> However, even the fiercest distributed team advocates agree that an office provides some benefits that are difficult to replicate on a distributed team. I want to dig into some of those benefits.
Or, how to say you don’t read hacker news without saying you don’t read hacker news.
I don’t disagree that offices have their benefit, but I do know where to find internet pundits who do!
I know two startups started both in 2020. They started out with roughly on the same idea, having raised similar funding.
Startup #1 decided to do full-remote from day one. After a year, the founder of the full-remote startup had little progress: they ended up figuring out how to work, had to fire people "not cut out" for remote work, and then realized they really make meaningful progress after week-long retreats as a team which they now do on an adhoc basis.
Startup #2 stayed in-office even during the pandemic in the same location - following local guidelines on COVID rules as with all businesses. They did this because this was the way the founders knew how to work, and they knew that full-remote would be a steep learning curve and slow down their iteration speed as they are rushing to find product-market-fit. They only hired for onsite 2-3 days a week, and paid very well in return.
Startup #2 found PMF in year 1, and now are at ~30 people, ~100 paying businesses, growing strong, ready for their Series A. They have engineering, product, sales and customer support in the same office. As this startup grows, they are putting remote-friendly policies in place as they realize they'll have a hard time hiring and retaining without. But their core culture is collaborating frequently as in-person.
Startup #1 is looking for PMF and are still learning how to work efficiently as a full-remote team. In this sense, they are well ahead of Startup #2. In product progress, they are behind. For runway, they are about the same, as Startup #1 runs with a smaller team than #2.
In my social media feed, almost everyone advocates for full-remote work, as from a personal point of view this is the preference of most people. No commute, more flexible work hours and choosing where to live and where to work from are all undoubtedly huge benefits for any individual.
Still, my observation is that working full-remote or full-distributed has a learning path that takes time and effort. There are people, managers and teams are not there just yet. And we might learn that certain team phases, team dynamics and business environments are better fitted for full-remote or fully distributed versus one that has more "in-office" contact.
Ha! This happened in the startup where I worked in 2020: CEO was stubborn to work in the office so he implemented "all official guidelines " to keep some people in the office. There were 2 COVID outbreaks in the 10 months I worked there during the pandemic (I refused to go to the office). I later found a better paying fully remote job with sensible leadership .
My takeaway from that is very early startups should be in person, but beyond that very early stage remote will make sense especially as devs can be picky and want to work remote.
And mine is that you can't tell much from that anecdote. The failing startup might be failing for any number of reasons. There are counterpoints of fully remote startups that have worked out well. So basically, it's just noise. There isn't even an attempt made at explaining why is working remotely the problem, they might not be suited to it, or that they tried before being ready for it as OP stated.
Yes, In Person is always better where there is more "chaos", but for established companies where most people have "tasks" to do, remote works just fine.
If we've learned anything from reading HN, a sample of two isn't statistically significant, especially when talking about startups. I've known people in several startups and very few cashed out - and they were all in office.
It's interesting that you state that Startup #2 paid very well in return for coming into the office. I get paid very well for doing my job, regardless of whether it is remote or in office. If Startup #1 has decided that remote means they don't need to pay very well, then that is probably your root cause.
> At Google Chicago, we had a yearly two day team ski trip
So get the remote team together for a two day team ski trip. With all the money you save on office rent, get the while team together for a whole week of skiing.
> Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences are near impossible to replicate over any remote tool I’ve used
True, but again, remote teams can also go to conferences and have off sites.
> Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted
Maybe so, but team ski trips, conferences and offsite will also be on the chopping block. And the budget is much more likely to get stressed when you have the huge fixed cost of downtown office space in it.
This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.
My company is remote only and the money saved on office space has been reallocated to additional team outings and a longer runway. Constant outings sounds a bit overwhelming, personally.
Because employees have families and lives outside of work so can't just drop everything to go a team ski trip. Once or twice a year, sure, but more than that it's a chore more than a perk :)
My last remote company had quarterly offsites, and sponsored at least a conference of your choice per year if you wanted to go to it. My current remote company hasn’t had many offsites (covid + clients in healthcare) but hires aggressively and pays significantly above market. Also spares almost no expense on employees. It’s hard to compare like for like though. How much of any company’s actions can be attributed to budget savings from cutting physical offices, as opposed to any number of other variables: decisions from leadership, market strategy, or quality of last funding round? It’s hard to isolate just the one cause, but it might be worth gathering that aggregate data to see if patterns exist.
There you said it. With the office being a fixed expense, budget is formed around it, since you “just need it”. While the trips and conferences are always discretionary expenses, and as such will not be made if they could be not made.
I meant "fixed" just in the sense that there is a set amount you are contractually obligated to pay regularly, as opposed to discretionary costs of something like team offsite. If everyone is on vacation for the month of July then you can't just decide to not pay office rent for the month, whereas you could decide not to have your July team offsite.
But calling it "fixed" in the sense that you just have to pay it is begging the question. The whole point is that you don't need an office in all situations. Or at least you don't need a dedicated desk for every employee. So you shouldn't look at office rent as a cost of doing business thing. You have to really look at whether the ROI is there. Maybe it is, maybe it's not based on your particular circumstances but it IS a choice.
But I think the whole point is that we don't just need it. The trend towards remote (or at least remote-friendly) work which was dramatically accelerated by the pandemic means that office space should be viewed as a discretionary expense. If you already are locked into a long-term lease and that money is already a sunk cost, then that's one thing. But if you are starting a new company or at a point where you need to renew an office lease, you have to ask yourself whether there really is an ROI on office rent. It's a lot of money after all and you can still get a lot of the benefits of in person team bonding at a fraction of the cost through regular offsites and team building events.
I'll just throw in that "fully remote but with regular company off sites" is actually a really attractive proposition to an employee. Instead of commuting every day to some dreary office I get to work from my very comfortable home and still meet my coworkers at some nice destination a few times a year. I actually feel like I have a better bond with remote coworkers in that situation because when we meet in person it is in a "vacation" atmosphere and being time limited means we really focus on hanging out together and doing group activities.
Anecdotally it seems much more difficult to get an offsite together in the modern remote office than it was in the old offices. With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. While this surely results in fewer time wasting pep talks, it also means that the worthwhile activities are also getting side lined.
What about it is more difficult? The (admittedly few) off-sites I've been to have been scheduled 6+ months in advance and the general expectation is that everyone is going unless there's a wedding or a kid is sick or something, in the sense that it's not really culturally acceptable to take PTO during that time unless it's for something very important. When the VP or CTO comes around in February and says "we're going to $CITY for a week, all expenses paid, in September" it's pretty easy for all the teams to get around that.
> With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers.
I’d say that is more of a sign of poor management chain management, communication, and people management. Senior mgmt can stay in touch by, surprise, staying in touch. Remote makes it harder for those poor at written skills and tech skills, but a good manager should’ve been writing things down to begin with.
Opinions from someone doing mgmt for quite some time now.
And that's a MAJOR contingent of people against remotework.
Most middle and upper management can't do it. They fail. They're impediments. They're also the ones who want glass "fishbowls" to show off their employees' toil, AND to "supervise" professionals for the lack of appearance of work.
In reality, companies would do themselves a LOT of cost-cutting to getting rid of ineffectual managers who get in the way of process and progress. But then again, its that class of workers is why we're dealing with anti-remotework all the time.
You can’t get rid of the C-suites’ safety layer. Middle management exists to take the fall when the C-suite makes major mistakes. The sociopaths at the top won’t even consider it.
> This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.
That's exactly what some of us said would happen at the beginning of the pandemic. There were a large minority of people complaining about remote work and questioning how anyone could do it. But the pandemic was not a typical remote work/work from home situation. People were forced into it. You couldn't bug out to the library to get a change of view. You couldn't meet up for drinks or coffee to get even a bare minimum of face to face. Some of us who had been remote working for a long time predicted this anti-remote work backlash specifically because of this.
It's prescient, I think many people were feeling like their house was being invaded and molded by work requirements, and it wasn't a choice they were making. I think when someone chooses remote, it's their responsibility to offer a suitable working environment and that's clear.
For many working remotely is about the freedom of choice in the act of working, choose the time, choose the place, choose the equipment. Whereas the pandemic was a situation where that freedom didn't exist, so even previously remote workers were not as happy with remote work.
It was often trying to make an office environment out of a smattering of digital communication tools, and I think that's the wrong approach for remote work. Previously I had all the above flexibility, in the "everyone's remote" model, I was clocking on at 9am, sitting in 10x the bullshit meetings I used to be in as they tried to simulate ad-hoc communication, and all from my bedroom, not a co-working space or cafe or outdoors etc.
The last thing I want is to spend extra time with my coworkers. Intense work interaction is enough, I strongly prefer to meet "outsiders" in my spare time to actually be able to relax efficiently. Thanks but no thanks.
Yep, I'm ok with the occasional "event", restaurant and such ; but I don't want work to socially pressure me into a small holiday with my colleagues. My time off I want to spend with friends and family, not drinking corporate coolade.
I did one of these kind team junkets in like 2001 when I was just out of college and realized immediately I never wanted to do it ever again. They've been offered a handful of times at other places I've worked and it's a hard pass.
>The last thing I want is to spend extra time with my coworkers.
That seem to be a common point that divides the WFH vs office people. For some, it's really wild how much they rely on the office, and the people that are only there because they're getting paid to be, to act as a stand in for friends, family, or fulfillment of general social need (plus, in OP's case, the office lets him get his steps in each day(!) which is a topic he surely strikes up a long, tedious conversation about with his coworkers as they're held captive at their desk).
Most coworkers are merely tolerated socially. Even if I think they're wonderful to work with, and cherish and rely on their contributions, I've got zero desire to spend any time with 99% of them outside of situations where I'm paid to be there.
The people who make blanket statements about how integrated, in-office teams are better than remote teams ("every time") fill me with contempt. Mostly because I know over the long haul their arguments will win and we'll all be back in the office because that's what managers who need to be seen want, and coworkers who need a family want, and CEOs who need an empire want.
Don't trust you're lying eyes! Distributed doesn't work! The last two years were a failure. Open source doesn't exist. Now drive into the office so we can have a meeting where everyone sits in a room and midlessly browses Reddit while someone drones on about something that could have been an email.
Absolutely agree! I like my coworkers and enjoy going to the office 2 days a week but anything more than that no thanks. I have a life outside of work that I care about.
This. I am always in a hurry and anxious, even if I leave the house with large advance, just because I am on the "mission" to get to work and have to counteract public transport that can be delayed etc.
Instead when I am out in a park I do truly enjoy my green surroundings and relax.
Distributed was always an alternative. The pandemic just made it popular among people who never tried it before. These kinds of arguments in favor of office culture seem like a reflex action resisting any change.
things like starbucks or wework or whatever shared office space rentable by the hour are a better solution for this then big office spaces that stay empty most of the time.
I will say this about the world, though. (As someone who hasn't gone to an office job in 20 years).
* No one builds rapport through zoom meetings.
* People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them.
* People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home.
The world is realizing what offroad warrior freelancers like me realized a long time ago, but it takes time to realize it: It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure. I think it will take 20 years or so before a majority of people in white collar positions really adjust to creating their own work/life balance now that it's open to them to choose how to manage their geographic place and time. It's actually a lot of responsibility, and something a lot of people never asked for.
In my experience you can build rapport through video calls. For certain not in meetings with groups, but on 1:1s it's doable. You have to be conscious about it and put more effort. But it's not impossible. In fact, for me it's easier because it's not by chance, I can put myself in the right mindset to have meaningful conversations rather than bumping into random people when solving a problem in my mind.
I do agree it's a lot of responsibility, but life changes that way. Horse breeders didn't ask for the Model T and so on...
Funny that you would take this example since personal cars (as we know them since the Model T) are likely to become restricted to rich people in a few decades...
(Though I doubt horses would come back to replace a significant fraction of them.)
I disagree. I think rapport is created when you create things/solutions that makes sense for the business. You don't create rapport by being in same room when things don't make sense.
In high school I made rapport with teachers that were good. I did not make rapport with bad teachers who pretended to be good at their job.
Same as developer: rapport is made with other people who strives for clarity in design and communication. No rapport is made with people who play people games.
Office time versus zoom time does not make any difference.
Yes! I've been remote for many years, more than anyone else I know. I learned how to work long before videoconference was even an option, and I never turn my camera on. Some people have never seen my face live. But they know who I am. Because when I come in the room, good questions start getting asked, brains turn on, decisions are made, roles and accountability are set up.
If you're there to do the work, the other people who are there to do the work appreciate the hell out of you. (And most of them don't turn their camera on either.)
I flat out disagree with every single point you make. Not to dismiss your own experience, disregard what you are saying, or be snide or whatever, but:
1. I met my new manager (switched jobs) for the first time over MS Teams in a personally challenging time; I needed to take care of my family the second week after starting a new job. I worried a lot over this, which was met with incredible kindness and empathy.
2. I've started several serendipitous, fruitful collaborations by expansion of offhanded questions or remarks in remote meetings.
3. My mental and physical health is better than pre pandemic because of less commute, more leniency to take a walk or bike a bit, lower stress around picking up kids, being able to cook my own food instead of relying on (potentially unhealthy) cafeteria
The company I work for will happily let you do this even after already having had your lunch break. As far as they're concerned as long as the work gets done they don't care that much as to how it gets done.
People don't realize that walking is a way to think and thinking is work as well.
Many successful people, including Steve Jobs, took long walks during the day. It helps the mind focus and untangle all your ideas in your head.
> It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure.
It’s not hard, it just takes deliberate action. Learning to take said matters into your own hands rather than conforming them to what you “have to do” (aka formal structure) is something most people would benefit from as early as possible in life.
I joined my present company in 2020 and had no problems building a rapport with my fellow workers via Teams.
> People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them.
I don't see any evidence of this. I have plenty of chance encounters and don't feel any less comfortable about them compared to pre-lockdown, and neither it seems do the folks that are on the other end of those chance encounters.
> People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home.
People also stopped sitting in cars and trains for hours on end commuting to the office and used that time to get some exercise. Sure it's anecdotal, but you couldn't buy a bicycle around here because demand went through the roof.
> It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure.
I've worked remotely almost continuously since 2003 and have managed to maintain enough self-discipline to stay organised and look after myself (certainly at least as well as if I'd had to go to an office for "formal structure").
> something a lot of people never asked for.
I disagree, they were told they couldn't because employers have a natural distrust of their staff and "this is the way its always been". Working from home is weirdly seen as some kind of perk, it's not, it's still work.
Now don't get me wrong, there'll be a bunch of folks who either can't work from home and being in the office is their thing (or an escape :) ), but there are also plenty of folks who can function perfectly well working from home so why not facilitate that?
no one builds rapport in zoom meetings where the company strangles the meeting space with an expectation of conduct and subject matter*
whole internet communities born around games which rely on communication are quite literally filled with (positive) remote rapport.
quite a few demographics have had long time remote-friends (i personally have had a few, one i practically grew up with from ages 9 to 23, and have stayed in contact with) -- never met them irl bc logistics are hard.
i just do not understand this notion of not being able to build relationships remotely -- it is a fiction.
> It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure.
I have strong doubts that you’ve been remote for “20 years”. This is much easier to accomplish working remotely. Outside of tech and Silicon Valley, there are still managers who are keen to see their their employees warming their seats despite the proven effectiveness of the independence of remote work
hm? Reading 'distributed' as 'decentral' ...thinking about: Once there was a time when 'some' try to track 'how informations spread' by using protocols... hu sounds off-topic... (-;
I hope remote with asynchronous interactions is the future, because big cities are increasingly unlivable, and corporate culture is often a culture of distraction. Remote is hard to do right, but it's worth striving for.
Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.
Unclear that's a particularly worthy goal. I enjoy the rural life as much as anyone, but it's hard to argue that a "liveable city" (dense, planned, walkable/bikeable, work near to where you live, etc) isn't a more efficient use of society's resources than the automobile-centric suburban sprawl that much of the US is subjected to.
The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like.
When you give all opportunities to a few, they don't tend to use it to everyone's benefit. People who are robbed of the consequences of their actions tend to lose sight of reality.
> The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like.
That's not because livable places with amenities located within walking distance are expensive to build or maintain. It's because there aren't enough of them, primarily because in very large tracts of every metropolitan area they are illegal to build under current zoning ordinances. That's how you get cute prewar streetcar suburbs that are ludicrously unaffordable - the neighborhoods were cheap to build at the time and could be cheap to build today, the prices are all because people love living there and we made it illegal to build more.
Postwar suburban sprawl is monstrously expensive to build and maintain. You need to build and maintain an incredible amount more infrastructure per person, and because the properties themselves are less livable and car-dependent, fewer people want to and can afford to live there, which makes them "cheaper."
The answer is not to force people to live in car dependent sprawl. It's to build more walkable places so that the cost comes down.
As a sibling already mentioned, one does not preclude the other. I don't know why the US does it the way it does it and other countries seem to strive for it too nowadays, even the ones that have done it properly so far.
Especially in the US I don't see an issue with both building out and being walkable or livable without cars. One just has to plan it properly. There are tons of medium sized cities around the world that get some of it right already, possibly by accident. I don't think we need to go Tokyo style or New York style density with millions upon millions of people being crammed into skypscrapers and every inch of soil covered in asphalt or concrete. Sure there's Central Park but not much more and it's so full of people it's unbelievable. So many people all crammed into one space generates so many issues that otherwise don't exist.
I think lots of medium sized cities, say 150-500k, can easily provide enough public transport to make it liveable, provide enough green space to make it liveable and provide city centers with lots of concrete and asphalt for those that want that to make it completely walkable. Before you say that its impossible, I have lived in such cities and they work just fine. In my younger years I lived in such a downtown and everything was within walking distance. Work, groceries, pubs even stores. And it was absolutely safe to walk all over downtown, half drunk in the middle of the night to get from one pub to the next or home. Sure, to go to IKEA I had to take a car and drive to the outskirts of the next city of similar size. But how often do I go to IKEA? Once, when I moved in. The a bit older me had to then make a choice of moving to a particular side of town to be close enough to the office and such. With remote work it wouldn't matter. I could've stayed where I was. Get to the city center? 15 minute train ride after walking 5 minutes to the train.
Almost everyone in my circles are loving big city life while working remotely. It depends on your life circumstances, and what you enjoy, but let’s not generalize that urban lifestyle is bad. Meeting new people, enjoying indoor activities, walking around and etc. are not dying anytime soon, and rent prices show how people are still willing to join in.
I think it kinda depends on your age. When I was in my twenties and thirties, and despite being a country lad, living in cities was highly desirable and I had a lot of good times and made some great long lasting friendships during that period.
In my forties I became less enamoured by city life and in my fifties, now living in a rural location and working remotely, if I never see the inside of a city again then that's fine by me.
It’s interesting that in general everyone on HN loves big city living, but then you have a post about city noise and it’s a thousand posts complaining about urban noise and how you can’t get away from it.
Of course, the key is that you can have both with the right transportation options.
I think you're making a mistaken observation there. It's a skewed data set: of course people who like living in cities will talk about policies they'd like to see to make their cities better, and not complain about ways that a suburb or rural community could be better.
I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.
While I enjoy Not Just Bikes as a channel, it goes a little deep into the "cars are literally the root of every problem there has ever been even accounting for the period before cars existed."
I live in the city. It's loud af, but general traffic is only a small part of it. Essential services like police, ambulance, and fire sirens, and trash collection are massively loud. Then you've got bars blasting music on Fridays. People shouting, laughing, and, in general, existing (often till the wee hours of the morning). They there's the meth-fueled tweakers shouting obscenities. Construction noises. Road work. etc..
Not just age. Depends on the city where you live, how you grew up and your priorities. I would say it’s harder for people that grew up in suburban communities to live their 40s/50s in a city. Meanwhile, I know people in their mid-life (40-60) that actually moved back from suburban lifestyle to NYC downtown life. From my personal perspective, even being retired in a city would be better than living in a small community where everything you do on a daily basis is exactly the same. But again, I understand others’ perspectives and everyone has different things they enjoy in life.
>Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too.
Neither of these things are good for an employee.
A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.
It's double edges all the way around. "shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm. It's one of those things that people want, but which is bad, like "Everything be more efficient if everyone would stop wasting time on their own different ideas and just did what I want.". There are no single simple correct answers.
Shared background can be a good thing and can apply to good things, but it is also the basis of all discrimination, tribalism, prejudice, or even at it's most benign, inconsideration or ignorance.
The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
> A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you
So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important.
> where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away
Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.
I think diversity has been pushed on the workplace because it massively opens up the labor supply and allows companies to plummet wages. As a native worker of a country it is completely against your self-interest to advocate for such changes.
All of the pro-diversity platitudes like "diversity is a strength" are never justified with data, they're just said as truisms you're supposed to blindly believe and repeat.
Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for. But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that! And that's why Amazon tracks lack of workplace diversity as a metric for risk of union formation :)
> Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages
As I'm sure you're aware, software development is very different from physical labor. For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
Think of it in terms of code reviews. Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences? I can't point to any studies to prove this, but from personal experience I'd argue it's the latter.
Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer and person.
Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best. Strong bonds can and do form regardless of culture.
>For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
I'd say it's far more engineering than creative. You're writing code to meet the specifications of a client. I don't think the race of the person writing that code makes a difference.
>Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences
It benefits from being reviewed by people who have lots of experience writing different types of software. Which has nothing to do with ethnic diversity.
>Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer
Meaningless platitude, unless you can back this up with data
>Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best.
I stand corrected. Corporations gonna corporate /shrug
However I disagree with the conclusion:
> It appears it's nothing more than a union busting tactic to divide and conquer their own workforce so they'll be easier to control and accept lower wages.
Quite the sensationalist take. Again, I don't have data to back this up, but IME a diverse team produces better results and I'd rather work in one than not.
> Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences?
In practice "diversity" is more often people from the same schools and employment backgrounds, with just a bit more variation in sex or race or ethnicity.
Diversity initiatives in tech have a strong bottoms-up component from a subset of employees. "Self interest" isn't really the point.
One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.
The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.
> The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for.
It was certainly good for the owners of the mines and other extractive businesses to have their workers feel some sense of loyalty to each other based on where they were born. Not so much for the workers themselves that had fewer opportunities for growth, nor their families as the mines closed and the towns died.
> But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that!
There are plenty of unions made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them span states (or are at least affiliated with organizations that span states). I don't know where you got this idea that there's a connection between birthplace and unionization.
>Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing.
I assure you, diversity that would actually impact production in some big way is not the diversity being hired for. Just look at how many psychological tests emphasize a variety of personalities, meanwhile hiring tries to find the same car with a different paint job.
This really isn't the same "diversity" as "integrating marginalized communities", though.
So yes, I am against the particular kind of diversity that prefers hiring a wealthy brahman living in India over the inner-city kid who needs a leg up.
I'm also opposed to the kind of "diversity" that puts a substantial portion of our domestic workforce out of a job.
Neither of these is what "diversity" used to mean; the term is being coopted by those who would benefit from lowering working wages.
My company has employees all around Europe, and in north America too. Funny enough, even without the shared background, we kinda draw from the same principles and have a common understanding on how to behave an operate.
A world where I have to work with what the local market offers sounds like russian roulette. I don't want to be constrained by where my parents decided to live.
> lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell
I'd feel pretty terrible about my ability if one of the best things about me was proximity to a building. I live in the midwest and I like it in the midwest, and I'm quite happy with a ~future~ present where I'm competing with people around the world for a job I want and not stuck to the one of the 10 or so places I could do my kind of work here.
You might be in the top 1%, but 99% of people aren't. Not everyone is able to compete globally against 3 billion other people. Most people are unexceptional and average. And that's okay. Those are the workers keep the world moving forward.
It is perfectly okay to just be the best person at something in your town or local area. Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
Celebrating mediocrity while being privileged enough to make lots of $$$ is the definition of toxic mindset.
IMO, if a person somewhere in the world is better qualified for the job than me - it's ok.
They worked hard to get where they are and their work should be compensated fairly.
> Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
but he did not say this at all. not even literally.
you merely think he implied it, which is still a leap, since all this person described to you was how they personally internalize their work.
your disdain for competition makes it harder to read.
I appreciate this reply and most definitely do not think I’m in the 1% if anything, let alone the talent pool. I come from a town that wasn’t a tech center growing up (and still isn’t, though we have some logos now), and am largely self-taught. I just like playing with computers and am lucky to have made a job doing that, and am glad to live in a time where I can do something I love, somewhere I love, but for companies not necessarily here. My only point was that if my best qualification was proximity, I’d feel pretty unaccomplished, but the flip side of that is that I welcome the challenge to apply for jobs that are far more challenging than I’d otherwise have access to.
You're not competing against the best of the best for every single job. Only 1% of people are in the 1%, and they'll largely be employed in high-wage, high-visibility positions at high-budget employers. In an idealized global market you'd be competing against other people for jobs with desirability commensurate with your own ability.
It's true that if in an absolute sense you're in the bottom rung of the labor pool then a global market will be more likely to sort you into a job with low desirability. I sympathize; I'm from Cincinnati, and if my employer were in the Bay Area (and paying Bay Area wages) it would have been harder for me to get a job there. But I'm not that sympathetic, because a global market means someone with a better fit but no local options can find a job. It means that if the market for data scientists in Cincinnati dries up I still have a chance.
Idk I live in a city that honestly is great to live in (Tokyo), run a distributed team comprised of others who all live in big cities around the world, and nobody has expressed that they feel like cities suck to live in. Different strokes I guess. Or maybe it’s not that cities suck, but that the cities you’ve been to (cough USA cough) suck.
If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation.
If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
I think your costs baseline is underestimating: even starting as a FAANG engineer in NYC or SF or you already can't buy a "large house next to the park"
Maybe I'm misreading something here, but why should someone who is an entry level software developer at a FAANG be able to afford one of the best houses in the city?
I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations.
Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
> I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations.
If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago).
With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen.
To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
> If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation.
It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too.
edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
There's no inherent reason why this should be so. Big cities can and do provide a marvelous life experience.
But almost all big cities in the US suffer from total mismanagement. IMHO, the greatest immediate goal for the US should be to work out how to correct that.
This is the case outside the US as well. Short term, greed-focused strategies cause this mismanagement somewhere down the line. Over the top prices, noise pollution, etc. None of these need to exist at the rates they do today. Similar issues form outside cities when mismanagement occurs, it's just harder to notice with fewer people involved.
You forgot to mention the huge environmental impact that remote first has. Even EVs still pollute the air from tires along with micro plastic fragments.
Nothing shows that corporate support for the environment is mostly lip service when it comes to lack of support for remote work despite the major environmental benefits that it brings.
I greatly disagree with the idea that big cities are becoming "increasingly unlivable."
American cities, especially downtowns, are in the middle of doing the exact opposite of becoming unlivable. I'm not talking opinions here, I'm talking about factual changes in the context of American history.
American city downtowns started as, essentially, the entire city, with a diverse mix of residents, commerce, and industry. As the industrialization progressed, those downtowns morphed into commercial-only zones as most other uses migrated outward. [1]
Residential living was very rare in city centers in America, with only slum living left. Since then, however, American cities are re-introducing residential life to city centers and redesigning them around mixed use and essentially revitalizing them. [1]
So this idea that big cities are "increasingly unlivable" is more of a cynical opinion rather than a matter of historical fact.
Also, in terms of sustainability, cities still win out. Suburban and rural development fragments animal habitats and uses more land per person. More time and miles are needed in your car burning oil to get around. City dwellers who walk and take transit are more carbon efficient than suburban and rural drivers.
Counter-intuitively, water quality is better in cities where more people are connected to a treated municipal water source. Sewage is also better managed in cities. [2]
Now, on to what's my actual opinion...regarding asynchronous work: it's awesome if you're already at a senior level of skill, but to me it seems absolutely horrendous for new graduates and junior level employees. It's difficult to do "apprenticeship" asynchronously. The idea of a future of asynchronous work is also incredibly software-biased. For example, when Apple wants their employees back in the office there's good reason: they design hardware.
Obviously not all jobs are remote-compatible, and obviously you would not do apprenticeship entirely asynchronously.
Liveable is a subjective term, but water or air quality, or environmental footprint varies a great deal between countries. Cities consume most of the energy and produce most of the greenhouse gases for obvious reasons. Historically big cities became increasingly liveable, however my opinion is that we are at a turning point, in average big cities will become unliveable, some will improve slightly, and many will falter greatly. However urbanization will go on, people will continue to fill cities looking for opportunities, ironically climate change will even hasten this, eventually turning big cities into death traps.
It seems healthiest for companies and people to choose: have all-remote or all-in-person. It’s the muddled hybrid model that’s the worst of all worlds.
It was the best of both worlds. 3/5 days at the office was great.
It gave the benefit of socialising and collaboration, with the flexibility of being at home for visiting home contractors, bulk deliveries, or somewhere where you could take a deep dive into something with no interruptions.
You were right with the first part alone - let the teams choose. Hybrid worked for me and my team pre-pandemic, where we had no emphasis on location at all, so some people worked remotely full time, and the rest were free to come in to the office at their discretion. We would get together periodically (and deliberately), but outside of a few times a year, there was no emphasis on location at all. Most days, you wouldn't know who was in the office or not until the cams came on during standup.
This is an important issue. My own experience is limited to New York City, so I can only comment intelligently on what I've seen here. Over the last 18 months I spoke to 30 entrepreneurs about this issue, and I've tried to synthesize what I have learned. I've posted some of this information previously in various comments, in particular, that many entrepreneurs seem to put a value on vague and intangible (but apparently important) aspects of in-person work. Like I said in an earlier comment, I've had clients who offered mid level software engineers an extra $30k a year to come into the office. I've also summarized all of this in a blog post. For anyone interested, see "What work can be done from home? What work needs to be done at an office?"
That's a good argument, but I didn't see the "we want the best people we can get with what we want to pay regardless of where they are." Which is what some companies do, they hire from all over the world and pay them in the same range.
Why should companies hire only from the US if there are as good or better people elsewhere?
You're looking at it from the cost reduction perspective, but work shouldn't be something you save money on, but invest it the best you can to get the best product.
In summary, looks like the CEO and CTO of your sample companies don't know how to collaborate remotely. Which is natural because it's not intuitive. And if you don't know and don't want to learn, or happen to be at a niche not amenable to remote collaboration, sure, stay at an office.
I did sort of touch on this in the essay when I wrote:
"If these experts insist “I’m only willing to educate you on a Zoom call, I’ll educate you via video” then I have the option of hiring any expert in the world, I don’t need to hire an expert in the USA. If I need to educate myself on a set of technologies, so as to evaluate competing software architectures, then I would prefer to meet with experts in-person, but if for some reason I had to rely on communication via Zoom or Slack, there is no reason for me to hire someone in the USA. In such cases, the only reason I would hire a remote worker in the USA is if they were the greatest expert in the world on a subject that I wanted to learn. "
But I go into much greater detail in my book. I devote a whole chapter to this in my book.
The flaw in that reasoning is it assumes that anyone is able to get the greatest expert in the world.
Reality for most companies who hire remotely is that they just try to get the best person they can find within their time, monetary and other constraints. Many times they hire from the US. They can't access actual world class talent, who is very busy and can be really expensive (or isn't readily discoverable). Or even if they can, they can't fill their staff just with them.
We do need to build human trust and relationships, and you can't do that with remote easily. Also, communications are slower and full of paper cuts that will make any task requiring to gather a lot from different people harder with remote.
Those 2 things make onboarding much harder.
Young people are also the one that are paying the most cost from remote:
- they are the ones with the less autonomy, which makes remote either very unproductive or make the task super hard.
- they don't learn anything about politics, which remote hides from view, and maybe reduces a little, but doesn't remove.
- they are already deep in the culture distractions, which is incredibly tempting in remote.
How course, remote work has so many benefits it may very well offset all that. Time will tell I guess.
How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful.
It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs.
And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated.
TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this.
In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.
I work at such a startup. We all live in different countries and different timezones. Everybody has a high level of autonomy and decision-making working on his own stuff. Most of product communication happens in comments on Jira and technical — in PR comments on Github, both of which are completely async. There's also Slack for some realtime interaction, but it's okay not to be online. At average, I'd say that I have one or two video calls a week, and I don't feel that I need more.
It's one of the most productive environments I had in my entire 15 year career.
"Certain types of companies need a certain workaholic mentality"
The way you describe led to monoculture and I hope this isn't the only way to do things.
Wasn't there a saying that your software will resemble your company structure? I don't know if a software resembling two people sleeping in an office is a good structure to base your software on.
I run a globally distributed startup - we still have very responsive communication but a) it’s not everyone on the team that’s a workaholic since not everyone prefers to be always “on” like that, and so that’s fine, they contribute in other ways; b) we have to be a bit more strategic about timing since you can’t powwow with someone unless that person’s awake, and c) we spend more effort explicitly aligning since misalignment can waste a ton of time, so in a way it’s upgraded the quality of our communication. I personally think it’s been fine, and as a result we have a much bigger hiring pool and are getting as much done as any startup in SV I’ve worked at.
Hate to sound dismissive but I've worked with people who can't communicate very well unless it's in person. Writing/reading causes a lot of misunderstandings for them due to comprehension or patience, and video calls don't seem to work very well for them as they are typical scheduled and have less body language.
This is fine, but I do disagree with those people saying "remote doesn't work" for startups, etc. It's just them.
> How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful.
I'm starting a startup now. There is no way that I am ever going to be pointing at a screen and telling my cofounder "take a look". My cofounder will not be a tech guy, he'll be a sales, marketing and customer-contact guy.
A business is "product + distribution".
There is very little point in having two cofounders who are both focusing only one of the above two variables. I think it is a recipe for failure, and so I will not be doing that.
Well i hope it is. I can't stand commuting or the noisy and distracting office environment. Being close to my family is way more important than being close to coworkers. I'm also way more productive at home, I can wear what i want, I can speak out loud to myself, listen to metal, take a walk, use my clean bathroom and the list goes on. Overall it's healthier and more ecologic. It's just doesn't compare and any argument I've heard/read against 100% remote work just doesn't matter to me. I also don't care about small talk with coworkers or any kind of non-professional bonding, I have friends for that.
Agree with you. I'm highly skeptical of an argument from a (X?)googler about why remote is bad.
Like sure it might be nice to go to Google's office instead of work from the kitchen table but that's not what's on the table for 99.999% of developers. It's some open-plan dead air noisy hell.
From what I’ve heard Google campus is very like a college campus - and if they provided dorms many of the younger employees would love it. And it would have been amazing in my college years.
Having worked at Google previously, I completely agree with this assessment.
I love remote work, mostly because actual work environment feels hostile towards ICs but if I had a Google like environment again, I’d have no problems going back to office.
I haven't gone to an offsite meeting with my coworkers yet (we're 100% remote) so I don't really know what to expect of them. I do know that when I worked in offices there was a lot of bullshit going on every day that only happened because the barrier to interruption was lower. What goes on at these offsite meetings that makes them worthwhile?
I usually just expect to drink booze and shoot the shit with my team. There are usually team building activities arranged by HR, that is another way get to know your teammates. In my opinion, getting a little inebriated is the fastest way to bond with your team.
This is exactly what I do right now and it's pretty nice. We have quarterly planning weeks and everyone goes on-site for that, but otherwise, we're split around the country and there is only one office in downtown San Antonio. 70% of the people working on this program don't live in San Antonio, so there is no practical way to undo being a distributed workforce. But it's a military program and the military is pretty used to working in a distributed manner. They need to be able to work in theaters of combat where you're not only spread out and constantly on the move, but any node in your worker network can go offline at any time, possibly permanently.
Other than listening to metal (I'm more into a mix of punk and classical), I could've written this comment. When I commuted into work it took maybe 40 minutes from front door to desk in the morning; the reverse trip often took an hour and a half. It was absolutely killer. I'd rather be getting painful dental work done than sit in traffic for an hour with nothing but a podcast to distract me.
Now that my company has returned to work with a "hybrid" plan (2 days in the office, 3 days out), I'm glad that they've been flexible in allowing me to be fully remote despite being local. My dogs would be the saddest pups stuck in crates without me.
I don't really understand why (relatively) over paid US Software Engineers are so keen on remote work. The inevitable conclusion is the rapid decrease in salary paid.
“Zapier, a great distributed company, famously has quarterly offsites for its teams where everyone meets in person to replicate this effect. However, I highly suspect that most big companies won’t make any such effort to do this. Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted.”
This seems to contradict the argument for offices. Companies save money by having fewer offices, so their budgets should be improved. Also, if companies do not see the value of employees periodically meeting each other then why do management largely prefer face time in offices?
“Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization”
Much of this article focuses on the workplace fulfilling out of work needs or out of work meetings fulfilling at work relationships. Why do people want and expect so much from their jobs? Why is that the place to fulfill ones social needs? Pursue hobbies and interests outside of work and meet people not tethered to your employer. These relationships are stronger and transcend work ties. Avoiding terrible commutes provides some of the time to pursue such ventures too.
I think its the google centric view of the article. All the perks google offer in their offices are tools to keep you in the office longer. Stay for the Gym, stay for Dinner or come in early for lunch. Considering that its naturally that they expect your social circle to be mostly other google employees.
The company I work for is still tiny, so we don’t know how it’s going to scale, but we’ve been spending the money we would spend on an office just traveling to work together either collectively or in small groups on an as-needed, voluntary basis. Some have more flexibility around travel, some less, but we all like and care about each other so someone is always willing to go the extra mile when someone else can’t travel.
This only works because the enterprise is a COVID baby, and so the “base load” workflow is totally remote, we’ve never known anything different. This makes being in person pleasant and useful but almost never strictly necessary.
> While working from home certainly increases the amount of control that people have over their day, it does so at the cost of essentially all of these chance encounters.
How much value do you actually get from those chance encounters? My experience, after years in everyday in the office, is very, very little. It's like playing lottery everyday, there's not much you earn under all probabilities.
And it's not like it's a potential Oasis while talking a long cool hike. Office can be a minefield.. maybe you get lucky, but the life distortion effect of a bad building are too strong to ignore.
> Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization into your day than sitting at home in your office. While it’s certainly possible that some people working from home will choose to socialize more, I predict that the majority of people will socialize less as they have fewer opportunities to meet and talk with people built into their days.
When you are in control, you are in control of everything. Means that if you need to get exercise everyday, you need to make it a habit to go and walk outside during your remote working day.
As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.
> As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.
I agree. I'm happy to "socialise" to the extent that it facilitates getting work done. But I'm not looking for new pals, I'm just here to do the work and get paid, I have a separate life outside of the workplace. Maybe it's just an age thing but I don't want to do company pizza night, or company skiing or company drinks, for me work is a means to an end.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the company I presently work for, get on well with my colleagues, even push the boat out and do a few extra hours to get a project over the line or to help others, but it is just work and that's it.
I suppose it's a different mindset. I'm not friends with anyone at work in the sense that we hang out after hours, or that I'd call them if I needed help with a personal problem. But it's still hard for me to think of it as "just work and that's it". I'm glad to be "work pals" with these people and want the best for them personally as well as professionally.
I agree that work is a means to an end, but the people I work with aren't similarly means.
Spend time with your real friends instead of your coworkers, get out of the house on your own, nobody is forcing you to stay inside just because you don't have to go to an office. Work from a coworking space, distributed/remote doesn't mean everybody at home.
It's crazy to see how unhealthy people's life can be when work is the only thing they have.
instead of obsessing over what will be the "new default", it's sometimes better to sit back, relax and watch the pieces fall where they may , as some of the forces here are irreversible. There is always a capacity and will for people to produce work, and it will find its way to productive use regardless of whether they job is distributed or not. we are still at the beginning of this
Incidentally , academics have been used to this distributed mode for decades, with conferences purposely organized to provide opportunities for meshing mixing and friction.
In short, i do not believe that having an office-centric culture is a bad thing, nor that a remote culture is a bad thing either. It's just that there are people who will always lean towards one or the other and that's where the incompatibilities begin.
Personally, i'd want a 100% remote position and doubt that i'll be going back to spending my time commuting just to sit in an office. For others, the opposite applies - they might not be able to wait for being able to properly return to offices soon enough. Each of us might have our own valid (at least subjectively) arguments for pursuing these approaches. Hell, with slightly different life circumstances i might change my opinions (e.g. having kids around the house) or vice versa (wanting to travel more or move and not be bogged down).
It is when the guilt tripping and peer pressuring as well as brainwashing starts, with every team/company/culture advocating for their own "normal" as the only proper way to work that the problems start appearing. Everything from virtuous articles in favor of a particular approach or against another, to trying to gaslight or convince those easily swayed to conform to whatever they want.
That, in my eyes, is disingenuous and there will definitely be a lot of people looking for different jobs in the coming years, the so called "Great Resignation" (albeit there are also other factors to this, especially in other industries), after it became apparent that people can switch jobs without always relocating, something that's taken advantage of by many.
But what's the end result of this? Plenty of people quitting and taking the domain knowledge with themselves, which will make things worse for others in the short term and long term - but that's usually just a case of documentation/knowledge transfer/bus factor being bad. I do hope that the current circumstances allow more people to find jobs that are suitable for them, whatever those jobs may be.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadOr, how to say you don’t read hacker news without saying you don’t read hacker news.
I don’t disagree that offices have their benefit, but I do know where to find internet pundits who do!
Startup #1 decided to do full-remote from day one. After a year, the founder of the full-remote startup had little progress: they ended up figuring out how to work, had to fire people "not cut out" for remote work, and then realized they really make meaningful progress after week-long retreats as a team which they now do on an adhoc basis.
Startup #2 stayed in-office even during the pandemic in the same location - following local guidelines on COVID rules as with all businesses. They did this because this was the way the founders knew how to work, and they knew that full-remote would be a steep learning curve and slow down their iteration speed as they are rushing to find product-market-fit. They only hired for onsite 2-3 days a week, and paid very well in return.
Startup #2 found PMF in year 1, and now are at ~30 people, ~100 paying businesses, growing strong, ready for their Series A. They have engineering, product, sales and customer support in the same office. As this startup grows, they are putting remote-friendly policies in place as they realize they'll have a hard time hiring and retaining without. But their core culture is collaborating frequently as in-person.
Startup #1 is looking for PMF and are still learning how to work efficiently as a full-remote team. In this sense, they are well ahead of Startup #2. In product progress, they are behind. For runway, they are about the same, as Startup #1 runs with a smaller team than #2.
In my social media feed, almost everyone advocates for full-remote work, as from a personal point of view this is the preference of most people. No commute, more flexible work hours and choosing where to live and where to work from are all undoubtedly huge benefits for any individual.
Still, my observation is that working full-remote or full-distributed has a learning path that takes time and effort. There are people, managers and teams are not there just yet. And we might learn that certain team phases, team dynamics and business environments are better fitted for full-remote or fully distributed versus one that has more "in-office" contact.
It's interesting that you state that Startup #2 paid very well in return for coming into the office. I get paid very well for doing my job, regardless of whether it is remote or in office. If Startup #1 has decided that remote means they don't need to pay very well, then that is probably your root cause.
So get the remote team together for a two day team ski trip. With all the money you save on office rent, get the while team together for a whole week of skiing.
> Furthermore, the spontaneous and critically important break-outs (small conversations) that happen at team off-sites or conferences are near impossible to replicate over any remote tool I’ve used
True, but again, remote teams can also go to conferences and have off sites.
> Even if they do, once budgets get stressed, it seems likely this will be the first “perk” to go: its benefits are hard to quantify and it certainly seems frivolous to the short-sighted
Maybe so, but team ski trips, conferences and offsite will also be on the chopping block. And the budget is much more likely to get stressed when you have the huge fixed cost of downtown office space in it.
This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.
There you said it. With the office being a fixed expense, budget is formed around it, since you “just need it”. While the trips and conferences are always discretionary expenses, and as such will not be made if they could be not made.
But calling it "fixed" in the sense that you just have to pay it is begging the question. The whole point is that you don't need an office in all situations. Or at least you don't need a dedicated desk for every employee. So you shouldn't look at office rent as a cost of doing business thing. You have to really look at whether the ROI is there. Maybe it is, maybe it's not based on your particular circumstances but it IS a choice.
I'll just throw in that "fully remote but with regular company off sites" is actually a really attractive proposition to an employee. Instead of commuting every day to some dreary office I get to work from my very comfortable home and still meet my coworkers at some nice destination a few times a year. I actually feel like I have a better bond with remote coworkers in that situation because when we meet in person it is in a "vacation" atmosphere and being time limited means we really focus on hanging out together and doing group activities.
I’d say that is more of a sign of poor management chain management, communication, and people management. Senior mgmt can stay in touch by, surprise, staying in touch. Remote makes it harder for those poor at written skills and tech skills, but a good manager should’ve been writing things down to begin with.
Opinions from someone doing mgmt for quite some time now.
Most middle and upper management can't do it. They fail. They're impediments. They're also the ones who want glass "fishbowls" to show off their employees' toil, AND to "supervise" professionals for the lack of appearance of work.
In reality, companies would do themselves a LOT of cost-cutting to getting rid of ineffectual managers who get in the way of process and progress. But then again, its that class of workers is why we're dealing with anti-remotework all the time.
Yep, your post is 100% correct :) That’s the reality we live in.
That's exactly what some of us said would happen at the beginning of the pandemic. There were a large minority of people complaining about remote work and questioning how anyone could do it. But the pandemic was not a typical remote work/work from home situation. People were forced into it. You couldn't bug out to the library to get a change of view. You couldn't meet up for drinks or coffee to get even a bare minimum of face to face. Some of us who had been remote working for a long time predicted this anti-remote work backlash specifically because of this.
For many working remotely is about the freedom of choice in the act of working, choose the time, choose the place, choose the equipment. Whereas the pandemic was a situation where that freedom didn't exist, so even previously remote workers were not as happy with remote work.
It was often trying to make an office environment out of a smattering of digital communication tools, and I think that's the wrong approach for remote work. Previously I had all the above flexibility, in the "everyone's remote" model, I was clocking on at 9am, sitting in 10x the bullshit meetings I used to be in as they tried to simulate ad-hoc communication, and all from my bedroom, not a co-working space or cafe or outdoors etc.
That seem to be a common point that divides the WFH vs office people. For some, it's really wild how much they rely on the office, and the people that are only there because they're getting paid to be, to act as a stand in for friends, family, or fulfillment of general social need (plus, in OP's case, the office lets him get his steps in each day(!) which is a topic he surely strikes up a long, tedious conversation about with his coworkers as they're held captive at their desk).
Most coworkers are merely tolerated socially. Even if I think they're wonderful to work with, and cherish and rely on their contributions, I've got zero desire to spend any time with 99% of them outside of situations where I'm paid to be there.
The people who make blanket statements about how integrated, in-office teams are better than remote teams ("every time") fill me with contempt. Mostly because I know over the long haul their arguments will win and we'll all be back in the office because that's what managers who need to be seen want, and coworkers who need a family want, and CEOs who need an empire want.
Don't trust you're lying eyes! Distributed doesn't work! The last two years were a failure. Open source doesn't exist. Now drive into the office so we can have a meeting where everyone sits in a room and midlessly browses Reddit while someone drones on about something that could have been an email.
Well, it does. Just not for the right reasons.
Don't force me into the office for a majority of the time, and give everyone a travel budget to meet once a quarter.
IMHO this is a great balance, moreso that the "hybrid" of 3 days a week.
* ski trips and the like build good rapport
* chance encounters with colleagues are valuable
* steps make you healthier
The world is realizing that these are so much easier to solve for in remote-first work than it is to solve the problems associated to office-first.
* No one builds rapport through zoom meetings.
* People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them.
* People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home.
The world is realizing what offroad warrior freelancers like me realized a long time ago, but it takes time to realize it: It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure. I think it will take 20 years or so before a majority of people in white collar positions really adjust to creating their own work/life balance now that it's open to them to choose how to manage their geographic place and time. It's actually a lot of responsibility, and something a lot of people never asked for.
I do agree it's a lot of responsibility, but life changes that way. Horse breeders didn't ask for the Model T and so on...
(Though I doubt horses would come back to replace a significant fraction of them.)
Life changes and there are a set of people affected negatively by those changes. Those people never ask for those changes. They happen anyway.
I disagree. I think rapport is created when you create things/solutions that makes sense for the business. You don't create rapport by being in same room when things don't make sense.
In high school I made rapport with teachers that were good. I did not make rapport with bad teachers who pretended to be good at their job.
Same as developer: rapport is made with other people who strives for clarity in design and communication. No rapport is made with people who play people games. Office time versus zoom time does not make any difference.
If you're there to do the work, the other people who are there to do the work appreciate the hell out of you. (And most of them don't turn their camera on either.)
1. I met my new manager (switched jobs) for the first time over MS Teams in a personally challenging time; I needed to take care of my family the second week after starting a new job. I worried a lot over this, which was met with incredible kindness and empathy.
2. I've started several serendipitous, fruitful collaborations by expansion of offhanded questions or remarks in remote meetings.
3. My mental and physical health is better than pre pandemic because of less commute, more leniency to take a walk or bike a bit, lower stress around picking up kids, being able to cook my own food instead of relying on (potentially unhealthy) cafeteria
The company I work for will happily let you do this even after already having had your lunch break. As far as they're concerned as long as the work gets done they don't care that much as to how it gets done.
It’s not hard, it just takes deliberate action. Learning to take said matters into your own hands rather than conforming them to what you “have to do” (aka formal structure) is something most people would benefit from as early as possible in life.
> No one builds rapport through zoom meetings.
I joined my present company in 2020 and had no problems building a rapport with my fellow workers via Teams.
> People have forgotten how to handle chance encounters, and display a lot of signs of social discomfort now when they do have them.
I don't see any evidence of this. I have plenty of chance encounters and don't feel any less comfortable about them compared to pre-lockdown, and neither it seems do the folks that are on the other end of those chance encounters.
> People also stopped taking care of themselves during the pandemic, at the same time everyone started working from home.
People also stopped sitting in cars and trains for hours on end commuting to the office and used that time to get some exercise. Sure it's anecdotal, but you couldn't buy a bicycle around here because demand went through the roof.
> It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure.
I've worked remotely almost continuously since 2003 and have managed to maintain enough self-discipline to stay organised and look after myself (certainly at least as well as if I'd had to go to an office for "formal structure").
> something a lot of people never asked for.
I disagree, they were told they couldn't because employers have a natural distrust of their staff and "this is the way its always been". Working from home is weirdly seen as some kind of perk, it's not, it's still work.
Now don't get me wrong, there'll be a bunch of folks who either can't work from home and being in the office is their thing (or an escape :) ), but there are also plenty of folks who can function perfectly well working from home so why not facilitate that?
no one builds rapport in zoom meetings where the company strangles the meeting space with an expectation of conduct and subject matter*
whole internet communities born around games which rely on communication are quite literally filled with (positive) remote rapport.
quite a few demographics have had long time remote-friends (i personally have had a few, one i practically grew up with from ages 9 to 23, and have stayed in contact with) -- never met them irl bc logistics are hard.
i just do not understand this notion of not being able to build relationships remotely -- it is a fiction.
I'm healthier than ever. I bought an exercise bike, have a home weight setup and my diet is cleaner. I have several coworkers who have done similarly.
I have strong doubts that you’ve been remote for “20 years”. This is much easier to accomplish working remotely. Outside of tech and Silicon Valley, there are still managers who are keen to see their their employees warming their seats despite the proven effectiveness of the independence of remote work
Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.
My job is to somehow be productive despite the best efforts of management to interfere. Being remote has greatly helped that.
Unclear that's a particularly worthy goal. I enjoy the rural life as much as anyone, but it's hard to argue that a "liveable city" (dense, planned, walkable/bikeable, work near to where you live, etc) isn't a more efficient use of society's resources than the automobile-centric suburban sprawl that much of the US is subjected to.
When you give all opportunities to a few, they don't tend to use it to everyone's benefit. People who are robbed of the consequences of their actions tend to lose sight of reality.
That's not because livable places with amenities located within walking distance are expensive to build or maintain. It's because there aren't enough of them, primarily because in very large tracts of every metropolitan area they are illegal to build under current zoning ordinances. That's how you get cute prewar streetcar suburbs that are ludicrously unaffordable - the neighborhoods were cheap to build at the time and could be cheap to build today, the prices are all because people love living there and we made it illegal to build more.
Postwar suburban sprawl is monstrously expensive to build and maintain. You need to build and maintain an incredible amount more infrastructure per person, and because the properties themselves are less livable and car-dependent, fewer people want to and can afford to live there, which makes them "cheaper."
The answer is not to force people to live in car dependent sprawl. It's to build more walkable places so that the cost comes down.
Especially in the US I don't see an issue with both building out and being walkable or livable without cars. One just has to plan it properly. There are tons of medium sized cities around the world that get some of it right already, possibly by accident. I don't think we need to go Tokyo style or New York style density with millions upon millions of people being crammed into skypscrapers and every inch of soil covered in asphalt or concrete. Sure there's Central Park but not much more and it's so full of people it's unbelievable. So many people all crammed into one space generates so many issues that otherwise don't exist.
I think lots of medium sized cities, say 150-500k, can easily provide enough public transport to make it liveable, provide enough green space to make it liveable and provide city centers with lots of concrete and asphalt for those that want that to make it completely walkable. Before you say that its impossible, I have lived in such cities and they work just fine. In my younger years I lived in such a downtown and everything was within walking distance. Work, groceries, pubs even stores. And it was absolutely safe to walk all over downtown, half drunk in the middle of the night to get from one pub to the next or home. Sure, to go to IKEA I had to take a car and drive to the outskirts of the next city of similar size. But how often do I go to IKEA? Once, when I moved in. The a bit older me had to then make a choice of moving to a particular side of town to be close enough to the office and such. With remote work it wouldn't matter. I could've stayed where I was. Get to the city center? 15 minute train ride after walking 5 minutes to the train.
Almost everyone in my circles are loving big city life while working remotely. It depends on your life circumstances, and what you enjoy, but let’s not generalize that urban lifestyle is bad. Meeting new people, enjoying indoor activities, walking around and etc. are not dying anytime soon, and rent prices show how people are still willing to join in.
In my forties I became less enamoured by city life and in my fifties, now living in a rural location and working remotely, if I never see the inside of a city again then that's fine by me.
Of course, the key is that you can have both with the right transportation options.
I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.
I agree, but even then I'm pretty much done with cities and that benefit would be wasted on me :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
I live in the city. It's loud af, but general traffic is only a small part of it. Essential services like police, ambulance, and fire sirens, and trash collection are massively loud. Then you've got bars blasting music on Fridays. People shouting, laughing, and, in general, existing (often till the wee hours of the morning). They there's the meth-fueled tweakers shouting obscenities. Construction noises. Road work. etc..
Density in general is loud.
Neither of these things are good for an employee.
A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.
Do you have an example?
The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important.
> where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away
Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.
All of the pro-diversity platitudes like "diversity is a strength" are never justified with data, they're just said as truisms you're supposed to blindly believe and repeat.
Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for. But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that! And that's why Amazon tracks lack of workplace diversity as a metric for risk of union formation :)
As I'm sure you're aware, software development is very different from physical labor. For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
Think of it in terms of code reviews. Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences? I can't point to any studies to prove this, but from personal experience I'd argue it's the latter.
Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer and person.
Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best. Strong bonds can and do form regardless of culture.
I'd say it's far more engineering than creative. You're writing code to meet the specifications of a client. I don't think the race of the person writing that code makes a difference.
>Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences
It benefits from being reviewed by people who have lots of experience writing different types of software. Which has nothing to do with ethnic diversity.
>Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer
Meaningless platitude, unless you can back this up with data
>Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best.
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403
I stand corrected. Corporations gonna corporate /shrug
However I disagree with the conclusion:
> It appears it's nothing more than a union busting tactic to divide and conquer their own workforce so they'll be easier to control and accept lower wages.
Quite the sensationalist take. Again, I don't have data to back this up, but IME a diverse team produces better results and I'd rather work in one than not.
In practice "diversity" is more often people from the same schools and employment backgrounds, with just a bit more variation in sex or race or ethnicity.
One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.
The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.
It was certainly good for the owners of the mines and other extractive businesses to have their workers feel some sense of loyalty to each other based on where they were born. Not so much for the workers themselves that had fewer opportunities for growth, nor their families as the mines closed and the towns died.
> But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that!
There are plenty of unions made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them span states (or are at least affiliated with organizations that span states). I don't know where you got this idea that there's a connection between birthplace and unionization.
I assure you, diversity that would actually impact production in some big way is not the diversity being hired for. Just look at how many psychological tests emphasize a variety of personalities, meanwhile hiring tries to find the same car with a different paint job.
This really isn't the same "diversity" as "integrating marginalized communities", though.
So yes, I am against the particular kind of diversity that prefers hiring a wealthy brahman living in India over the inner-city kid who needs a leg up.
I'm also opposed to the kind of "diversity" that puts a substantial portion of our domestic workforce out of a job.
Neither of these is what "diversity" used to mean; the term is being coopted by those who would benefit from lowering working wages.
A world where I have to work with what the local market offers sounds like russian roulette. I don't want to be constrained by where my parents decided to live.
I'd feel pretty terrible about my ability if one of the best things about me was proximity to a building. I live in the midwest and I like it in the midwest, and I'm quite happy with a ~future~ present where I'm competing with people around the world for a job I want and not stuck to the one of the 10 or so places I could do my kind of work here.
You might be in the top 1%, but 99% of people aren't. Not everyone is able to compete globally against 3 billion other people. Most people are unexceptional and average. And that's okay. Those are the workers keep the world moving forward.
It is perfectly okay to just be the best person at something in your town or local area. Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
IMO, if a person somewhere in the world is better qualified for the job than me - it's ok. They worked hard to get where they are and their work should be compensated fairly.
but he did not say this at all. not even literally.
you merely think he implied it, which is still a leap, since all this person described to you was how they personally internalize their work.
your disdain for competition makes it harder to read.
It's true that if in an absolute sense you're in the bottom rung of the labor pool then a global market will be more likely to sort you into a job with low desirability. I sympathize; I'm from Cincinnati, and if my employer were in the Bay Area (and paying Bay Area wages) it would have been harder for me to get a job there. But I'm not that sympathetic, because a global market means someone with a better fit but no local options can find a job. It means that if the market for data scientists in Cincinnati dries up I still have a chance.
If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago).
With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen.
To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
So you need a car, just paying for one as a service instead of direct ownership.
It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too.
edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
Umm ... Those all require a car, it just might not be _your_ car. It doesn't help make cities accessible and walkable.
There's no inherent reason why this should be so. Big cities can and do provide a marvelous life experience.
But almost all big cities in the US suffer from total mismanagement. IMHO, the greatest immediate goal for the US should be to work out how to correct that.
Nothing shows that corporate support for the environment is mostly lip service when it comes to lack of support for remote work despite the major environmental benefits that it brings.
American cities, especially downtowns, are in the middle of doing the exact opposite of becoming unlivable. I'm not talking opinions here, I'm talking about factual changes in the context of American history.
American city downtowns started as, essentially, the entire city, with a diverse mix of residents, commerce, and industry. As the industrialization progressed, those downtowns morphed into commercial-only zones as most other uses migrated outward. [1]
Residential living was very rare in city centers in America, with only slum living left. Since then, however, American cities are re-introducing residential life to city centers and redesigning them around mixed use and essentially revitalizing them. [1]
So this idea that big cities are "increasingly unlivable" is more of a cynical opinion rather than a matter of historical fact.
Also, in terms of sustainability, cities still win out. Suburban and rural development fragments animal habitats and uses more land per person. More time and miles are needed in your car burning oil to get around. City dwellers who walk and take transit are more carbon efficient than suburban and rural drivers.
Counter-intuitively, water quality is better in cities where more people are connected to a treated municipal water source. Sewage is also better managed in cities. [2]
Now, on to what's my actual opinion...regarding asynchronous work: it's awesome if you're already at a senior level of skill, but to me it seems absolutely horrendous for new graduates and junior level employees. It's difficult to do "apprenticeship" asynchronously. The idea of a future of asynchronous work is also incredibly software-biased. For example, when Apple wants their employees back in the office there's good reason: they design hardware.
[1] https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-o...
[2] https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban...
Liveable is a subjective term, but water or air quality, or environmental footprint varies a great deal between countries. Cities consume most of the energy and produce most of the greenhouse gases for obvious reasons. Historically big cities became increasingly liveable, however my opinion is that we are at a turning point, in average big cities will become unliveable, some will improve slightly, and many will falter greatly. However urbanization will go on, people will continue to fill cities looking for opportunities, ironically climate change will even hasten this, eventually turning big cities into death traps.
It was the best of both worlds. 3/5 days at the office was great.
It gave the benefit of socialising and collaboration, with the flexibility of being at home for visiting home contractors, bulk deliveries, or somewhere where you could take a deep dive into something with no interruptions.
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-f...
Why should companies hire only from the US if there are as good or better people elsewhere?
You're looking at it from the cost reduction perspective, but work shouldn't be something you save money on, but invest it the best you can to get the best product.
In summary, looks like the CEO and CTO of your sample companies don't know how to collaborate remotely. Which is natural because it's not intuitive. And if you don't know and don't want to learn, or happen to be at a niche not amenable to remote collaboration, sure, stay at an office.
"If these experts insist “I’m only willing to educate you on a Zoom call, I’ll educate you via video” then I have the option of hiring any expert in the world, I don’t need to hire an expert in the USA. If I need to educate myself on a set of technologies, so as to evaluate competing software architectures, then I would prefer to meet with experts in-person, but if for some reason I had to rely on communication via Zoom or Slack, there is no reason for me to hire someone in the USA. In such cases, the only reason I would hire a remote worker in the USA is if they were the greatest expert in the world on a subject that I wanted to learn. "
But I go into much greater detail in my book. I devote a whole chapter to this in my book.
Reality for most companies who hire remotely is that they just try to get the best person they can find within their time, monetary and other constraints. Many times they hire from the US. They can't access actual world class talent, who is very busy and can be really expensive (or isn't readily discoverable). Or even if they can, they can't fill their staff just with them.
We don't have to be 100% either.
We do need to build human trust and relationships, and you can't do that with remote easily. Also, communications are slower and full of paper cuts that will make any task requiring to gather a lot from different people harder with remote.
Those 2 things make onboarding much harder.
Young people are also the one that are paying the most cost from remote:
- they are the ones with the less autonomy, which makes remote either very unproductive or make the task super hard.
- they don't learn anything about politics, which remote hides from view, and maybe reduces a little, but doesn't remove.
- they are already deep in the culture distractions, which is incredibly tempting in remote.
How course, remote work has so many benefits it may very well offset all that. Time will tell I guess.
It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs.
And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated.
TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this.
In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.
It's one of the most productive environments I had in my entire 15 year career.
"Certain types of companies need a certain workaholic mentality"
The way you describe led to monoculture and I hope this isn't the only way to do things.
Wasn't there a saying that your software will resemble your company structure? I don't know if a software resembling two people sleeping in an office is a good structure to base your software on.
This is fine, but I do disagree with those people saying "remote doesn't work" for startups, etc. It's just them.
I'm starting a startup now. There is no way that I am ever going to be pointing at a screen and telling my cofounder "take a look". My cofounder will not be a tech guy, he'll be a sales, marketing and customer-contact guy.
A business is "product + distribution".
There is very little point in having two cofounders who are both focusing only one of the above two variables. I think it is a recipe for failure, and so I will not be doing that.
Like sure it might be nice to go to Google's office instead of work from the kitchen table but that's not what's on the table for 99.999% of developers. It's some open-plan dead air noisy hell.
Not so much these days
I love remote work, mostly because actual work environment feels hostile towards ICs but if I had a Google like environment again, I’d have no problems going back to office.
Now that my company has returned to work with a "hybrid" plan (2 days in the office, 3 days out), I'm glad that they've been flexible in allowing me to be fully remote despite being local. My dogs would be the saddest pups stuck in crates without me.
If remote work leads to more efficient job markets, I'm not going to complain just because the efficiency doesn't benefit me.
This seems to contradict the argument for offices. Companies save money by having fewer offices, so their budgets should be improved. Also, if companies do not see the value of employees periodically meeting each other then why do management largely prefer face time in offices?
“Getting out of the house and into a setting with other human beings builds a heck of a lot more socialization”
Much of this article focuses on the workplace fulfilling out of work needs or out of work meetings fulfilling at work relationships. Why do people want and expect so much from their jobs? Why is that the place to fulfill ones social needs? Pursue hobbies and interests outside of work and meet people not tethered to your employer. These relationships are stronger and transcend work ties. Avoiding terrible commutes provides some of the time to pursue such ventures too.
This only works because the enterprise is a COVID baby, and so the “base load” workflow is totally remote, we’ve never known anything different. This makes being in person pleasant and useful but almost never strictly necessary.
I hope it scales because I love it.
Yep. This outweighs all the benefits of being in the office that are mentioned in the article.
How much value do you actually get from those chance encounters? My experience, after years in everyday in the office, is very, very little. It's like playing lottery everyday, there's not much you earn under all probabilities.
When you are in control, you are in control of everything. Means that if you need to get exercise everyday, you need to make it a habit to go and walk outside during your remote working day.
As for socializing, I find that very reductive to think that "the people you work with in an office are great for socialization". Nope, I don't choose those people, so I'd rather invest my time socializing with people I choose, which will probably not be the people I am forced to work with.
I agree. I'm happy to "socialise" to the extent that it facilitates getting work done. But I'm not looking for new pals, I'm just here to do the work and get paid, I have a separate life outside of the workplace. Maybe it's just an age thing but I don't want to do company pizza night, or company skiing or company drinks, for me work is a means to an end.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the company I presently work for, get on well with my colleagues, even push the boat out and do a few extra hours to get a project over the line or to help others, but it is just work and that's it.
I agree that work is a means to an end, but the people I work with aren't similarly means.
Spend time with your real friends instead of your coworkers, get out of the house on your own, nobody is forcing you to stay inside just because you don't have to go to an office. Work from a coworking space, distributed/remote doesn't mean everybody at home.
It's crazy to see how unhealthy people's life can be when work is the only thing they have.
Incidentally , academics have been used to this distributed mode for decades, with conferences purposely organized to provide opportunities for meshing mixing and friction.
In short, i do not believe that having an office-centric culture is a bad thing, nor that a remote culture is a bad thing either. It's just that there are people who will always lean towards one or the other and that's where the incompatibilities begin.
Personally, i'd want a 100% remote position and doubt that i'll be going back to spending my time commuting just to sit in an office. For others, the opposite applies - they might not be able to wait for being able to properly return to offices soon enough. Each of us might have our own valid (at least subjectively) arguments for pursuing these approaches. Hell, with slightly different life circumstances i might change my opinions (e.g. having kids around the house) or vice versa (wanting to travel more or move and not be bogged down).
It is when the guilt tripping and peer pressuring as well as brainwashing starts, with every team/company/culture advocating for their own "normal" as the only proper way to work that the problems start appearing. Everything from virtuous articles in favor of a particular approach or against another, to trying to gaslight or convince those easily swayed to conform to whatever they want.
That, in my eyes, is disingenuous and there will definitely be a lot of people looking for different jobs in the coming years, the so called "Great Resignation" (albeit there are also other factors to this, especially in other industries), after it became apparent that people can switch jobs without always relocating, something that's taken advantage of by many.
But what's the end result of this? Plenty of people quitting and taking the domain knowledge with themselves, which will make things worse for others in the short term and long term - but that's usually just a case of documentation/knowledge transfer/bus factor being bad. I do hope that the current circumstances allow more people to find jobs that are suitable for them, whatever those jobs may be.