I've been working remotely most of my career and I wouldn't trade it for the world. However I believe that "just" having a place to do your video calls or whatnot in peace and quiet can be a tremendous value offer for many if not all people. This isn't to say that I think going to the office should be mandatory. Rather, I would hope that one day more companies can start going remote first with a workspace budget where you get to choose. Whether it's choosing to go to the office and your budget going towards the office rent, or paying for a coworking space with the budget, or just getting a better setup at home, raising awareness of the topic will hopefully lead to more flexible approaches in the long run. Right now, finding a company that's good at remote and has it all figured out is still rare.
I have enjoyed being able to choose when and why I go to the office (or especially when I don't). I struggle to imagine how forcing employees into an unpaid, stressful commute is paying off... tech profits have soared in the face of work-from-home.
Have any of the pro-RTO folks on HN experienced this phenomenon? There's definitely a contingent here who do not prefer remote work, curious to read what they think of going back into the office only to have to continue to call in order to collaborate with coworkers.
I prefer working from the office, even if it’s empty. 99% of my interactions continue to be remote but I like to have somewhere that isn’t my home office to do work. I don’t like being _that_ much of a hermit.
I prefer going to the office at least a few days a week, because (a) I like to socialize with other humans, and (b) I want to get out of my "home office", aka corner of the living room. I work with a distributed team, so I definitely don't go in to collaborate. In fact, on days with a lot of meetings, I'm more likely to work from home.
The needless socialization at the office killed my productivity. I don’t need to be interrupted and I don’t need an hour lunch. I socialize off-hours with real friends and family. Work is for (more effective) working
I’ve been going into the office 3 days per week, and often times, it’s just me and the office manager in the office out of our ~200-employee company. We’ve been hiring remote-first for a while, so that maybe the way it is until our lease ends.
Like the other commenter, I just like having a place to get work done that isn’t my home. The plus side of an empty office is that I can take Zoom calls at my desk. It does get rather irritating to have to find an empty call room or conference room when others show up.
There’s something good about seeing people in person. Even if a 4 person mtg, 2 are on zoom but me and another are in the same room. It’s nice to be in the room with the other person, and talking.
I would prefer NOT to go into office, but I don’t think it’s totally pointless. Beyond what I mentioned above, it’s great for 1:1’s. Go for a walk with someone, or have a coffee.
My ideal would be to go in when I want, which would probably net out to 1-2x per month.
Even before COVID all my collaboration with teammates was done online. (We use Teams now) I'm at the main site for my company; my boss and all my close collaborators are at a satellite location that's not within driving distance; my boss's boss is down the hall from me.
For me, the act of leaving the office at the end of the day is an effective "off switch" that I don't have while my work station and my gaming station is the same chair in the same room. And the office is an effective procrastination temptation blocker that I don't have when I'm at home and surrounded by all my toys, dirty dishes in the sink, and dirty cloths in the hamper.
WFH is the worst case scenario of "taking work home with you", which really isn't the way I want to live my life.
I have a laptop exclusively for work and one exclusively not for work, and at the end of the day the work one gets closed and put away until the next working day.
Junk like HN serves well enough for endless procrastination in or out of the office. Having my toys near me has been no worse - if anything my personal projects have suffered because they largely got attention during the commute.
I'm not sure it will matter at FAANG. For > 15yrs meetings always had video conferencing for other offices or team members at home etc... So it's not that much different except at home I can turn off my camera if I'm disheveled. I suppose it's also easier to blow off the meeting at home.
We’ve been in-office since early August 2021. It’s been great. Since we have two offices, we dial in every day for our daily meeting.
The rest of the time we talk in person and sync up after. We’ve found it quite enjoyable so all of us come in every day.
We’re in HFT so if an action would leave money on the table, we’d prefer the alternative that grabs the cash.
In this case, we started this office because part of the team was remote in SF and expressed an interest in being in one. It costs a lot per year so we didn’t make the decision lightly.
This reminds me of the time about 7 years ago when my team (in Redmond, WA) wanted to send me to Beijing for a year. I didn't agree so they sent someone else instead. He spent most of the year living in Beijing and working with a team in Bellevue, WA.
That isn't so bad per se. It's pretty common at MSFT from experience, sometimes it helps. But if you are connected in the Seattle area/have a mortgage and such it can def see annoying then to leave.
I meant it in the non family, adventure in China way and work maybe late evening hours to 1:1 w/ the redmond team.
I had something similar happen to me when I was also at msft, I volunteered to go to Manila and Tokyo (since no one else wanted to go) and it was the same exact situation except to interface with same redmond team and barely any with the international office.
My lease was expiring, I didn't feel like renewing, I was home searching (wish I just bought something instead, this was 2015, so imagine the prices) and well I spent over 18 months living abroad with more than quarterly tickets home and I was not even mid 20's.
I loved it, but I 100% get it. If I had a family and truly deep network of friends and long term connections there, I would've probably said no, but I wanted to travel. Only downside was, it was Japan in Winter when I arrived. :)
I'm confused, what was the point of making you (or your coworker) live on the other side of the globe then? Were they running an "let's see what happens if we expel someone out of the US just for kicks" experiment? The way you described it it sounds like they deliberately did something completely pointless, which seems... unlikely?
I always found it kind of sad when I would have video conferences with people in the same building. But I didn't want to walk up 12 flights of stairs (very dodgy elevators in that building; wayyyyy under capacity for an office building), and they didn't want to walk down 12 flights of stairs, so there we were.
This is even worse at corporate campuses like the Googleplex. It might be a mile walk to go meet someone in person, while that 1 person video conference room is just footsteps away. Sad, but what can you do. (That said, I've been in meetings where I realized the other half of the group was next door, and said "wait, I'll just come over". Sometimes it's just unfortunate incremental iteration on the list of conference rooms and not actually a good reason.)
My thoughts exactly. I had a similar opportunity about 10 years back and I turned it down. I still think about what my life would have been like had I chosen otherwise.
The only “bad” case I know of is my cousin who moved to Finland from Australia: her teen struggled because high school was impossible to follow. The younger kid didn’t care as much, and otherwise they all had a great time.
I feel like I know plenty of families who have done this.
What if you don’t have to overlap for the full day? Our team is all over the world and people are used to having real-time overlap with some people only for a couple of hours.
I have to be able to talk to everyone so my schedule is crazy (but is a schedule, so I’m not up at 2 AM every morning, and do get enough sleep). But I’m the only one.
Interference between Zoom calls (being in different or the same one) is the killing factor here. Specially when not everyone is back, or there are more people from outside participating, and that it has become the new normal. One Zoom call in a work room may be ok (if people there is quiet and don't care a lot of the lone participant speaking from time to time while using headphones), but two or more cause trouble, at least without special microphones.
And even if in some workplaces are rooms for phone and now Zoom calls, that too many people use now Zoom calls make them insufficient.
I was on Zoom or Meet most of the time for years before the pandemic. Teams were geographically spread. Clients, vendors could be anywhere. I've never had an official WFH job but I also haven't had a colocated team since maybe 2010. Ironically enough my current company is very localized but I have barely set foot in the office due to pandemic.
Yes, and that's why hybrid doesn't make much sense - even if you have 80% in office and 20% remote, then you have to have 100% of the processes/costs/downsides of remote work (because almost everyone needs to work as if you were remotely), but you get only 20% of the benefits of remote work.
Isn't it pretty standard to have video conferencing equipment in conference rooms or are there actually companies where people literally sit in a meeting room and dial in with Zoom from their laptops? Sounds pretty silly, and easy to fix with minimal cost.
Or just their desks. It’s a terrible experience to have the people in the conference room using a room camera and the remotes at least for an interactive discussion. It can make some sense if it’s basically an internal meeting but one person say couldn’t travel or missed a flight. But everyone on their own laptop if anyone is was a practice many teams followed pre-pandemic.
my company turned off all our conference room video conference hardware to force people to dial in individually. the argument being that the remote people have less representation if theyre a small box on a screen vs everyone in the room
I have to wonder how long this kind of thing will last in these types of org structures before there's a collective realization that coordinating groups always has a challenging element to it, even in person in a single office location.
With distributed groups, even more "overhead," which Zoom / video calls, I think, have been proven over the last 2+ years to ameliorate to some extent.
These kinds of stories come across as almost validating the critique I've seen going around on various discussion forums - that critique would be that the return to office push when the job doesn't inherently require it is more an artifact of an organizational failure to adapt and/or an attempt to put expensive office spaces to some kind of readily visible use, rather than rational or productive management planning.
As a mid level computer programer working under policy of work from office at least few days even at peak of covid I see that company is happy when employees are more available remotely for work issues after hours. But when it comes to normal work hours remotely there is lot of hedging mainly because with so many leaving they do not want anger by explicit calls on this.
So they like to save all the money by utilizing benefits of online resources. Never flying for mid level employees for any face to face meeting, get togethers etc. No tech conferences, no in-person training and so on. At the same time office is best way to collaborate with team distributed over 4 cities. Doing 5 webex sessions in a day apparently require office to do quality work.
Afaik many people who either see best intention or that management is listening their remote work demands are deluding themselves. Management are simply waiting to get great employee churn over so they can announce everyone get back to office if they want to keep their jobs.
I recently spent a week in the office with my team. First time I'd had office time with any team since mid-2018.
It was really, really, really nice.
I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare.
But... sometimes?
Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed it until I experienced it again. For the first time in years.
I think it also helps team cohesion. We're human beings, not robots. I think my ideal schedule would be "3 days at home, 2 in the office" per week or maybe "one week in the office, two weeks at home."
edit: I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
I did the same and it was as unbelievably worthless as I recalled from before the pandemic. You know what really stands out in the office? How sad it all is. The frowns on the subway, the fake smiles in the office, the pretending, the posturing. Bleh. I'm resigning.
There are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads.
* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.
I still find the replies to my personal experience very baffling. I didn't say what anybody else should be doing; I didn't present it as a universal truth.
It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.
I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.
It’s loss aversion. Many people perceive office environment to be unpleasant for various reasons (long commute, psychopathic coworkers, noisy, lack of privacy) and so now they have tasted freedom they have a strong negative reaction to losing it.
At this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail.
Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.
I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.
People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.
> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.
I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.
Resentment from people who have been held mentally hostage by their socialite coworkers who wander around interrupting others for a significant portion of their day.
I enjoyed one single week of office work after four years of being fully remote, and plainly expressed my preference to continue being remote a majority of the time.
I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well.
You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.
That’s not how this works. There’s an extreme bias toward butts-in-seats. “Everyone should do what’s best for them” is a nice sentiment, but not how the world works at all.
There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.
Companies succeed by hiring the best people and setting them up to do great work.
I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well.
A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses.
dang, I think you are the best moderator I have ever known, but respectfully strongly disagree with who you've fingered as the "flamewar-style" poster in this conversation.
I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable.
Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share.
However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.
I made a point not to single out one poster. Like most online conflicts, it was a co-creation.
Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC.
The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic.
If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here.
The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad.
[2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience.
I miss in-person activities, especially going to lunch with coworkers, trying a new restaurant, or one of our old favorites. Remote has become pretty old.
the opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.
How are you going to build more meaningful relationships with a collection of people that’s essentially random (neighbors) vs. one with a lot of built in common ground (coworkers)?
it used to be incredibly common, in fact normal, to be friendly with your neighbors… dine with them, hang out with them… this has changed dramatically in the last 30 years
yup — I’m a bit old school and keep trying to do this. It’s very “hard,” you can face rejection, but it’s way more interesting than living in a bubble of your work place.
People whose common ground in life is that they both liked the weather or got good deals on big houses - at least this is how I understand geographical community in a remote-first world - would seem unlikely to produce nearly as engaging of lunch conversation as coworkers. And coworkers at lunch were not famously engaging to begin with.
I've read your comment a few times and I'm baffled. What are you saying, here?
I understand that people fake "happiness" and "respect" all the time. Yes. It's true. But... you seem to be suggesting that I am faking it here? Why?
My coworkers aren't reading this. They don't know my HN handle. I have never mentioned my employer on HN. What incentive would I have to be false here?
I've worked on a number of crap, toxic teams over 20+ years. This one's good.
I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the replies here. I make an offhand remark about my current team being a pleasure to work with, and I have multiple replies suggesting that there is something fishy afoot?
"The Lake Wobegon effect, a natural human tendency
to overestimate one's capabilities"
Oh, cool. Because I say my coworkers are good and I enjoyed spending a few days with them, maybe I'm overestimating my own abilities. Great. Very cool. Nice thing to say about a stranger.
I've never ever had such absolutely bizarre replies on HN. I can't remember the last time I had such bizarre replies anywhere.
Don't let it bother you man. It's just an example of cross-cultural confusion crossed with some blunt HN mannerisms (to put it politely).
The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).
How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"
How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."
Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)
It's hard to wrap my mind around somebody thinking a stranger is "bragging" or "uncouth" or "sycophantic" because they think their team is smart and fun to work with.
Saying they are "fun" is obviously my personal opinion. How could it be anything else? Of course it means I think they are fun and not it is a universal truth that everybody thinks my team is fun.
As for smart, aren't most/all engineers "smart?" I hardly thought that calling a group of engineers "smart" would be controversial.
Some people are just very grumpy that they have to go back to the office.
So here comes along this guy that loves going back to the office. Fuck that guy! He must be faking it, he's lying to himself. It's that fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work. It's because of these kind of people that I'm forced to go back! :)
I'm European and I know the fake US thing, but I didn't read that in your post.
I think there was also a misunderstanding. I'm not returning to the office. It was just a one week visit. I am back to working remote. I live 500mi/800km from my office. I will not move there.
fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work
Are you from America? I do not understand this statement. I have lived in America my whole life and everybody complains about their jobs 99% of the time. Maybe a person might lie to their boss about being happy. But nobody lies to their friends or strangers about loving their jobs. I mean, wtf? That's what people think Americans do?
But as a European looking at US culture, there is definitely a difference between this "positive thinking" attitude. I guess that's what the first response to your post was referring to.
Respectfully, I was not addressing you, and I think you are reading very different things into my comment than I intended. The connection in my mind was that the Lake Woebegon monologue always ended with "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I did not agree with this characterization, and I gently took someone to task for making what I considered a bigoted statement.
I have no opinion on your subjective assessment of your current or prior teams. I'm not sure what about my response merits being called bizarre. If I inadvertently touched a nerve, please understand that it was not my intention.
I get where you’re coming from. I’ve been half time remote since 2017 (I.e. on one coast half the time and back near the office the other half) and full time since 2019. It is very nice to visit and have a really good in person session occasionally.
My work has moved the office to a general hoteling model where the dozen people that need the office every day are always welcome to use it. It’s mostly a ghost town but everyone is happy with how this worked out.
The most common use case is a team coming into the office to see each other for the first time in two years or the first time ever depending on when they started.
We have a rule that all calls are done over Zoom or Meet, so we will have the eventual insane looking situation of the majority of the participants in the same conference room speaking into a laptop.
The company owns several Owl cameras which did a good job pre-pandemic of bridging the gap of seeing who is speaking in a conference room. I’m not sure if all laptops open is a good policy for remotes like myself but I’m sure we’ll figure that out in a few months time.
1. There are people who are more sociable and more likely to thrive working with other people in person, while some other type of people are more introverted, sensitive and dislike human interactions.
2. There are companies/work environments/jobs/teams where coworkers are mostly nice, smart and a pleasure to work with. There are also companies/work environments/jobs/teams that suck and filled with political, disgruntled and unhappy employees.
So, the only thing that is universally true is YMMV.
There’s introverted and then there’s reclusive. People who don’t like big groups or find social situations draining may nevertheless find a lifestyle with 95% of their time spent alone (assuming 8 hours of social plans in a 168 hour week) to be too isolating.
I am introverted, but the pandemic has taught me that I'm not actually suited to a reclusive life. I get far more done when working from home, but need a day in the office every month or so as a "reset", to remind myself that the company is bigger than just me and my projects, and that my colleagues are people rather than Slack bots.
I'm with you. I definitely miss having an office to go to.
Would I take a job that required me to be in the office every day? Almost definitely not. Would I sacrifice a bit of pay if it meant working for a company local enough that I could go to the office 1-2 days a week? Probably.
That would really be the sweet spot for me. I like working from home a lot, but being a fully remote team wears on you. I've considered taking a part time bartending job just to satisfy the desire to have in-person coworkers a bit of time a week.
Regarding why this post is so inflammatory, it's just tedious "i hate people" misanthropic posturing from people who still haven't figured out that their problem is them.
No offense, but your comment reads like it came from a script. Thing happened -> unexpected result -> wonder why -> learn more about yourself. And the moral of the story is that working in the office is not that bad, because we're human beings not... robots?
Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)
I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey.
> I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
The problem is that choices aren't independent. While they're not using this language, you can see that other people are thinking of you as a "scab" for having crossed the "picket line" of returning to the office, and that admitting there is any benefit to being in the office at all will result in their life being made worse. That's why it's so heated.
I wouldn't mind being in the office. I do mind commuting, and I definitely would mind getting COVID as my wife is in the vulnerable category.
“My team” are in London, Chicago, Dallas, Cochin, and Bangalore and I’m in Seattle. Commuting to the office just makes it harder to get in early enough for the morning Zoom calls.
"Employees Are Returning to the Office, Just to Sit on Zoom Calls"
Yep my team is split between 2 sites and works with teams in various other sites. We may have some meeting rooms set up, but we will still be using video calls predominantly.
Haha you would think. These actually are the new teams.
I've been in my current position for two years. During that time: I've had 4 managers. The team structure has changed majorly twice (lost about 1/3 of the team because they got reorg'd to a different team/project, then lost 1/2 to posting or leaving the company). We also had app ownership change majorly 3 times.
They're having such a hard time retaining and finding people that they're having to combine teams with 50% losses to make one whole team, start a new office in a new region in the hopes of using a new labor market, start up an offshore team for owning mature products (prod support), and they're finally investigating full/permenant remote jobs to see if they can get more people that way.
There is no one size fits all. I’m a believer that office time should be optional. If I was an employer I want to get the most from my people. I want to empower them with the tools they need to get the best work done they can. If that is them working at home. Fine. If it’s having a dedicated space (office) that I pay for. Fine. They are adults and can figure out what works best for them. Why would I as an employer know how best all of my employees can work best.
Individuals may be able to make good decisions for themselves (though, reading this thread, I believe some WFH advocates may just be doing what's convenient, not what makes them happier in the long term), managers need to weigh what's best for the team or the company as a whole. The outcome might be the same, but not necessarily.
This is what I did for years before March 2020. Maybe I'll go in once in a while to get out of the house, but maintaining two development workstations is a drag.
Unless there's an office pizza party or a real scheduled brainstorming session, it's not worth physically being there.
This is the most frustrating part of being forced back to the Bay Area. Even before the pandemic, we always had distributed meetings, with people calling in from various buildings, conference rooms, phone booths, etc.
So nothing changes between last month and this month, except that managers get peace-of-mind knowing I’m calling in from somewhere on the premises, and I’m back living in a place where I can’t afford a house.
(I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions.)
>I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions
I hope that I get to work on some actually hard problems at some point in my career. Sounds fun :)
Grass can be greener on the other side. Usually hard problems are expensive to solve, and the business end wants nigh endless amounts of justification and planning for those solutions lol. You think you'll be designing cool architecture (and you will!) but you'll also spend a lot of your time making powerpoints and sitting in meetings to "touch base" and "tag up" and whatever lol.
It's odd isn't it? Git went from an idea to being benchmarked in about a month. But tell anybody at work you can rewrite something to fix a fundamental design decision causing issues and they will usually say that will be impossible, take forever etc. While they assign you much longer lengths of time just working around something that was poorly designed.
I had plenty of interactions at Google over lunch, in the hallway, while taking a break, etc that we brought to a whiteboard and either ended up with a potentially interesting project or saved us time by finding out something didn’t make sense. These often came from a series of multiple, low stakes conversations that were much more difficult to have remotely. I don’t contend they are impossible, but for me they were at least much less frequent during wfh.
this outcome can exist remotely, it simply requires effort and maintenance;
the gains from working remote are the same scenario, just different context;
I haven't figured out yet the specifics of what works because it hasn't been a priority, and what components of it are the quirky part and what are the catalysts for the same outcome (yet);
my flaw is thinking outside the box, which managers and companies don't optimize for; in fact in exemplary situations where I led efforts that gained many times the cost of all my work for many years (millions in USD) they didn't notice or care, which I find hard to understand about US corporate and cultural norms;
I'm sure there's a relationship between these things, I just haven't sorted it out.
Certainly, interesting work and effective in-person collaboration do exist at the these companies, it just varies a lot from team to team. The trope of PhDs hired to optimize button colors exists for a reason.
After a few years of remote working, me and some colleagues just randomly call each other with “watercooler conversations”. IE About once or twice a day, we are on slack and just call each other to answer and continue talking about random things and ideas
In my experience, this is the closest to just being together in an office without being in an office
I also had those by just doing my work and talking with colleagues about work. At home.
People love (my company included) to say office promotes those low-stake spontaneous conversations that result in something positive. Because these spontaneous conversations don't happen remotely, the argument is that then that something positive wouldn't have happened either. That's a false argument though.
Besides, if a company has responsible employees they will think about work, about their tasks. These types of brainstorming and thinking would come up anyway. And if not exactly this specific brainstorm that came from a lunch-topic, another one.
At the end of the day, right now most arguments are emotional arguments to force people into the office. Those findings that something didn't make sense, would happen anyway if people just think about work and do their job, in the comfort of their home, in the Bahamas, or wherever they choose to work.
Because in some countries it’s mandatory to wear masks in offices (indoor environments with lots of people), so they force people to come in, sit with their masks for 8 hours, not allow physical meetings (or going to other desks), forcing you to eat at your desk just so that you can do Teams/Zoom/WebEx meetings :-) Insane, I know!!!
That doesn't sound fun. Find a new job? I can tolerate having to come into an office if that's part of the job - but it's either safe enough to do so without masks & zoom or it is not, and should still be remote.
This is exactly the case for my company. Since the pandemic started the majority of our engineering hiring has been remote, because why pay Bay Area salaries when you have perfectly great developers willing to work out of Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Portland or really anywhere else in the same-ish timezones.
Now that our HQ has fully opened up and local employees are being asked to come back, how do you deal with the dynamic of up to 50% of your team not being in the same building? What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
We are in a place where we get very few of the advantages of in-person collaboration while having to bear all the drawbacks.
> What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way there’s no burden of having a meeting just to discuss something?
Sorry if that comes off rude. I’m just genuinely curious what you’d need to meet about.
Slack is slower. You can cover far more in a face to face meeting (or a video call) in less time.
This is easily provable too. Have a 30 minute call with someone, and then have a 30 minute Slack chat with them. It becomes very clear that Slack doesn't work as well for that sort of comms.
Slack is brilliant for asynchronous stuff, or very short chats, but it doesn't work for longer things.
Slack was just an example though. It could be a google doc. It could be anything written down.
In what instance is talking about something better (I guess we’d have to define better but just assume better = retention) than reading about something? If I’m reading about it I can always read it again. In a meeting I’m going to forget 90% of it the moment I walk out the door (or end the zoom meeting).
In a collaboratively edited doc (which we should do more of, not less), the 6th person in read a different doc than the 2nd person, yet they both “read the doc”
That dynamic is much reduced in a synchronous meeting because everyone’s at the same meeting.
> Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it?
One of my frustrations with working remotely is things that used to be a two-way discussion on a whiteboard or a live demo become a one-way broadcast of something prepared in advance.
There are 'virtual whiteboards', certainly, but none of them are any good.
Same. Half the people we hired during work from home are remote (that was never allowed before). Now all meetings are on zoom and all conversations are on slack. Being in an office is beyond pointless. It wastes time, gas, etc. the main take away from the past 2 years is working in an office is beyond stupid (at least for certain careers like developers). I drive to work, communicate with no one except on the computer, then drive home. So so so stupid.
Not the person you were asking, but I had next to no conversations about work aside from video calls, even before Covid. Between national and international distributed teams (and people working weird hours to avoid sf bay commute hours), and packed meeting schedules, it basically didn’t happen. It’s making me sad to write this and it’s making me think.
> Are they conversations that a company would consider help further the bottom line? Not at all.
I realise this depends on the company and the person, but to me these kinds of conversations are essential. I find all the interesting stuff actually happens in these incidental conversations!
I guess the real takeaway here is that to be an effective company you need to have an environment where your employees can work well, but different styles work better for different people so you end up having to compromise.
It's funny, I once had a manager who was outraged I hadn't done something she asked for. I said I wasn't aware of the requirement.
She hadnt actually made any formal announcement. She just liked informal chats with colleagues and assumed all important decisions she made would just spread to everyone through some kind of office osmosis.
She then got annoyed with me that I didn't have enough casual conversations with the team. She wasn't a good manager. But it remains the only time I've been reprimanded for focusing on getting my job done and not chatting enough!
Not really. I come in, sit down, put on my headphones, and stare at my screen pretty much the entire day. I’ve never engaged in small talk in the hallway, even pre-pandemic. It pisses me off when people stand around talking and disturbing people around them trying to concentrate. If you want to have a conversation, schedule a conference room and close the door.
Where I work, it was actually like this before the pandemic. We are a global company with lots of tiny offices. Teams were assembly remotely just to satisfy requirements. It was silly to be in an office.
It’s more than just developers, our CEO is in love with in person interactions, so now we have managers at my company who have made a zoom background of their office and work from home to try to keep up appearances. It’s the most bizarre thing. At a big enough company, everyone won’t be in the same office and you’re interacting across regions, so you’re already doing zoom/teams/emails/voicemails/ whatever pre and post pandemic. If you’re spending your day on the phone or email or in conference calls, that can be done from home.
We're also almost completely remote. I still find it fun to go to the office 2-3 times a week. Yeah, it's a 40 minute commute, sitting in the train and listening to podcasts (or biking in the summer). In the office I typically have my own room without distractions, the company orders lunch and I get to be somewhere else than home every now and then.
I also have a great remote setup at home. A room, with a fast desktop computer and all. Still changing the location few times a week clears my head somehow...
I love having lunch with co-workers. It’s a great way to connect. Even though at my office only about 30% of folks are back, it’s roughly the same group each day. So I’m happy being back even if all meetings involve Zoom. At least getting a conference room for all the zoom calls is not too hard :)
I love that I get to work from home [1], yet I still get together with some coworkers for lunch once a week. Yes, we don't work for the same department, but we used to regularly go out for lunch before the pandemic. It also doesn't hurt that we all live closer to each other than we do the office.
[1] I "work" from the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida office. My manager is in Tampla, Florida, and my two other team members are in Reston, Virginia and Seattle, Washington [2]. There's a push from upper management to get people back in the office in May, but there's no way I'm going in. No point to it.
[2] Due to our company being bought out by a larger company, and the rest of my team basically retiring at the end of 2020.
Even though at my office only about 30% of folks are back, it’s roughly the same group each day.
This an area where companies will see problems with reopening offices - the people who aren't there (eg remote hires who work hundreds of miles away, people who choose not to return, people who still need to isolate, etc) will feel far less included, will see that their prospects at the company are worse, and ultimately are much more likely to leave because the social aspect of Slack will die off. Maintaining inclusion in a partially remote company is incredibly hard.
i foresee this as the main problem with a distributed, hybrid workforce.
in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.
any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)
I was thinking returning to the office is sort of a 'prisoner's dilemma'. Everyone has to make the same choice for it to be effective, otherwise the office experience is diminished and working from home is better at that point, since you'll be in remote meetings anyway.
I still think it's a matter of control that the office is preferred. There's absolutely no reason why software problems can't be solved remotely, especially when half of the industry is outsourced to China or India.
The reason to have anyone in an office is because it makes managers and executives feel better. It’s really that simple. No one who has ever worked remotely themselves could possibly believe that employees are more productive in an office.
I think the delusion most people tell themselves about in person being better for spontaneous conversations, and better productivity comes down to just wanting human interaction. Which is totally normal. But all of the talk about how being in person is better is just a cope. Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
I’m saying if you’re more productive in an environment where you’re forced to commute into work, then you don’t have the proper tools to be more productive remotely. This is very common. It’s the lack of a remote working strategy on the part of your company. Of course you won’t have a successful time working from home if you just take your existing in-office work lifestyle and copy-paste it on to working remotely.
If your location is causing you to be less productive, then change your location. Go to a coffee shop, or a co-working space. Go to the park. Go anywhere you want.
> No one who has ever worked remotely themselves could possibly believe that employees are more productive in an office
Anyone who makes a statement like this is naive ay best. Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
> Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
For you (and for me). But that doesn't mean it's better for everyone, and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else ("well Fred needs to be in the office and if it doesn't work for Fred it doesn't work for everyone")
> Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
I don’t really see how any of this has to do with remote work. Remote doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. It could mean working from a coffee shop, a co-working space, a boat, a beach, a park, a mountain, etc. If someone craves being around people they can solve that pretty easily in a remote environment (granted it’s been more difficult these past two years, ill give you that).
> and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else
Given the proper setup, and support from management, there isn’t an instance where remote work isn’t better. Whatever Fred is missing about an office environment is reproducible in a remote environment. It just takes looking at remote work holistically.
Personally I feel the pandemic has set us back quite a bit. We had companies haphazardly forcing remote work without any sort of strategy at all. This obviously is going to cause some people to think it doesn’t work. The problem isn’t remote work, it’s that your company just sucks very badly at doing it.
My only 2c is that the WFH vs office conversation often seems to pretend that there aren't a ton of businesses with desk workers where many of their colleagues can't feasibly work from home -- manufacturing for example. It's not even only the people physically building the products who obviously have to be there, but even mechanical engineers have a reason to.
My job is to build software to make the lives of the people building our product better. I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
That said, I do appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home for house maintenance, deliveries, family stuff, etc.
Beyond all that, going into the office (or factory really) is energizing. Too much time at home and I get reminded of CGP Grey's "spaceship you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
> I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
there's a balance. I would consider being on site as a special case; do it when needed. This means the workplace needs to plan it out, and know ahead of time when it is going to happen.
Same here. Everyone was "happy" and "proud" about our remote performance and now they force us back to the office 50% of the time. Many people seem to see it as a great leap forward, but I don't. One of the company value is supposed to be "independent"...
This week I was supposed to go, not see my kids in the morning, waste 2 hours in the train, expose myself to Covid, just to sit alone in an office and discuss through Teams because the rest of the team was not even there. What the actual f**. I just couldn't go.
Set terms yes, bu the terms are very unreasonable, impractical and paradoxal, they imply unnecessary suffering that actually degrades work performance, the very thing good managers want to keep up. Sacrificing performance for control is the signature of bad management and a bad employer.
You know your employers benefits of you too, right? That's why they employ you. They don't give you charity or hire you of the good of their heart. They hire you because you bring them more value than you cost.
So I don't get this subservient attitude you have to employment. This should really be a two way street.
Are you implying that renegotiating terms isn't an available option, and the only way to deal with an unpreferable situation as an employee is to switch jobs?
I am trying to make sense of your comment but I don't really get this attitude either :)
Your terms of employment are negotiable. If you don't like them then you are always free to discuss them with your employer. You should never assume that your employer is able to dictate terms, or even that they want to. Most companies want their staff to do good work and are happy to come to an arrangement that benefits everyone.
Surely it’s equally ridiculous that your kids would leave the house for school. Or that they would ever move out just to do their own Zoom jobs. But at some point we’ve got three generations who have rarely if ever the left the house and have spent their whole lives Zooming from separate rooms. Some kind of sci-fi dystopia.
“My morning routine is well-oiled. I drink a big glass of water, do some exercise, hit the shower, meditate for a few minutes, read a few pages, take some notes, and write a few more paragraphs of my next book.“
What is it for you now? Morning routines are a dream of the past for me.
As someone who has worked on startups, side gigs, and only around 6 months at a “real” company. I’m always blown away at how many meetings there are in corporate America. What are you even meeting about? Why aren’t you doing hands on keyboard work? Why does a decision need to be made in a room, with everyone pretending to listen? Why are you presenting something to me when I’ll comprehend it far better if I read it, gather my thoughts, and then send you my questions?
And don’t get it twisted. I’ve been in these types of meetings. Client meetings, project meetings, etc. It’s always been as an outsider, but they’re all the same. Small talk, people arrive, someone always has to have everyone introduce themselves, then there’s a quasi-presentation/conversation, and eventually everyone leaves. I can’t think of a less efficient means of communicating an idea than that.
I don't think meetings are really there for the informational value for a lot of people, but to give face time as a show of strength.
But, I do exactly what you do - I prefer something well-written and it gives me time to think about it. As someone talking to a lot of people within the company, I sometimes get asked to go on a client call. I almost always say no. It's not my job to talk to clients (and that means being ready to look good for them) and saying whatever needs to be said in a call doesn't do much that an email can't do. While being there as an "expert" to the client is probably something that customer-facing people want, I have nothing to gain from it.
Useful meetings engage people : a fresh new idea to have everyone go research more, a way to gather the team to focus on tough questions, or to explain a point better than chat messages.
Yeah, the company I work for recently got acquired by a US corporate. I went from one ~15min stand-up call a day to 3-4 hours of meetings per day, all mandated by the US VPs. Our company has had to double our number of developers just to get the same amount of work done that we did pre-acquisition.
Wait till you see government organisations. There are meetings to decide who needs to turn up to a meeting. I thought that was a sick joke until I attended such a thing myself.
On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the keyboard and use that, it's fine, just make a decision already. Nope. Got to run it past marketing. Branding (a separate team). Networks. BAU support. Domain hosting team. Architecture team. SecOps. Etc, etc...
The same org then had daily meetings involving 10+ people to decide how to purchase $500 worth of USB security fobs. At one point a project manager broke down in tears and pulled his credit card out out, and offered to just buy it himself if it would make the madness stop. There was a stunned silence, and then somebody raised the point that yes, fine, sure, but then how would warranty returns be handled if he becomes the "supplier"? With a straight face that same guy suggested another meeting to discuss the warranty return issue.
This reminds me of a great scene[1] from the British show "Yes, Minister". It's from an episode called The Compassionate Society where a minister for Department of Administrative Affairs learns about a newly built hospital which has some 500 employees but no doctors & patients. The scene I linked is a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential no matter what.
I used to think Yes Minister was the least humorous comedy on television, and I could not for the life of me understand why my father liked it so much.
He lived under communism, with its dozen+ levels of government bureaucracy, so you can imagine why he thought it was hilarious.
Once I had worked as a consultant for government departments, I suddenly "got" it, and now Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The bit about hospitals is all too true.
For example, just recently, I had to fill out a stack of paperwork to provision a virtual server for hosting an archived, read-only web site for data that hasn't changed since 2017 and has three (3) users. Literally a stack. As in, a pile. About a hundred pages, or a short novel. That nobody will ever read, except if the time comes to blame me for a shortcoming that they themselves could not have avoided.
I recently started doing part time contracting dev work for a couple companies. The best part is that management doesn't invite me to these bullshit meetings because they know I will be billing them for no value being delivered.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 1009 ms ] threadLike the other commenter, I just like having a place to get work done that isn’t my home. The plus side of an empty office is that I can take Zoom calls at my desk. It does get rather irritating to have to find an empty call room or conference room when others show up.
I would prefer NOT to go into office, but I don’t think it’s totally pointless. Beyond what I mentioned above, it’s great for 1:1’s. Go for a walk with someone, or have a coffee.
My ideal would be to go in when I want, which would probably net out to 1-2x per month.
For me, the act of leaving the office at the end of the day is an effective "off switch" that I don't have while my work station and my gaming station is the same chair in the same room. And the office is an effective procrastination temptation blocker that I don't have when I'm at home and surrounded by all my toys, dirty dishes in the sink, and dirty cloths in the hamper.
WFH is the worst case scenario of "taking work home with you", which really isn't the way I want to live my life.
It never had anything to do with collaboration.
Junk like HN serves well enough for endless procrastination in or out of the office. Having my toys near me has been no worse - if anything my personal projects have suffered because they largely got attention during the commute.
The rest of the time we talk in person and sync up after. We’ve found it quite enjoyable so all of us come in every day.
We’re in HFT so if an action would leave money on the table, we’d prefer the alternative that grabs the cash.
In this case, we started this office because part of the team was remote in SF and expressed an interest in being in one. It costs a lot per year so we didn’t make the decision lightly.
I had something similar happen to me when I was also at msft, I volunteered to go to Manila and Tokyo (since no one else wanted to go) and it was the same exact situation except to interface with same redmond team and barely any with the international office.
My lease was expiring, I didn't feel like renewing, I was home searching (wish I just bought something instead, this was 2015, so imagine the prices) and well I spent over 18 months living abroad with more than quarterly tickets home and I was not even mid 20's.
I loved it, but I 100% get it. If I had a family and truly deep network of friends and long term connections there, I would've probably said no, but I wanted to travel. Only downside was, it was Japan in Winter when I arrived. :)
This is even worse at corporate campuses like the Googleplex. It might be a mile walk to go meet someone in person, while that 1 person video conference room is just footsteps away. Sad, but what can you do. (That said, I've been in meetings where I realized the other half of the group was next door, and said "wait, I'll just come over". Sometimes it's just unfortunate incremental iteration on the list of conference rooms and not actually a good reason.)
The only “bad” case I know of is my cousin who moved to Finland from Australia: her teen struggled because high school was impossible to follow. The younger kid didn’t care as much, and otherwise they all had a great time.
I feel like I know plenty of families who have done this.
I have to be able to talk to everyone so my schedule is crazy (but is a schedule, so I’m not up at 2 AM every morning, and do get enough sleep). But I’m the only one.
And even if in some workplaces are rooms for phone and now Zoom calls, that too many people use now Zoom calls make them insufficient.
I have to wonder how long this kind of thing will last in these types of org structures before there's a collective realization that coordinating groups always has a challenging element to it, even in person in a single office location.
With distributed groups, even more "overhead," which Zoom / video calls, I think, have been proven over the last 2+ years to ameliorate to some extent.
These kinds of stories come across as almost validating the critique I've seen going around on various discussion forums - that critique would be that the return to office push when the job doesn't inherently require it is more an artifact of an organizational failure to adapt and/or an attempt to put expensive office spaces to some kind of readily visible use, rather than rational or productive management planning.
So they like to save all the money by utilizing benefits of online resources. Never flying for mid level employees for any face to face meeting, get togethers etc. No tech conferences, no in-person training and so on. At the same time office is best way to collaborate with team distributed over 4 cities. Doing 5 webex sessions in a day apparently require office to do quality work.
Afaik many people who either see best intention or that management is listening their remote work demands are deluding themselves. Management are simply waiting to get great employee churn over so they can announce everyone get back to office if they want to keep their jobs.
It was really, really, really nice.
I've been a diehard work-from-home guy for ages. Why spend perhaps 10+ hours per week commuting? It's a productivity and environmental nightmare.
But... sometimes?
Yeah. It's nice to be in the room with other smart people, solving hard problems. I didn't realize I missed it until I experienced it again. For the first time in years.
I think it also helps team cohesion. We're human beings, not robots. I think my ideal schedule would be "3 days at home, 2 in the office" per week or maybe "one week in the office, two weeks at home."
edit: I'm baffled by the polarized and inflammatory replies to this post. I was just relating a personal experience. I don't have opinions on how others should work. You want to be 100% fully remote forever? Cool. I don't think you're wrong. I'll continue to be remote a majority of the time, myself.
Do you still spend (or, would you like to spend) any time with your teammates? Like several times per year? Or 100% remote?
* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.
It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.
I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.
I'm not advocating for folks to stop working remotely. I'm not advocating anything.
I'll certainly never share another personal experience on HN, that's for sure.
Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.
People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.
I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.
I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well.
You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.
There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.
I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well.
A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses.
* for some definition of “move”
So what did you mean by this?
For instance, in general, “I am sorry to hear that your father died” means “I am feeling sympathetic to you for your misfortune”.
It does not mean “I apologize for the death of your father” except in the extreme case where I was responsible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable.
Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share.
However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.
Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC.
The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic.
If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here.
The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad.
[1] Lots of past explanation on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience.
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I’ve noticed this as a very American thing to say on the lines of “I’m super excited to be here” :-)
I understand that people fake "happiness" and "respect" all the time. Yes. It's true. But... you seem to be suggesting that I am faking it here? Why?
My coworkers aren't reading this. They don't know my HN handle. I have never mentioned my employer on HN. What incentive would I have to be false here?
If I am misunderstanding you, please explain.
I commented as a light disagreement with:
- need to use the word “smart people” or even such a need itself
- also possibility of this being a trite - more of an unconscious habit without maybe meaning anything specific about it (again, not faking it) [1]
And more importantly it was joke kind of a retort which I think I should have been clear about. Wasn’t a personal attack in any way.
Edit: [1] e.g. like the zero day old guy saying in his intro, “I’m super excited to join you all super smart people. It’s gonna be fun”.
And as for WFH - god, I just want to go back to office - fully or hybrid!!
On the other hand, making broad proclamations about nationalities based on anecdotes has another name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_...
I'm absolutely dumbfounded at the replies here. I make an offhand remark about my current team being a pleasure to work with, and I have multiple replies suggesting that there is something fishy afoot?
Oh, cool. Because I say my coworkers are good and I enjoyed spending a few days with them, maybe I'm overestimating my own abilities. Great. Very cool. Nice thing to say about a stranger.I've never ever had such absolutely bizarre replies on HN. I can't remember the last time I had such bizarre replies anywhere.
The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).
How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"
How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."
Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)
It's hard to wrap my mind around somebody thinking a stranger is "bragging" or "uncouth" or "sycophantic" because they think their team is smart and fun to work with.
But, I understand that it's a thing.
As for smart, aren't most/all engineers "smart?" I hardly thought that calling a group of engineers "smart" would be controversial.
So here comes along this guy that loves going back to the office. Fuck that guy! He must be faking it, he's lying to himself. It's that fake American culture that acts as if it's a nice thing to go back to work. It's because of these kind of people that I'm forced to go back! :)
I'm European and I know the fake US thing, but I didn't read that in your post.
I think there was also a misunderstanding. I'm not returning to the office. It was just a one week visit. I am back to working remote. I live 500mi/800km from my office. I will not move there.
Are you from America? I do not understand this statement. I have lived in America my whole life and everybody complains about their jobs 99% of the time. Maybe a person might lie to their boss about being happy. But nobody lies to their friends or strangers about loving their jobs. I mean, wtf? That's what people think Americans do?But as a European looking at US culture, there is definitely a difference between this "positive thinking" attitude. I guess that's what the first response to your post was referring to.
I have no opinion on your subjective assessment of your current or prior teams. I'm not sure what about my response merits being called bizarre. If I inadvertently touched a nerve, please understand that it was not my intention.
You’re right. I’ll retake the humour class (skipped that during my UG) and try again later. Failed miserably here it seems. But thanks :)
My work has moved the office to a general hoteling model where the dozen people that need the office every day are always welcome to use it. It’s mostly a ghost town but everyone is happy with how this worked out.
The most common use case is a team coming into the office to see each other for the first time in two years or the first time ever depending on when they started.
We have a rule that all calls are done over Zoom or Meet, so we will have the eventual insane looking situation of the majority of the participants in the same conference room speaking into a laptop.
The company owns several Owl cameras which did a good job pre-pandemic of bridging the gap of seeing who is speaking in a conference room. I’m not sure if all laptops open is a good policy for remotes like myself but I’m sure we’ll figure that out in a few months time.
2. There are companies/work environments/jobs/teams where coworkers are mostly nice, smart and a pleasure to work with. There are also companies/work environments/jobs/teams that suck and filled with political, disgruntled and unhappy employees.
So, the only thing that is universally true is YMMV.
Would I take a job that required me to be in the office every day? Almost definitely not. Would I sacrifice a bit of pay if it meant working for a company local enough that I could go to the office 1-2 days a week? Probably.
That would really be the sweet spot for me. I like working from home a lot, but being a fully remote team wears on you. I've considered taking a part time bartending job just to satisfy the desire to have in-person coworkers a bit of time a week.
I'd really want to see your reasoning...
Surely you're not so surprised to get these responses :)
I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey.
https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destr...
The problem is that choices aren't independent. While they're not using this language, you can see that other people are thinking of you as a "scab" for having crossed the "picket line" of returning to the office, and that admitting there is any benefit to being in the office at all will result in their life being made worse. That's why it's so heated.
I wouldn't mind being in the office. I do mind commuting, and I definitely would mind getting COVID as my wife is in the vulnerable category.
Yep my team is split between 2 sites and works with teams in various other sites. We may have some meeting rooms set up, but we will still be using video calls predominantly.
I've been in my current position for two years. During that time: I've had 4 managers. The team structure has changed majorly twice (lost about 1/3 of the team because they got reorg'd to a different team/project, then lost 1/2 to posting or leaving the company). We also had app ownership change majorly 3 times.
They're having such a hard time retaining and finding people that they're having to combine teams with 50% losses to make one whole team, start a new office in a new region in the hopes of using a new labor market, start up an offshore team for owning mature products (prod support), and they're finally investigating full/permenant remote jobs to see if they can get more people that way.
Unless there's an office pizza party or a real scheduled brainstorming session, it's not worth physically being there.
So nothing changes between last month and this month, except that managers get peace-of-mind knowing I’m calling in from somewhere on the premises, and I’m back living in a place where I can’t afford a house.
(I did have previous jobs where we worked on hard technical problems, and spending face-to-face time with a couple colleagues hashing out solutions at a whiteboard was invaluable. But that is not my FAANG job, where the whiteboards are rarely used for anything other than interview questions.)
I hope that I get to work on some actually hard problems at some point in my career. Sounds fun :)
If the justification is meant for the shareholders: why not admit they may be right, and lease a smaller office?
In my experience, this is the closest to just being together in an office without being in an office
People love (my company included) to say office promotes those low-stake spontaneous conversations that result in something positive. Because these spontaneous conversations don't happen remotely, the argument is that then that something positive wouldn't have happened either. That's a false argument though.
Besides, if a company has responsible employees they will think about work, about their tasks. These types of brainstorming and thinking would come up anyway. And if not exactly this specific brainstorm that came from a lunch-topic, another one.
At the end of the day, right now most arguments are emotional arguments to force people into the office. Those findings that something didn't make sense, would happen anyway if people just think about work and do their job, in the comfort of their home, in the Bahamas, or wherever they choose to work.
Now that our HQ has fully opened up and local employees are being asked to come back, how do you deal with the dynamic of up to 50% of your team not being in the same building? What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
We are in a place where we get very few of the advantages of in-person collaboration while having to bear all the drawbacks.
Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way there’s no burden of having a meeting just to discuss something?
Sorry if that comes off rude. I’m just genuinely curious what you’d need to meet about.
This is easily provable too. Have a 30 minute call with someone, and then have a 30 minute Slack chat with them. It becomes very clear that Slack doesn't work as well for that sort of comms.
Slack is brilliant for asynchronous stuff, or very short chats, but it doesn't work for longer things.
In what instance is talking about something better (I guess we’d have to define better but just assume better = retention) than reading about something? If I’m reading about it I can always read it again. In a meeting I’m going to forget 90% of it the moment I walk out the door (or end the zoom meeting).
That dynamic is much reduced in a synchronous meeting because everyone’s at the same meeting.
One of my frustrations with working remotely is things that used to be a two-way discussion on a whiteboard or a live demo become a one-way broadcast of something prepared in advance.
There are 'virtual whiteboards', certainly, but none of them are any good.
You don't talk to people aside from at the meetings?
I realise this depends on the company and the person, but to me these kinds of conversations are essential. I find all the interesting stuff actually happens in these incidental conversations!
I guess the real takeaway here is that to be an effective company you need to have an environment where your employees can work well, but different styles work better for different people so you end up having to compromise.
She hadnt actually made any formal announcement. She just liked informal chats with colleagues and assumed all important decisions she made would just spread to everyone through some kind of office osmosis.
She then got annoyed with me that I didn't have enough casual conversations with the team. She wasn't a good manager. But it remains the only time I've been reprimanded for focusing on getting my job done and not chatting enough!
If I get an idea during a meeting, I send it as an email afterwards
I also have a great remote setup at home. A room, with a fast desktop computer and all. Still changing the location few times a week clears my head somehow...
it is, but some people who prefer the remote world do so because they don't need nor want to socialize with their coworkers.
[1] I "work" from the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida office. My manager is in Tampla, Florida, and my two other team members are in Reston, Virginia and Seattle, Washington [2]. There's a push from upper management to get people back in the office in May, but there's no way I'm going in. No point to it.
[2] Due to our company being bought out by a larger company, and the rest of my team basically retiring at the end of 2020.
This an area where companies will see problems with reopening offices - the people who aren't there (eg remote hires who work hundreds of miles away, people who choose not to return, people who still need to isolate, etc) will feel far less included, will see that their prospects at the company are worse, and ultimately are much more likely to leave because the social aspect of Slack will die off. Maintaining inclusion in a partially remote company is incredibly hard.
in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.
any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)
I still think it's a matter of control that the office is preferred. There's absolutely no reason why software problems can't be solved remotely, especially when half of the industry is outsourced to China or India.
I think the delusion most people tell themselves about in person being better for spontaneous conversations, and better productivity comes down to just wanting human interaction. Which is totally normal. But all of the talk about how being in person is better is just a cope. Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
So you're saying that people who are just more productive and happier working from the office do not exist? I sure feel like I exist..
If your location is causing you to be less productive, then change your location. Go to a coffee shop, or a co-working space. Go to the park. Go anywhere you want.
Which is the office where my coworkers are. It makes working a lot more fun for me.
Anyone who makes a statement like this is naive ay best. Some people thrive on environments with other people around. Some people don't have a home space conducive to working (either lack of space or having other people living with them). Some people work _much_ better in areas of places where they have supervision; that doesn't mean they need to be babysat just that having someone around keepz them in line and performing well.
> Working from home is better in every instance where it’s possible.
For you (and for me). But that doesn't mean it's better for everyone, and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else ("well Fred needs to be in the office and if it doesn't work for Fred it doesn't work for everyone")
I don’t really see how any of this has to do with remote work. Remote doesn’t necessarily mean working from home. It could mean working from a coffee shop, a co-working space, a boat, a beach, a park, a mountain, etc. If someone craves being around people they can solve that pretty easily in a remote environment (granted it’s been more difficult these past two years, ill give you that).
> and dogmatically claiming it is weakens the argument for everyone else
Given the proper setup, and support from management, there isn’t an instance where remote work isn’t better. Whatever Fred is missing about an office environment is reproducible in a remote environment. It just takes looking at remote work holistically.
Personally I feel the pandemic has set us back quite a bit. We had companies haphazardly forcing remote work without any sort of strategy at all. This obviously is going to cause some people to think it doesn’t work. The problem isn’t remote work, it’s that your company just sucks very badly at doing it.
My job is to build software to make the lives of the people building our product better. I'd prefer myself and my team to be there with them frequently, instead of considering ourselves to be part of some class of special people that have the luxury of working at home most of the time.
That said, I do appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home for house maintenance, deliveries, family stuff, etc.
Beyond all that, going into the office (or factory really) is energizing. Too much time at home and I get reminded of CGP Grey's "spaceship you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
there's a balance. I would consider being on site as a special case; do it when needed. This means the workplace needs to plan it out, and know ahead of time when it is going to happen.
This week I was supposed to go, not see my kids in the morning, waste 2 hours in the train, expose myself to Covid, just to sit alone in an office and discuss through Teams because the rest of the team was not even there. What the actual f**. I just couldn't go.
I wrote about this and my feeling is still the same: https://medium.com/management-matters/going-back-to-work-no-...
So I don't get this subservient attitude you have to employment. This should really be a two way street.
I am trying to make sense of your comment but I don't really get this attitude either :)
“My morning routine is well-oiled. I drink a big glass of water, do some exercise, hit the shower, meditate for a few minutes, read a few pages, take some notes, and write a few more paragraphs of my next book.“
What is it for you now? Morning routines are a dream of the past for me.
And don’t get it twisted. I’ve been in these types of meetings. Client meetings, project meetings, etc. It’s always been as an outsider, but they’re all the same. Small talk, people arrive, someone always has to have everyone introduce themselves, then there’s a quasi-presentation/conversation, and eventually everyone leaves. I can’t think of a less efficient means of communicating an idea than that.
But, I do exactly what you do - I prefer something well-written and it gives me time to think about it. As someone talking to a lot of people within the company, I sometimes get asked to go on a client call. I almost always say no. It's not my job to talk to clients (and that means being ready to look good for them) and saying whatever needs to be said in a call doesn't do much that an email can't do. While being there as an "expert" to the client is probably something that customer-facing people want, I have nothing to gain from it.
Useful meetings engage people : a fresh new idea to have everyone go research more, a way to gather the team to focus on tough questions, or to explain a point better than chat messages.
On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the keyboard and use that, it's fine, just make a decision already. Nope. Got to run it past marketing. Branding (a separate team). Networks. BAU support. Domain hosting team. Architecture team. SecOps. Etc, etc...
The same org then had daily meetings involving 10+ people to decide how to purchase $500 worth of USB security fobs. At one point a project manager broke down in tears and pulled his credit card out out, and offered to just buy it himself if it would make the madness stop. There was a stunned silence, and then somebody raised the point that yes, fine, sure, but then how would warranty returns be handled if he becomes the "supplier"? With a straight face that same guy suggested another meeting to discuss the warranty return issue.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLU-Evdlt-A
He lived under communism, with its dozen+ levels of government bureaucracy, so you can imagine why he thought it was hilarious.
Once I had worked as a consultant for government departments, I suddenly "got" it, and now Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The bit about hospitals is all too true.
For example, just recently, I had to fill out a stack of paperwork to provision a virtual server for hosting an archived, read-only web site for data that hasn't changed since 2017 and has three (3) users. Literally a stack. As in, a pile. About a hundred pages, or a short novel. That nobody will ever read, except if the time comes to blame me for a shortcoming that they themselves could not have avoided.