That awkward feeling is the employees being aware that the motivation of the people paying them and their own interests are in opposition.
In this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.
> We want to do the right thing by our employees. [...] And it’s really unclear what the right thing is. [...] We do have office space and we have welcomed people back to the office, but not many have been coming in.
It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.
It sounds like junior employees are not coming in, and some are struggling. Anecdotally I’ve seen that too. Maybe some in this company do not know what they don’t know. Is the right thing to do just to let them fail? I don’t think so. The right thing could be a compromise.
If they've identified juniors having issues, they should train managers to identify and solve for it. Ask them to come in or set up pair programming/joint work sessions like 'shoulder surfing'.
Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming.
Some of the issue with junior employees is that what worked before won’t work as well now (or at minimum, won’t work the same way).
When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck.
It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions.
In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”
1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks
2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff
3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience
I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way
I completely understand their concerns about remote work long term. Maybe it really does make it harder for new employees to form networks, and productivity does take a hit. This might make the company less innovative, less competitive and even deliver a lower return on capital.
The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive.
Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable.
Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.
From my first hand experience in managing teams, this article resonates well. The biggest problem my company sees is a low level of trust between team members now that a lot of the tenured engineers have left and new ones joined in a fully remote environment. More than half the team hasn’t met colleagues in person and the culture feels very transactional with shallow bonds, compared to old days when all of us were in office.
Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together.
Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.
I'm still very much an underling, and I resonate with the shallow bonds comment. At my previous role, I was friends with my colleagues. We went to the pub together after work, had each other around for parties, and invited each other to our weddings.
Doing any of the above with my current team seems unimaginable - not because I don't like them, but because we've never had the opportunity to break that trust barrier over Teams or Zoom.
N=1. Colleagues are not my friends. We share a revenue source and common body of work, but my friends are outside of work for a reason. Under exceptional circumstances, a friendship bond that lasts beyond an employer might be established, but in my 20+ years in tech, it’s happened so few times I can count on one hand. And I prefer it that way.
I don’t think your parent commenter is talking about making “friends” at work. It came across as an environment with “friendly colleagues”, which is amazing to have and so far I haven’t seen those kind of work relations being built purely on Zoom.
Perhaps I’m just not seeing the benefit. You can absolutely have friendly, polite, cordial colleagues remote/over Zoom without being friends, no? In the decade I’ve been remote, across several orgs, this has been my experience. Friendly but not friends.
A friend is someone I can expect to be there when I ask for or need personal help (and vice versa), not someone who shares their beer or hobby preferences over a Zoom 1:1. Deep bonds are forged in meaningful shared struggle (see military bootcamp for an example, where you are broken down and built back up together), not ephemeral employment.
Second that.If you want friends then join a meetup or a club where you can talk about your interests and common goals. Work colleagues share only one interest which is the success of the business which does not necessarily mean that you would be having the same feelings as with a true friendship.
Hard disagree. There is a difference between there being a transaction (labour in exchange for money) and it being purely transactional.
Take a haircut for instance, it is transactional (you exchange money for a haircut) but often people stick with the same hairdresser for years - e.g. because they have a relationship, have built trust, and often have built a friendship e.t.c. and similarly hairdressers seem to enjoy having these bonds both with their repeat customers and their coworkers. Hairdressers could always work in silence in single-customer booths on their own, but they always seem to be together and chat to each other and customers in the open. This isn't purely transactional - there is a formed culture here "i.e. 'the way we do things is that we chat and have fun while we cut hair'"
In a work context:
The best performing companies and teams typically have a deep sense of culture and shared-purpose. There is a reason why corporate vision/mission/values are created - because they are effective tools to drive large organizations together in a cohesive way.
I personally find that there is a huge personal difference working on a team that has great bonds and a great culture vs a team that doesn't. Working on a team without a sense of belonging and without great relationships with my coworkers sucks for me personally.
Now someone might say "well you can still form relationships with coworkers remotely" - in which case that IS culture and something more than transactional, the argument is just that this is much more difficult to form with everyone being remote.
I would absolutely give repeat business to any barber shop whose selling point was “we won’t try to talk to you about last night’s game (you didn’t see) of a sport you don’t care about”.
The would be a substantial improvement on the status quo.
Nope. I spend one third of my life at work and I’d rather spend it with people I trust and I have a friendly relationship with (doesn’t mean they have to be my friends), rather than a robotic transactional environment. Based on my almost two decades of experience, the former environment is far more productive than later and I’d bet on companies fostering that one to win in the end.
Hmm. "A low level of trust between team members" sounds like remote work exposed some big defects in your company culture that should be addressed first. Why did "a lot of the tenured engineers" leave? Why weren't they doing more to mentor the newer ones to facilitate knowledge and "lore" transfer? (And don't tell me it can't be done online, because it absolutely can.)
If it was limited to my own company, I’d definitely blame it on our culture. But so far, based on discussions with a few dozen friends and colleagues, everyone seems to be missing the in-person interaction while not missing the commute. The general consensus wants a hybrid setup with a few days from home and few days from office.
As for why tenured engineers left, they all had spent 3-5 years in this company and it was time to move on just like any other shop in tech. That seems in line with overall tech sector.
And it is borderline impossible to build camaraderie or a well bonded team purely online without any in person interaction for months or years. If you think you have seen that, please share further details about what worked and the name of the company. I am very much interested in learning how to build great teams online. So far, outcomes from even the best practices don’t seem to hold a candle when compared against the in-office experience.
>And it is borderline impossible to build camaraderie or a well bonded team purely online without any in person interaction for months or years.
If you want to bond with your employees, find one who’s into MMORPGs or used to be - shouldn’t be too hard in this industry. They have hours and hours of stories to tell you about.
You need to force the senior staff to come (because they want to) or else there's nobody for the junior staff to learn from. That's basically the trade-off: senior freedom vs. junior learning
Middle management is struggling to show their value or even find something to do. The head shed is needed, and the workers are needed. Throw in tram leads to insulate the team from the bs and to keep them on the right path. And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet, a bullpen or place where interruptions occur daily or worse is counterproductive. Let the marketeers or the like do their thing to the best of their ability, but please have them do it somewhere else.
If you can’t asychronously tell whether a project you’re purportedly responsible for is advancing, why are you being paid?
> And given that software development usually profits from peace and quiet
It seems you have never built any complex software which needed a lot of whiteboarding, intense design discussions with lots of nuances to hash out, lots of unanticipated tiny cases which were solved by a quick 2-min chat or other aspects which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
I’ve spent decades building such things. But it’s not something that’s done much after things are threshed out and work assigned. Fine, gather the clans to start things up, divvy up work, and get out of their way and let them work. Better?
> which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
Can you elaborate on why you think this? It doesn't seem very obvious to me that this is the case. I've worked remote on a ton of projects and never really struggled to hash out these nuances via email, text message, video call, whatever.
Rather than focusing on how to get people back in the office, the execs already know the things they should work on:
> How do you build a compelling culture remotely?
> the majority of people seem to want to be remote when we survey them. But are they as engaged? Will they stay? ... how sustainable is that?
> How do you make those people [out of state] still feel like they are part of everything?
> Are people working as hard?
> there’s still just a lot of empty space right now. When I’m in the office, there’s not a lot of people.
> I recently attended an in-person meeting and I loved it. It was great. There are still things that are fun to talk about in-person and we were doing a lot of brainstorming. The time went by like that, and on a Zoom call, it just doesn’t.
Q: did the other people like it, or did they wish they were at home on a Zoom call and that the meeting was dragging on and should have been shorter?
> But I can’t get away from the inescapable reality that there’s still a hit to productivity. It was so scary the first six months of the pandemic and everybody just wanted to keep their job. Now, people are multitasking too much.
Seems this could be measured, and if it's just a problem for the exec internally and not an "inescapable reality", he needs to get over it. If productivity hasn't taken a hit, "people are not multitasking too much": they are able to do the same amount of work more efficiently away from the office, and that allows them to do more other things that may not be work related.
> [On working 4 days vs 5:] We’re not even in a space where you tell me you are just so good and efficient at your job, and you’re willing to work longer days for four days to have a fifth day off. That’s not the situation. I can keep my mind open to that.
In other words, if a smart worker can get their work done in 4 days, the exec expects them to do 25% more work without extra pay.
> Boundaries are being tested all over the place... the workplace was probably out of whack and companies did have too much power... There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money
I don't think it's dated considering that the gap between executive compensation and average worker compensation has only increased:
> There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money.
Because it is broadly true, as the nonsensical, obfuscated-with-bullshit layoff announcements prove - and there is always someone waiting in the hacker news comments to bleat about how corporations must be this way because of “shareholder value”.
Executives need to learn that they can’t have it both ways.
Right-my partner was just laid off without notice, while as usual the company has had record profits and just recently they were talking about opportunities for training.
If you think that the complaining workers WANT to go to workplace socials and aren't just feeling obliged, they do not feel grateful. They feel blackmailed.
This wash about consensus is irrelevant. Your culture is only valuable if the workers actually indicate they value it. Listen. To. The. Individual.
This read ok to me until the red flag about a worker wanting to have a set day off. If you're trying to build a remote culture with trust, that attitude should be exactly what you're looking for - straight up honest boundaries stated at the beginning when everyone can back out. This is way better than people having to prove their deservedness for time off or some other bullshit, or conversely, having them pretend to work while sneaking in time off. If the company has a problem with that, then I'd say they are trying to do this from the wrong head space, and yeah, it's not going to go well.
If I got a bad reaction from a potential employer over an honest conversation on what my and their expectations should be, I'd be out and on to the next.
It's amazing how little integration of online tooling there is even in the thought process.
The fact that they are remote or not actually says little about the communication patterns except that it is not physically face-to-face.
If mentorship is important then rather than relying on the physical distance between the new person's desk and the senior, you make it a policy that they need to do mentorship. And provide tools, structure and time for that.
If the senior or junior by virtue of the fact that they are not sitting in the same space cannot or will not work together, then either you have not got the tooling in place or you don't have control over your employees.
Learn to use internet software, set firm policies about communication and collaboration and availability to the degree it is actually necessary. If people don't comply then fire them.
The fact that they are physically in the same space or not is a minor detail for most of these jobs. Absolutely incredible how little understanding there is of that fact.
Learn to use an online white board, screen share, write an email, or open a video or voice chat.
Fixing the commute and/or fixing housing would help get people into office heaps. Fully remote seems to work really well for people who are who’ve been at the company for awhile so offer fully remote once someone has been at the company X amount of years.
There are two types of people - those who perform better working in person, and those who perform better working remotely. Forcing either to work in the other fashion is harmful. The best solution for productivity will be that which respects both types of people.
46 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIn this business, in code and in management, Async is god. If it can be done async, it will be better done async plus or minus the social considerations.
It took me a while but I just did the complex analysis including some long division. It turns out the right thing by the employees is the thing they are freely choosing to do. So it appears the right thing is to give them that freedom, unless of course the premise is flawed.
Tell people it's inappropriate to go to a museum during work or that they're underperforming.
Seems like we've got solutions to these issues
When I was a junior programmer, I ate lunch every day with junior and senior programmers. I developed a trust that let me easily ask one of them to “walk me through how a variable of char * and char[256] are related” or show me some trick in the debugger or help me get unstuck.
It’s not that you can’t do any of those things remotely. It’s that the social constructs are vastly different in the absence of repeated casual interactions.
In a remote-mostly world, a junior programmer is likely to struggle longer solo on any given issue (which brings along some benefits, of course), but once they get into a spot where they’re underwater, they don’t have an easy, low-stakes, smooth way to recover as “asking one of the 10 people you’ve eaten lunch with 100 times.”
1. remote being best suited for those who have pre-built in-person networks
2. lack of osmotic information transfer for inexperienced staff
3. decline of social cohesion, especially for new joiners who never had in-person experience
I suspect that we will end up with many different flavours of working mode, we are in the pre-Cambrian explosion for working culture practices. The diversity should lead to self sorting along the way
The thing is though, I don't give a shit. I am generally not rewarded for being productive.
Employees might be more inclined to think like owners if they actually reaped the benefits of ownership. Benefits like a share of profits or any semblance of decision making power for important decisions. All of this stuff is doable.
Until then, work from home sounds good because it's all upside for employees.
Organizing social events on Zoom very contrived and awkward. Chatting for 5 min at a water cooler was better to actually get to know someone and build trust. Of course, the company has no budget for physically bringing people together.
Fully remote doesn’t work and I am willing to bet on companies with some in-office presence beating fully remote companies in the long run.
Seems like the underlings and management are on the same page now.
Doing any of the above with my current team seems unimaginable - not because I don't like them, but because we've never had the opportunity to break that trust barrier over Teams or Zoom.
A friend is someone I can expect to be there when I ask for or need personal help (and vice versa), not someone who shares their beer or hobby preferences over a Zoom 1:1. Deep bonds are forged in meaningful shared struggle (see military bootcamp for an example, where you are broken down and built back up together), not ephemeral employment.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/09/when-it...
Work should be transactional. It is a transaction. Labor is exchanged for money.
Full remote frees us from all the bullshit and let's us focus on just doing the work we're getting paid for. "Deep culture" = bad work/life balance.
Take a haircut for instance, it is transactional (you exchange money for a haircut) but often people stick with the same hairdresser for years - e.g. because they have a relationship, have built trust, and often have built a friendship e.t.c. and similarly hairdressers seem to enjoy having these bonds both with their repeat customers and their coworkers. Hairdressers could always work in silence in single-customer booths on their own, but they always seem to be together and chat to each other and customers in the open. This isn't purely transactional - there is a formed culture here "i.e. 'the way we do things is that we chat and have fun while we cut hair'"
In a work context:
The best performing companies and teams typically have a deep sense of culture and shared-purpose. There is a reason why corporate vision/mission/values are created - because they are effective tools to drive large organizations together in a cohesive way.
I personally find that there is a huge personal difference working on a team that has great bonds and a great culture vs a team that doesn't. Working on a team without a sense of belonging and without great relationships with my coworkers sucks for me personally.
Now someone might say "well you can still form relationships with coworkers remotely" - in which case that IS culture and something more than transactional, the argument is just that this is much more difficult to form with everyone being remote.
I would absolutely give repeat business to any barber shop whose selling point was “we won’t try to talk to you about last night’s game (you didn’t see) of a sport you don’t care about”.
The would be a substantial improvement on the status quo.
As for why tenured engineers left, they all had spent 3-5 years in this company and it was time to move on just like any other shop in tech. That seems in line with overall tech sector.
And it is borderline impossible to build camaraderie or a well bonded team purely online without any in person interaction for months or years. If you think you have seen that, please share further details about what worked and the name of the company. I am very much interested in learning how to build great teams online. So far, outcomes from even the best practices don’t seem to hold a candle when compared against the in-office experience.
If you want to bond with your employees, find one who’s into MMORPGs or used to be - shouldn’t be too hard in this industry. They have hours and hours of stories to tell you about.
If you can’t asychronously tell whether a project you’re purportedly responsible for is advancing, why are you being paid?
It seems you have never built any complex software which needed a lot of whiteboarding, intense design discussions with lots of nuances to hash out, lots of unanticipated tiny cases which were solved by a quick 2-min chat or other aspects which are far better addressed in person vs via Zoom.
That sounds good. But my company has no budget to gather the clans. So what is the alternative?
Can you elaborate on why you think this? It doesn't seem very obvious to me that this is the case. I've worked remote on a ton of projects and never really struggled to hash out these nuances via email, text message, video call, whatever.
> How do you build a compelling culture remotely?
> the majority of people seem to want to be remote when we survey them. But are they as engaged? Will they stay? ... how sustainable is that?
> How do you make those people [out of state] still feel like they are part of everything?
> Are people working as hard?
> there’s still just a lot of empty space right now. When I’m in the office, there’s not a lot of people.
> I recently attended an in-person meeting and I loved it. It was great. There are still things that are fun to talk about in-person and we were doing a lot of brainstorming. The time went by like that, and on a Zoom call, it just doesn’t.
Q: did the other people like it, or did they wish they were at home on a Zoom call and that the meeting was dragging on and should have been shorter?
> But I can’t get away from the inescapable reality that there’s still a hit to productivity. It was so scary the first six months of the pandemic and everybody just wanted to keep their job. Now, people are multitasking too much.
Seems this could be measured, and if it's just a problem for the exec internally and not an "inescapable reality", he needs to get over it. If productivity hasn't taken a hit, "people are not multitasking too much": they are able to do the same amount of work more efficiently away from the office, and that allows them to do more other things that may not be work related.
> [On working 4 days vs 5:] We’re not even in a space where you tell me you are just so good and efficient at your job, and you’re willing to work longer days for four days to have a fifth day off. That’s not the situation. I can keep my mind open to that.
In other words, if a smart worker can get their work done in 4 days, the exec expects them to do 25% more work without extra pay.
> Boundaries are being tested all over the place... the workplace was probably out of whack and companies did have too much power... There’s a level of distrust that employees have for their organizations, almost like an old dated image of like fat cats sitting around counting their money
I don't think it's dated considering that the gap between executive compensation and average worker compensation has only increased:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-...
Because it is broadly true, as the nonsensical, obfuscated-with-bullshit layoff announcements prove - and there is always someone waiting in the hacker news comments to bleat about how corporations must be this way because of “shareholder value”.
Executives need to learn that they can’t have it both ways.
So no, fuckers. There’s no trust.
If you think that the complaining workers WANT to go to workplace socials and aren't just feeling obliged, they do not feel grateful. They feel blackmailed.
This wash about consensus is irrelevant. Your culture is only valuable if the workers actually indicate they value it. Listen. To. The. Individual.
If I got a bad reaction from a potential employer over an honest conversation on what my and their expectations should be, I'd be out and on to the next.
The fact that they are remote or not actually says little about the communication patterns except that it is not physically face-to-face.
If mentorship is important then rather than relying on the physical distance between the new person's desk and the senior, you make it a policy that they need to do mentorship. And provide tools, structure and time for that.
If the senior or junior by virtue of the fact that they are not sitting in the same space cannot or will not work together, then either you have not got the tooling in place or you don't have control over your employees.
Learn to use internet software, set firm policies about communication and collaboration and availability to the degree it is actually necessary. If people don't comply then fire them.
The fact that they are physically in the same space or not is a minor detail for most of these jobs. Absolutely incredible how little understanding there is of that fact.
Learn to use an online white board, screen share, write an email, or open a video or voice chat.