting the shit in the office.
The problem is that no one actually knows if that's true, or whether it's universal or individual. I used to commute by train, and I got a good hour of time to myself to think. I did great work thinking through problems in that time. Now I work remotely I try to carve out an hour to just think about stuff, but it's less effective because I'm easily distracted by house things like washing up or playng with a cat. Similarly, I got value from hearing conversations around the office, and now I don't have that. Slack can be the same thing if people join in, but so far it's rarely as effective.
All of that is tempered by the fact that I do much better work at home. Fewer distractions, more time, and longer quiet periods, all sum up very productive times.
Ideally we need some from column A and some from column B. I absolutely don't think remote is perfect, but it's certainly better. With work on how to collaborate in remote environments I can see it being even better still.
I had a lot more candid conversations with people back when at least one of us had an office door to close. We have only begun to absorb the importance of psychological safety in software development. We rarely chase it directly, instead championing analogs that can be twisted out of shape and work at cross purposes.
I can't tell you the number of times I've had arguments about what the point of unit test coverage is. The goal is not 100% coverage. The goal is to look at a green report and say, "I'm pretty sure this will work if you ship it." To trust the code. Yours, and everyone else's. To feel safe in making changes, or absorbing them. And for that to be useful, that report needs to arrive sooner and more reliably than another path I could use to arrive at the same conclusion. And that is why E2E tests are such a problem - they can take over 2 orders of magnitude as long to run as the unit tests, and still be wrong.
Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote work yet, and people were still struggling a lot with the tools (say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months).
I'd be interested in a follow-up that analyzes the same time period but for 2021.
I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk.
Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).
Because they don't have to pay for those offices anymore. If the company is allowing for remote work, they can also downsize those offices (subject to lease conditions), saving piles of money. (Commerical space is expensive!) If some of those savings aren't passed onto their employees, those employees will choose to move to a different company that has a more general WFH allowance, probably get a raise in the process, and work with a company that's just generally less obtuse to work at/for.
Once you factor in long contracts, the people who are desperate to go back to the office, and greater space requirements for proper social distancing - they pretty much do need to pay for those existing offices. Hopefully things will re-equilibriate, but I'd guess that will take another 2 years at least.
The cost of outfitting an employee with state-of-the-art equipment for their home office is at most a few months of commuter benefits. It's a comically small price to pay for employee happiness and productivity.
Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.
The equipment is trivial and most tech professionals have it at this point or don’t really care. But you’re not going to get paid to move from your urban studio to an apartment with an office though some companies did pay for coworking spaces when there was no office for employees to commute to pre-pandemic.
It’s always at “your own expense.” Me and my partner who also works full time wound up moving to a two-bedroom unit down the hall. Why would the company pay for this?
First half of 20/20 was really hard on a lot of people: the pandemic, civil unrest, political instability. It was a difficult time for sure. Then there is the whole shock of kids at home from school, spouses at home, potentially lost jobs, etc.. That said, I suppose it is intuitive to think that a bunch of people leaving campus life and suddenly working from home would have an adjustment period anyway.
I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their dependent variables to "other research suggests less innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote work is just as good as a campus environment.
I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a different environment and different way of collaborating than working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure.
Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I attended included many people calling in to their video conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home. I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their way to a remote work situation anyway.
They should do a follow up study on how many people will die from Covid by working in the office. I rather wonder how preventable deaths impact innovation in teams.
From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies.
The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers convenience.
Anecdotally I've seen reports of people getting Covid more than once. So even the assumption that if Delta runs rampant through the unvaccinated population at least we'll gain full herd immunity that way is perhaps not true. Plus you always have people too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised that will be a reservoir. I'm not an epidemiologist and claim no expertise but it certainly appears we may always have the threat of this virus in the background. Bleh.
I got so little work done that first few months until daycare opened back up. You can’t do much work with a one year old and a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the few moments of quiet.
This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work.
One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with.
It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.
So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams.
Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together.
Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams.
Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time.
Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.
I imagine a few small group tasks to help the new hire come up to speed on certain things might help. That is, assign the new hire and 1-2 other team members to work on a somewhat small task, something that the team members could easily accomplish in an hour or so, but will take a bit longer because the new hire is also being taught at the same time. Highly encourage them to use group video chat, and not to just have each be hidden behind a screen share. Being able to see the faces of the people talking is important to getting the right nuance of what they are expressing (sometimes that's the difference between something obviously being a good natured joke and an ambiguous and anxiety inducing statement).
Hopefully after a few of these ice breakers, everyone will have a better grasp of each other and more natural communication and relationships might come about.
That was my take at the time too. I do take some blame for not flagging the situation to my manager or my skip (their manager) earlier, and for not being more aggressive about it. It's so easy to think it must be you when things aren't working out.
I did not escape without a bad review. Somebody had to take the blame when things didn't work out. That was also some textbook bad management: my poor performance was first described in the meeting where the review was delivered. Never once in all the 1-on-1s we'd had. Skip said there was nothing that could be done because all that mattered was that I did not deliver compared to my peers.
My manager moved teams then left the company not too long after as well. I'll never really know what happened, but I assume they got a poor review themselves.
What I’ve found is that I will work with people I didn’t previously know if there’s some forcing function but the people I randomly reach out to for working on things re mostly people I knew previously. Reaching g out to strangers for help/collaboration with something mostly isn’t very effective in my experience.
Yeah, I'd argue that this hasn't changed during/due to the pandemic.
Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.
The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.
I have felt the worst for my Jr Engineers... usually you come out of college and you get sat with a few seniors, and we show you the ropes. We help you through it all, and defend, or attack your positions as we see fit for your learning in enterprise software. Suddenly you don't have someone sitting next to you that you can say does this look right... worse if you ask over IM client, you have no idea that they are heads down in some other totally more important issue. They suffer the worst since without them, we can't have more seniors.
It doesn't need to be so. I started in my actual company 3 years ago, NY based startup and I was based in Europe. The first months we had every day meetings with one of the senior engineers in USA going through the changes we implemented that day, how it worked with the rest of the codebase and systems, how and why this worked and that didn't, etc... It worked perfectly, considering we still work in the company and we are know the seniors. The system we started working on, that was freshly released then, is now smooth and stable. We did it full remote and also with a 6 h difference in time zone, and it worked.
The thing is the time investment may look big because you have to specify a meeting time and reserve a slot of an hour for it. But it is not different from having it spread across the day as the juniors find a problem, interrupt the senior, get the explanation, etc.
I worked in both environments: in the office and full remote. And regarding work and knowledge sharing I don't see a big difference. The real difference is changing the way of working and interacting, but once that is done it works equally fine. The rest is a matter of preference related to interacting with people on a daily basis. But for me, that is outside working hours when I go to the gym, join activities like quizzes, sports, etc., with people I don't work with.
Also I want to add that I connect in videocalls with colleagues, when we have not much work for a few hours just to chat about work and out of work things. And we never met in person.
>say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months
Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they added support for custom video backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really affect the experience of the app itself.
I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord, which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams, the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord.
And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off. Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.
This is my experience exactly. Teams is also somewhat easy to get lost in once you get a lot of rooms open. Our IT department has decided to use Teams as a ticketing system. My manager decoded to use Teams as a PTO calendar by assigning tasks to yourself. All we really needed was a good chat app for private conversations and small teams... I don't know why companies have such a hard time solving these kinds of issues.
> I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it
At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.
The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.
>At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.
Actually, yes, I remember this now. This was definitely a huge improvement. I was just trying to think of an addition of something good rather than fixing of something bad.
* UX for sharing from screen underwent a lot of change but I really like where it is now
* Blur/custom backgrouns/together mode additions. The last one actually did help with a feeling of camaraderie
* Switching into a thread-first model really helped conversation continuity on the teams I worked with
* Various smoothing out of integrations; namely with sharepoint. When you're at MS you're using internal sharepoints for docs and slides, and it's nice having access to everything and having it all feel integrated.
* PPT presentation mode, for me, was way better than using actual PowerPoint to present things in my setup. Not sure if others felt that way, but I did.
Prior to the pandemic, it felt like a more-corporate version of slack with less features that ran crappier. But I went from "I don't like using this" to "this is fine and I can get my work done with it" by the end of 2020.
I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think
>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Not really. I see that pattern across the entire software landscape, from big companies down to startups. It's true that there are occasionally people who stay put for 17 years at Microsoft, but those seem to be the exception rather than the norm.
I don't believe so. It's the only way to get a proper pay increase in corporate America. Internal promotion in most corporations comes with at best a 10% pay increase most of the time and includes increased workload. If I leave my company and go to another I can pretty easily get 15-20% increase and stay in the same basic job I'm currently at. Most companies don't offer any benefits that increase based on loyalty so I don't know why any would expect someone to stay long term.
Outside of startups, most of which fail anyway, I think you’ll find a lot more stay in the 5-10+ year range than you give credit for. Certainly 20+ is unusual these days. I’ve had multiple 10ish year jobs and don’t expect to hit that number.
Moving jobs entails significant risk, which is one reason why offers are high. Maybe you won't get on with your new manager or team-mates. Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare. You can't carry over the reputation and clout you had built up in your old job and you have to prove yourself all over again, and you have less say in how things are done.
Sure the interview process should surface these problems, but applicants can make a "bad hire" as easily as companies, especially as both are showing their best front, and this is more likely if you are enticed by a fatter paycheck.
Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.
This made finding work very challenging.
In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.
Agreed, it's difficult to make the call when to make your move, and staying too long can be harmful. Generally I'd say it's better to move around more earlier in your career when you're figuring out what kind of company environment is more to your liking and what skills to specialize in. But it's easy to get complacent and stick around too long in one place.
In any case, you have to weigh the pros and cons, but jumping ship just for the lure of a fatter paycheck is not necessarily going to make you happier or do your long-term career any favours.
Yes, true. Jumping ship for money is a motivation to mull for sure. Sometimes you can't say no, it's just too significant in terms of finance. Sometimes it's worth considering that the extra $ will change other pressures (perhaps rent on something close to work that will give back 2 hrs a day travel time, perhaps more / better childcare, perhaps pay off short term debt and change the dynamics of your finances). But, yeah, moving for money can screw things up.
My advice (fwiw) is move for growth. Can you identify something that will change your CV for the good about the new gig. If so then the extra money is essentially paying for your next job - you will be able to find something even better (hopefully p>0.??) after, if this one doesn't work out.
This is all correct but the places I've worked at all had the same problems already:
> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager
Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.
> or team-mates
Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.
> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.
Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.
I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.
> You can't carry over the reputation and clout
Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.
In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.
I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.
I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".
The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.
It’s true across most industries in Australia. The old social contract of employment, “work for us your whole career and we’ll look after you your whole career”, disintegrated in the 90s when companies started treating all employees as disposable. Now it’s everyone for themselves and loyalty between employees and employers is a shadow of what it was.
This too is a type of open door. You see more breadth and talk to more people by regularly changing employers. It enables you to move towards problems worth working on.
>random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas.
Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.
doesn't have to be ground breaking research, could just be ideas for product iteration or for an employees own side project. Benefits individuals more than the company really
The way this benefits the company is that individuals are happy and create relationships with coworkers making work more enjoyable and making it harder to quit. Companies wants you to feel like a family so you'll stay for a lower salary or so you'll accept more grueling conditions.
Knowing this, from a company perspective, remote can work if individuals have a way to create relationships. In my experience, some people bond over work but most bond by spending time with each other doing friendly activities which are not work related.
An in-person party or a holiday is the best option but some online gaming is a decent substitute in these authoritarian times. Some people swear by virtual coffees rotations that randomly match people but I had a couple of good ones and dozens of cringy/weird. None of them ended up being positive for creating relationships, at best it was useful for knowing who is who.
I think it can be similar to having your company support slack channel open.. not necessarily subscribed but seeing the issues that customers come to your support staff with… that can provide surprising clarity… maybe product owners should be focused on that sort of thing and maybe this highlights issues with where I am…
At Spriggy we had senior developers enrolled into Intercom chat. This takes agile to a whole another level. I knew with certainty what we had to get done. It was not a jira ticket close but 100s of customers to help. Stressful, yes, but getting real problems solved, double yes.
I was going to say. Academia is relatively dispersed, compared to the few tech hubs around the world. Creative people will be creative wherever they are. And there are plenty of cool open-source projects, from k8s to jupyter, that have been built by dispersed teams.
The academia can handle this, because it focuses on long-term collaborations that may span decades. Your closest coworkers and the topics you work on don't change just because you got a new job and moved to another place. You continue working with the same people on the same topics, and there is an elaborate system of conferences, workshops, guest lectures, research visits, and sabbaticals that keeps the collaborations running.
I'm not sure how much of that is applicable to normal jobs where your employer owns your work.
In normal jobs, innovation and creativity are optimized away, and may even be seen as threats to status quo. There's little incentives as well, as you can get blamed and fired at any time. It usually doesn't go that far, but contracts often say company even owns your work in free time, so everything is set up against the employee to end up the way it does.
Academics heavily leverage in person meetings and conferences to exchange idea. Much of my conference time was spent chatting with colleagues rather than attending paper sessions. We don’t get that in a virtual conference setting.
My experience in a siloed company is that the information doesn’t “flow” to me, whether I’m physically present or not. Most of the “small talk” I get is distracting noise from unrelated departments whom I have no business with.
I’ve had no problems chatting and calling with people whom I have actual business with. And here I’ve had the most success with planned meetings and agendas.
> Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.
So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.
Behind this is one of the problems. In a corporate environment you can't choose the best tool for the job at hand, collaboration. MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is.
That said I am not sure they should be spending time on more functional over getting the very basics, like video chat, working as well as almost every other platform. Just my personal opinion on what complete garbage it is when you have to use it every day of the week.
This is my experience. I've witnessed a company migrate to MS Teams given that it was included in their existing subscription. That alone was enough to kick-off a migration from Slack.
> MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is.
Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration?
My experiences with it seem to be at variance with this observation.
On the mac, the video and audio randomly do not work. In a team of 20, this means every day someone has to stop the app, restart it and rejoin the call. Doing stand-ups every day, this is a PIA. 2,000 'user-voice' votes, broken for 3 years.
Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram.
Thanks for providing that insight. It sounds like a platform issue.
I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.
I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.
I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.
For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.
I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.
The copy and paste bugs are supported on all platforms, as you say, likely on account of the common code base.
Also, if you have 16 or 32G machines Windows machines you rarely see the performance issues. Working for a large corporate, in fact a very larger MS partner, probably why slack was not a choice, 8G machines are the par.
Most companies are not graciously funded laboratories so to me the argument for "let smart people chat randomly" is moot. Those companies have plenty of creativity-killing processes that make sure people never looked beyond what they have to do today and maybe tomorrow.
You're better off browsing what interests you personally. If you come by a great group of people or person, it'll happen by chance, and will be fueled by your personal interests.
> I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas.
Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.
This continues to be the case, it's just the mediums have changed slightly, while they're still mostly text-based, there's also the multimedia-based methods thanks to things like ubiquitous video, voice and conference calling.
> Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.
At what speed though? You're obviously correct that such small talk can and does happen over asynchronous communication protocols. But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break. Businesses are going to desire something faster. So far, nothing has beaten a simple phone call in my (admittedly limited) remote work experience.
> But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break.
I think you overestimate how much relevant these napkin innovation situations are. Talking with some coworker and drawing something over a napkin doesn't mean the idea will be revolutionary at all. Or even useful. It is most of the times, a romantic image that make people feel like the smart innovator they would like to be.
> say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic
Yet for some reason they refuse to implement simple improvements with thousands of comments on their feature request site, 2 simple ones that could probably be implemented in a day:
1. Option to disable [read more]
2. Option to make the mute toggle hotkey global so it works when the app is not in focus
Silos are ideal for knowledge workers: their often autistic personalities and the nature of the work fit really well a quiet corner office.
Managers don't really exist without the chitchat: if managers are fish, then chatty open office is their fish pond.
The guys above them, VP+, who I'd call "gamblers", don't really need the open offices. They build networks anywhere they want. The in-office connections are too fake and weak anyway.
We expect that the effects we observe on workers’ collaboration and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the long-term, innovation. Yet, across many sectors, firms are making decisions to adopt permanent remote work policies based only on short-term data52. Importantly, the causal estimates that we report are substantially different compared with the effects suggested by the observational trends shown in Figs. 2 and 4. Thus, firms making decisions on the basis of non-causal analyses may set suboptimal policies. For example, some firms that choose a permanent remote work policy may put themselves at a disadvantage by making it more difficult for workers to collaborate and exchange information.
This implies that innovation is somehow a formalized process.
I don't know on what basis you make these sweeping generalizations. If nothing else, commutes made people miserable in terms of time, money, stress, and difficulty scheduling outside life.
WFH is poor for intra-team communication and rapport building. Companies won't want to take this risk. It only works for experienced individual contributors like freelancers, who aren't many. Good things are created only by collaboration. The collaboration suffers in WFH.
Let's come back to this in next 6 months. Don't delete your comment.
"If there's one thing in business that's certain, it's uncertainty."
-- Stephen Covey
"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."
> But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty.
That's one kind of gig. It isn't what Apple employee 100 signed on for, or Google employee 12. Some employees are looking for upside and challenges more than certainty.
In uncertain times, the most valuable employees are the ones who thrive on uncertainty. The most difficult are those who prioritise something an employer can't guarantee as a prerequisite for performance.
“ Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.”
So less interruptions and more asynchronous work. That’s awesome! But it’s framed as a negative outcome.
Do we really think that a company fully geared up for in-office work for over 100,000 employees in the USA alone would produce an impartial report on the effects of remote work?
Co located teams always wins sorry if you don't want to hear this but its true.
December 94 did first agile web project in BT took a month two developers flew up to Edinburgh collocated team.
The traditional remote (Cardiff) quoted 2 years.
Before that 3 of us developed SIROS the system that controlled the UK core ip network in 12 weeks again using agile and getting the customer in the room regularly
Interesting study. The data collection & classification methods seem strong as does the underlying data set. However I’m unconvinced their analysis necessarily follows from the established facts.
- Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same benefit from frequent in person meetings.
- Remote teams aren’t merely in-person teams + Video/VOIP stack. Optimal process and culture is drastically different for each case. It seems possible that some/most of detrimental effects would disappear over time as new remote teams adopt better processes and discard legacy methods optimized for proximity.
- There is a lack of nuance. While I may be persuaded that on average in-person collaboration adds value I strongly suspect there is tremendous variability between individual meetings. I once worked for a very senior Ballmer-era product executive who jumped ship to an alluring startup. In the year before they were fired I easily spent over 200 hours meeting and collaborating with them. To say that each hour was merely empty and valueless would do a disservice to this individual’s talent for value deletion. The abrupt conversion to WFH was accompanied by a substantial increase in communication friction. In such cases I would expect lower value, less focused, and more vacuous meetings and network connections to be the first that are jettisoned. It seems dangerous to assume the collaboration dynamics associated with success pre- WFH will remain so post-WFH. This is a novel, potentially pattern breaking change.
You've identified a major weakness of the study, which the authors acknowledge themselves (and then ignore when reaching conclusions).
> For each month, we classified ties as strong when they were in the top 50% of an employee’s ties in terms of hours spent communicating, and as weak otherwise. Although we have not seen strong and weak ties defined in this exact way elsewhere in the research literature on social networks, the research community has not, to our knowledge, converged on a standard way to measure tie strength.
Another aspect of the study is it's primarily measuring proxies to reach conclusions - for example: because email is used rather than zoom, they assume (following various theories) that nuance is lost. Maybe, maybe not.
That argument works both ways - some people who like remote will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend WFH when presented with evidence that it isn't ideal.
I think it's specifically driven by the management population. Individual contributors don't seem to feel too strongly about how their coworkers want to work (remote vs. in-office). But there seems to be a large effort by managers in general to get everyone back into the office, often without any supporting evidence for why that is a good option to force upon people.
This study is not good evidence against remote work. If anything, this study is just confirming what we already know - that is, remote work happens differently (synchronously vs asynchronously).
I've said it before and so have others: the push to bring everyone back into the office is in my opinion, representative of management's own insecurities.
My experience is I can more easily join earlier or later meetings with remote teams in other timezones when I wouldn't been able before due to the commute. I can also meet with people spontaneously when before you'd struggle to find a room (or you'd annoy your neighbors). This far outweighs the number of work related 'coffee machine' or 'hallway conversations' I ever had.
Imagine the desperation and helplessness of managers as they brainstorm behind closed doors on how to force back people into their shitty offices. Imagine it, and smile!
I suppose it beats them thinking 'hey remote is great, why don't we start hiring more aggressively in Ukraine instead of Redmond'. If everything is remote companies won't have to pay non-remote wages anymore.
If the availability of fluent English-speaking developers who work PDT hours was high, companies would absolutely do this already.
Remote in same time zone so you can collaborate in real-time has absolutely no resemblance to an employee you can communicate with effectively a 24 hour delay.
What a completely worthless set of data. Not only do their findings mean nothing for long term remote work, it’s now fuel for the anti-remote work movement. Shameful coming from nature.
1 ) It’s unclear to me why Microsoft, a leading software firm with distributed offices, should be considered representative of “information workers”.
Contrary to this study of a digitally inter-connected firm, finding their preferred connection patterns and rhythms took a hit before adapting (see #2 below), most enterprises had no established digital connection patterns or rhythms and despite the challenges of going online, had been so bad before they saw a boost.
Many “big enterprise” firms’ collaboration and productivity shot way up from April through September, as necessity drove adoption of any collab at all.
2 ) Aside from this, “the first six months” is not how adapting to change works. MBA types like it call it “Storming, Norming, Performing”, but I prefer this:
Bottom line: I’d argue they studied a top decile performing firm far ahead of typical US enterprises, and found that Satir was right, a foreign element can induce a performance hit.
Generally have not had good experiences bringing up formal names for project or information theoretical phenomena. Not everyone is in my headspace and they can balk if you 'obfuscate' by throwing formal terms around.
Many of us and some of your managers will recognize the Satir curve as the 'J-curve'. In fact the guy who introduced this concept to me did not allow that he'd heard of Satir. I'm slightly curious to ask him if he did but we haven't talked in a while.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadRemote is hard and not every company is going to adapt to this long term.
I’m happy that remote is now an accepted structure but I worry that full time remote employees will miss out simply because they aren’t present.
All in all, I still prefer it despite its drawbacks. But it's certainly not for everyone, especially people who get or had little social interaction outside of work, and those who are chasing ladder climbing.
I don't mean that as a suckup or anything, just things people generally do with one another. If you have two equal performers, and one came to your wedding, gave you a jump, etc....and the other you often forget exists, the choice is quite natural. And I don't find any fault in that or hold any bitterness, it's human nature.
Also, you see your direct's boss in the cafeteria, or hallway, get to chatting, etc. I'd never just ping him or her on Slack to chat, for example.
Then again, I'm only speaking from experience at where I've been. I'm sure others are more strict about meritocracy, perhaps.
E.g. there is a task that requires the help of person A or B, where person B is working remote.
I'd argue that person A will be chosen 9 times out of 10 simply due to convenience.
To counter that, workers are required to spend 2 or 3 days in the office.
Slowly but surely some will go to the office one additional day, causing the remote workers to be left out of some tasks, while on-site workers form stronger bonds.
So i don't see a very bright for WFH, but it's all very new so time will tell.
Notably, it's always been emotionally easier to lay off someone who is remote or less like you than it is to lay off people who are in your immediate social group. Expect the amount of remote-only work to tank in the next economic downturn.
Case in point, what they consider useful spontaneous interactions between disparate corners of the social graph could in reality be annoying distractions that decrease productivity.
For the negative results: remote work creates silos and reduces cross-network collaboration. These might easily be mitigated with strategies and tooling.
Nevertheless, I admire Microsoft for conducting such research - congratulations to whoever had the initiative.
[ninja edit]: someone downvoted you, it wasn't me.
Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well.
If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.
They should instead look at companies that are:
1.) set up to do remote work because they actually created a plan for it and executed on it. Not companies reluctantly forced into it by a pandemic.
2.) look at companies that have been doing it longer than 6 months. Focusing on the first 6 months of 2020 as the baseline for how remote work is “going”. Is beyond unscientific.
I was recently interviewing at a really compelling startup backed by YC and I asked them how they communicate and knowledge share. The cofounder showed me pages and pages of well structures bits and pieces of things and findings the team come across and document. It's easily searchable and it's well categorize. It's their internal wiki, and I believe it is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. The startup relies on writing as the main method of sharing knowledge, getting async feedback, and gathering valuable information on important problems.
It is one of the main reasons I was intrigued and decided to join them. Their product is also awesome.
I think it's solvable with better technology (something like Facebook's Horizon Workrooms), but at the same it seems very far.
I couldn't disagree more that remote relationships are more difficult. On the contrary, technology continues to make it easier to stay in touch with 500 friends, coworkers from your last 3 jobs etc.
People need to stop fetishizing "breaking down silos" and "serendipitous hallway encounters" and all that nonsense and think about the big picture.
You're more likely to have something worth saying, and a work product worth talking about, if you aren't wasting time on your commute and shooting the shit in the office.
Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for.
Probably why I've never seen a Confluence that wasn't a disaster, magnified by turnover. This kind of stuff isn't interesting to business because it forces them to be accountable rather than deflecting accountability on the people in the trenches. Those people are expected to do all the heavy lifting for the org while business focuses on 'the bigger picture'
The problem is that it takes a lot of effort and attention from all levels of the company to really get it right. You also need a commitment to subsidiarity and shared vision, which most companies actively disincentivize, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
EDIT: wording, typos, formatting.
I think the benefits were quite tangible in this case; I can elaborate as much as I can while maintaining my anonymity if you think it’s relevant.
EDIT: more formatting. Can’t type today.
I'm not saying a return to pure tribalism here, but I am saying maybe realistic acknowledgement of tendencies and how to make those more effective/efficient and less problematic might be a good idea.
In other words, turn a negative into a positive. Work with the tendencies with incremental improvement.
There's another way of thinking about silos - call them organizational boundaries - and observe a complete shift in thought on the topic.
Some might call this heretical thinking.
At the end of the day, we are all surrounded by different scales of organization, whether it be a small family unit, formal and informal networks, societal organizations and institutions, businesses, etc.
There has to be a balance, because many organizations want flexibility, "democracy", the ability to change direction quickly, autonomy in suborganizations, etc. Yet, this must be balanced with the need for some kind of order against pure chaos or harmful organization actors (for instance). This implies some kind of governance, some kind of "ground rules" if you were, for things to function and be reasonably effective/efficient.
I think this is where organizational culture truly matters. I do think culture can be encouraged, and norms and behaviors modeled, and sometimes even formally enforced, but ultimately the net governance that emerges at scale is a sum of the parts (i.e. the whole is greater). I do not know if, at the kind of organizational scale I'm talking about (many thousands of people or more), it is possible to govern everything with absolute precision and control.
Rather, at scale, one can only model the desired outcomes, norms and behaviors, and/or set policy. Utimately what the organization is - all its boundaries and suborganizations and networks all the way up and down the scale of an organization - is determined by the sum of those who participate and represent the organization. It does leave holes where those with personal agendas or sociopathic tendencies (for example) may take hold.
By all this, I mean to say that, I do not believe it is just in recesses where sociopaths grow most influential. I believe they grow wherever their influence has meaning and they have power/control.
The only thing that can protect organizations against such behavior ultimately is the collective will of the members of the organization, at all levels of scale. The culture, and members of the organization are the ultimate tool for protecting the organization against such threats.
Even with laws or policies, everything depends on enforcement. Enforcement also depends on culture, in addition to power and control. I believe though, that in the long run, everything depends on what culture allows, and only culture can stop sociopaths from being ultimately successful and protect organizations from such threats.
The problem is that no one actually knows if that's true, or whether it's universal or individual. I used to commute by train, and I got a good hour of time to myself to think. I did great work thinking through problems in that time. Now I work remotely I try to carve out an hour to just think about stuff, but it's less effective because I'm easily distracted by house things like washing up or playng with a cat. Similarly, I got value from hearing conversations around the office, and now I don't have that. Slack can be the same thing if people join in, but so far it's rarely as effective.
All of that is tempered by the fact that I do much better work at home. Fewer distractions, more time, and longer quiet periods, all sum up very productive times.
Ideally we need some from column A and some from column B. I absolutely don't think remote is perfect, but it's certainly better. With work on how to collaborate in remote environments I can see it being even better still.
I can't tell you the number of times I've had arguments about what the point of unit test coverage is. The goal is not 100% coverage. The goal is to look at a green report and say, "I'm pretty sure this will work if you ship it." To trust the code. Yours, and everyone else's. To feel safe in making changes, or absorbing them. And for that to be useful, that report needs to arrive sooner and more reliably than another path I could use to arrive at the same conclusion. And that is why E2E tests are such a problem - they can take over 2 orders of magnitude as long to run as the unit tests, and still be wrong.
> over the first six months of 2020
Those first six months were pretty rough. The large majority of people had little to no experience working remotely, so many folks didn't have a good home office environment, and there was a general sense of being unsure if this would just be temporary or if employees should settle in for the long haul. Many orgs didn't have good practices set up for remote work yet, and people were still struggling a lot with the tools (say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months).
I'd be interested in a follow-up that analyzes the same time period but for 2021.
Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).
My company has offices that you can go to, but if you want to work remotely then it’s up to you to manage your environment.
The company already has offices. Why would they pay for more just because you don’t want to go to the offices.
There is a one time budget for hardware, such as a second monitor at home, we’ll have to see how that plays out with upgrades in a few years.
Employers that don't or aren't willing to pony up are going to be losers in the long run. Cheap is cheap.
I'm also a little skeptical of the their leap from their dependent variables to "other research suggests less innovation." It's probably a fallacy on my part, but I am also skeptical that a company with what must be billions of dollars invested in high tech campuses is going to find that remote work is just as good as a campus environment.
I have been working fully remote, in remote friendly or fully remote companies for 12 years or so now. It is definitely a different environment and different way of collaborating than working on a campus. I would be interested to see similar research on such companies. I suspect that the results would be replicated, but would be interesting to know for sure.
Related anecdote: I was visiting Microsoft campus in Redmond pretty regularly around 2018/2019. Most of the meetings I attended included many people calling in to their video conferencing system from around campus and sometimes from home. I thought at the time that it seemed like they were on their way to a remote work situation anyway.
From Israel we can see that that death rate per million with 90%+ of adults double vaccinated is ~4 per day. In the US that works out to ~1300 deaths a day. This is the new normal until everyone susceptible dies.
The office doesn't sound so good when it's sold as the place which ensures you can't live past 70 for your line managers convenience.
Life, uh, finds a way.
I got so little work done that first few months until daycare opened back up. You can’t do much work with a one year old and a four year old demanding your attention. Focus work was impossible, and speaking in meetings had to be timed for the few moments of quiet.
> > over the first six months of 2020
This also implies that most of the employees already knew each other and worked together before being forced into remote work.
One of the biggest problems with switching to remote work is that people carry over the in-person relationships they were already comfortable with.
It's the new hires who suffer most, in my experience. When everyone else has months or years of in-person relationship building and a comfortable network of people within the company, it can be hard to break in.
Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together.
Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams.
Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time.
Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.
Hopefully after a few of these ice breakers, everyone will have a better grasp of each other and more natural communication and relationships might come about.
I did not escape without a bad review. Somebody had to take the blame when things didn't work out. That was also some textbook bad management: my poor performance was first described in the meeting where the review was delivered. Never once in all the 1-on-1s we'd had. Skip said there was nothing that could be done because all that mattered was that I did not deliver compared to my peers.
My manager moved teams then left the company not too long after as well. I'll never really know what happened, but I assume they got a poor review themselves.
Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.
The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.
The thing is the time investment may look big because you have to specify a meeting time and reserve a slot of an hour for it. But it is not different from having it spread across the day as the juniors find a problem, interrupt the senior, get the explanation, etc. I worked in both environments: in the office and full remote. And regarding work and knowledge sharing I don't see a big difference. The real difference is changing the way of working and interacting, but once that is done it works equally fine. The rest is a matter of preference related to interacting with people on a daily basis. But for me, that is outside working hours when I go to the gym, join activities like quizzes, sports, etc., with people I don't work with.
Also I want to add that I connect in videocalls with colleagues, when we have not much work for a few hours just to chat about work and out of work things. And we never met in person.
Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they added support for custom video backgrounds and blur, which is helpful but doesn't really affect the experience of the app itself.
I find it funny how at work I use this giant behemoth's chat app I hate and then when I'm done with work I use this silly app (that used to be) for people who play video games, Discord, which has had a far superior UI/UX to Teams for years and keeps getting better and better. For every issue I have with Teams, the same issue has never been present with Discord. Every time I use Teams I just wish I was using Discord.
And I'm not a Discord shill or something. It's just such a weird contrast. It feels like Discord has been enterprise-ready for years and Teams has never stopped being a toy rip-off. Trying to share anything technical or code-related has always been super seamless for Discord and is still basically a nightmare every time I try to do it with Teams.
At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.
The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.
Actually, yes, I remember this now. This was definitely a huge improvement. I was just trying to think of an addition of something good rather than fixing of something bad.
* UX for sharing from screen underwent a lot of change but I really like where it is now
* Blur/custom backgrouns/together mode additions. The last one actually did help with a feeling of camaraderie
* Switching into a thread-first model really helped conversation continuity on the teams I worked with
* Various smoothing out of integrations; namely with sharepoint. When you're at MS you're using internal sharepoints for docs and slides, and it's nice having access to everything and having it all feel integrated.
* PPT presentation mode, for me, was way better than using actual PowerPoint to present things in my setup. Not sure if others felt that way, but I did.
Prior to the pandemic, it felt like a more-corporate version of slack with less features that ran crappier. But I went from "I don't like using this" to "this is fine and I can get my work done with it" by the end of 2020.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern
Sure the interview process should surface these problems, but applicants can make a "bad hire" as easily as companies, especially as both are showing their best front, and this is more likely if you are enticed by a fatter paycheck.
Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.
This made finding work very challenging.
In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.
In any case, you have to weigh the pros and cons, but jumping ship just for the lure of a fatter paycheck is not necessarily going to make you happier or do your long-term career any favours.
My advice (fwiw) is move for growth. Can you identify something that will change your CV for the good about the new gig. If so then the extra money is essentially paying for your next job - you will be able to find something even better (hopefully p>0.??) after, if this one doesn't work out.
> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager
Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.
> or team-mates
Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.
> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.
Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.
I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.
> You can't carry over the reputation and clout
Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.
In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.
I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.
I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".
The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.
Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.
Knowing this, from a company perspective, remote can work if individuals have a way to create relationships. In my experience, some people bond over work but most bond by spending time with each other doing friendly activities which are not work related.
An in-person party or a holiday is the best option but some online gaming is a decent substitute in these authoritarian times. Some people swear by virtual coffees rotations that randomly match people but I had a couple of good ones and dozens of cringy/weird. None of them ended up being positive for creating relationships, at best it was useful for knowing who is who.
I'm not sure how much of that is applicable to normal jobs where your employer owns your work.
I’ve had no problems chatting and calling with people whom I have actual business with. And here I’ve had the most success with planned meetings and agendas.
My job is not to invent the next big thing.
So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.
Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration?
My experiences with it seem to be at variance with this observation.
Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram.
The cut and paste does not work properly. This one has thousands of 'user-voice' votes and has been broken for over a year. edit: over 1000 people, broken for at least 3 years: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
Slack has completely changed the underlying video and voice platform and, for my teams, it has always worked perfectly.
I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.
I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.
I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.
For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.
I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.
I've tried configuring banner/feed options, but my teams is just a constant stream of notifications shit that I cant seem to tune properly.
I suspect most developers don’t really have a meaningful hand in shaping what they work on.
This assumes the company will be around in 10 years and that I am still working there.
Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.
This continues to be the case, it's just the mediums have changed slightly, while they're still mostly text-based, there's also the multimedia-based methods thanks to things like ubiquitous video, voice and conference calling.
At what speed though? You're obviously correct that such small talk can and does happen over asynchronous communication protocols. But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break. Businesses are going to desire something faster. So far, nothing has beaten a simple phone call in my (admittedly limited) remote work experience.
I think you overestimate how much relevant these napkin innovation situations are. Talking with some coworker and drawing something over a napkin doesn't mean the idea will be revolutionary at all. Or even useful. It is most of the times, a romantic image that make people feel like the smart innovator they would like to be.
Yet for some reason they refuse to implement simple improvements with thousands of comments on their feature request site, 2 simple ones that could probably be implemented in a day:
1. Option to disable [read more]
2. Option to make the mute toggle hotkey global so it works when the app is not in focus
Managers don't really exist without the chitchat: if managers are fish, then chatty open office is their fish pond.
The guys above them, VP+, who I'd call "gamblers", don't really need the open offices. They build networks anywhere they want. The in-office connections are too fake and weak anyway.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This implies that innovation is somehow a formalized process.
You are right though, WFH is not sustainable for many. Many folks are burnt out.
Time will tell whether you are right or not.
They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.
-- Stephen Covey
"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."
-- Richard P. Feynman
"There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing."
-- Robert Burns
Employers must then offer more for uncertainty.
That's one kind of gig. It isn't what Apple employee 100 signed on for, or Google employee 12. Some employees are looking for upside and challenges more than certainty.
In uncertain times, the most valuable employees are the ones who thrive on uncertainty. The most difficult are those who prioritise something an employer can't guarantee as a prerequisite for performance.
It’s one of the many reasons I’m about to leave.
So less interruptions and more asynchronous work. That’s awesome! But it’s framed as a negative outcome.
Do we really think that a company fully geared up for in-office work for over 100,000 employees in the USA alone would produce an impartial report on the effects of remote work?
A businesses absolute shit remote working process != remote working is bad.
December 94 did first agile web project in BT took a month two developers flew up to Edinburgh collocated team.
The traditional remote (Cardiff) quoted 2 years.
Before that 3 of us developed SIROS the system that controlled the UK core ip network in 12 weeks again using agile and getting the customer in the room regularly
- Knowledge workers are treated as a homogeneous population. But it seems unlikely a software engineer, a VP of software engineering, and a business development associate obtain the same benefit from frequent in person meetings.
- Remote teams aren’t merely in-person teams + Video/VOIP stack. Optimal process and culture is drastically different for each case. It seems possible that some/most of detrimental effects would disappear over time as new remote teams adopt better processes and discard legacy methods optimized for proximity.
- There is a lack of nuance. While I may be persuaded that on average in-person collaboration adds value I strongly suspect there is tremendous variability between individual meetings. I once worked for a very senior Ballmer-era product executive who jumped ship to an alluring startup. In the year before they were fired I easily spent over 200 hours meeting and collaborating with them. To say that each hour was merely empty and valueless would do a disservice to this individual’s talent for value deletion. The abrupt conversion to WFH was accompanied by a substantial increase in communication friction. In such cases I would expect lower value, less focused, and more vacuous meetings and network connections to be the first that are jettisoned. It seems dangerous to assume the collaboration dynamics associated with success pre- WFH will remain so post-WFH. This is a novel, potentially pattern breaking change.
> For each month, we classified ties as strong when they were in the top 50% of an employee’s ties in terms of hours spent communicating, and as weak otherwise. Although we have not seen strong and weak ties defined in this exact way elsewhere in the research literature on social networks, the research community has not, to our knowledge, converged on a standard way to measure tie strength.
This study is not good evidence against remote work. If anything, this study is just confirming what we already know - that is, remote work happens differently (synchronously vs asynchronously).
I've said it before and so have others: the push to bring everyone back into the office is in my opinion, representative of management's own insecurities.
+ Their double dose vaccination rate for adults is ~90%.
+ Their death rate per million is ~4 people/day.
+ Their ICU rate is ~25 per million.
+ They are doing third and fourth booster shots.
+ For the US those numbers would be ~1300 deaths per day and ~8000 ICU beds occupied.
This is what going fully open with current vaccines and indefinite booster shots looks like until everyone susceptible dies.
Anyone arguing for stopping work from home is arguing for 500,000 dead Americans a year as a good trade off for 'innovation'.
I find this somewhere between unconscionable to genocidal.
It's not what this site is for, and—what's worse—it destroys what it is for, so this is somewhat of an existential issue for this forum.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Those damn managers only caring about butts in seats!
Oh but what about the socializing! It's so hard!
Remote in same time zone so you can collaborate in real-time has absolutely no resemblance to an employee you can communicate with effectively a 24 hour delay.
What a completely worthless set of data. Not only do their findings mean nothing for long term remote work, it’s now fuel for the anti-remote work movement. Shameful coming from nature.
1 ) It’s unclear to me why Microsoft, a leading software firm with distributed offices, should be considered representative of “information workers”.
Contrary to this study of a digitally inter-connected firm, finding their preferred connection patterns and rhythms took a hit before adapting (see #2 below), most enterprises had no established digital connection patterns or rhythms and despite the challenges of going online, had been so bad before they saw a boost.
Many “big enterprise” firms’ collaboration and productivity shot way up from April through September, as necessity drove adoption of any collab at all.
2 ) Aside from this, “the first six months” is not how adapting to change works. MBA types like it call it “Storming, Norming, Performing”, but I prefer this:
- Virginia Satir Change Curve image: https://www.plays-in-business.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11...
- Virginia Satir Change Curve discussion: https://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_chang...
Bottom line: I’d argue they studied a top decile performing firm far ahead of typical US enterprises, and found that Satir was right, a foreign element can induce a performance hit.
Many of us and some of your managers will recognize the Satir curve as the 'J-curve'. In fact the guy who introduced this concept to me did not allow that he'd heard of Satir. I'm slightly curious to ask him if he did but we haven't talked in a while.