Now that we have some distance from the whole forced-at-home-during-pandemic episode, what are people's opinions on the topic?
I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
Exactly right. As an employee and a father of young kids, I love WFH.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
That's possible, but you could make the argument about any perk. Having free lunches, or paying high salaries puts companies at a disadvantage relative to competitors, all else equal. But if you free people to focus on what matters, and attract more competitive talent, it might balance out. Especially in light of attracting more competitive talent, it remains to be seen how it will balance out.
Good point. Also consider this scenario:
Direct competitors choose different WFH policies.
Company A: exclusively in-office.
Company B: exclusively WFH.
Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
it's possible that the "team" concept works better when reunited physically. Working at distance, there are misunderstandings, and more difficulty to communicate, synchronize our views, etc..
But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._
But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
> But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.
I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.
It depends a lot on how you define productivity. If it's heads down hours, sure.
But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:
- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.
The "I can just roll over, interrupt them and get my chat done" is a pretty funny thing to bring up as a positive. I guess for non-developer roles that actually is a positive, but eh.
When I've led teams, the first question I would ask if I noticed I needed to depend on seeing someone struggling would be which organizational failure made it get to that point, and how we could address it. Same thing if asking for a meeting is a complex thing, or if opportunities happen by chance before they're picked up in other ways.
I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.
> - need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.
That’s funny because I was remote for years before the pandemic. My ability to get heads down work done and focus make me greatly outperform my in-office colleagues. Several of them were made redundant because my projects and automations swallowed up the work they were doing. My ability to document everything in writing led me to rapidly expand the knowledge under my domain while they were having their random water cooler conversations.
I’m not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
Your theory doesn’t explain the success of companies who were fully remote before the pandemic. Being in the office does not necessarily mean you outperform.
Yup, being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions and exchanging ideas. It's way easier to gauge people's understanding of things when working with them in the same space than having to explicitly coax it out of them over chat or video.
We're very explicit about it in our hiring process. Our culture is that team leads serve to mentor junior people. If we introduce barriers to question-asking, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot. "Shut up and code" isn't our culture, by choice, and we let candidates sort themselves out accordingly.
What stopped your team lead from regularly reaching out via teams/slack/zoom and from letting the juniors know they were available and open to communicate?
Absolutely nothing. I'm the team lead and I bug people all the time for their questions and ideas. Quite explicitly so, like "why aren't you reaching out to me with questions?" But it's like trying to squeeze water out of a rock when they're online. But when I call them into the office to chat in person, then they have tons to talk about.
With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
How is that any less disruptive? When I was a junior, as someone who was very hesitant to disturb a senior, it helped that I could actually just walk past their desks while getting water or a coffee, and could tell whether they were deeply engrossed or more relaxed just by looking at them at their desks. Sometimes I could even time my coffee break based on when I saw them getting theirs so I could ask them a question without disturbing them.
Now, I’ll submit there are people who are not considerate at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way worse since the pandemic. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be far more disruptive in person than they can be remote. But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by telling them that you’re busy and not indulging them when they’re disturbing you, and very quickly they’ll get the hint).
Your comment perfectly describes why some folks may feel they’re much more productive at home, and wonder why leadership might still want them to come to the office.
Personal productivity does not necessarily map organizational productivity. You might be insanely productive by focusing heads down on your work all the time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to point it out because a lot of people here wonder why managers would ask them to come to office even though they believe they’re clearly more productive at home. There are non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
Your comment perfectly describes how managers live in their own bubble, make up narratives from excerpts, and don't understand anything about what their reportees do.
I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer people asking for help.
If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least understand their problem on their own in the meantime, they should be fired.
As with all things, it depends on the person. My motivation is shot in an office, wfh is the most productive and least tired from work I've ever been. No more doom scrolling on Reddit when I need a break, everything is in chat so it's searchable and you can't miss anything. When we need to get together for something we just hang out in a call.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
Office culture matters a ton and greases the gears. What we had pre-pandemic was good enough, and required employees to show their employers they were capable of remote work. Now, the bar is lower... you tell me what that does to the quality of work over a long period.
Agreed. It also helps newer employees better integrate with existing teams that have a past history of face to face.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
I don't have children and my partner goes in to the office 4 days a week.
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
It would be interesting to see what career trajectories people that work exclusively from home have, when compared to people that work in offices. What you say about professional connections rings very true. Most work related friendships I have are people I met in person, be it in an office or at meetups.
I would love to see some empirical evidence surrounding these magically enlightening "water cooler" conversations that managers claim creates value out of thin air, because I am convinced it is just lip service from managers and capital holders to justify their existence
I don't know about empirical evidence but surely personal experience must lend some credence to this topic. It is far easier to just hit a whiteboard with a colleague (all virtual options for this are always a mess) and iterate quickly.
I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
Knowing Amazon, the S-team absolutely used real data about productivity/cohesion/resilience for teams that spend more time in the office to make this decision, but they are absolutely not going to share it with anybody else.
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
Strictly work related ones probably still would, but maybe at a reduced rate.
What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?
Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.
On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
Yep. I get less work done on an in office day because I am catching up with colleagues or being interrupted by colleagues because I can't put a busy status on my chair.
I personally don't mind being in the office a couple of days a week. As many distractions people complain about being in the office, I think people have the same at home.
I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really does suck.
Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer saying "You're going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a week to work where you won't be compensated and won't be productive".
Half an hour commute? You're lucky! I would be giving up about 9 hours a week (55 min commute if I time things right) -- 9 uncomfortable rush hour hours.
Yeah, I was best casing that - so that's an extra 25% of your life dedicated to work. I'm sure you found that very time spent rewarding and worth the energy.
Funnily enough I still plan that extra hour around my work day as the "commute" time, so I could highlight all the things I can do whilst I'm just standing in public transit going from A to B. It's changed over the past two years but, currently, my 1 hour morning routine involves: a herbal tea brew, brief exercise, some food prep for later in the day, 15 minutes of study, then I take a shower and get ready. Of course, I've also gained some extra sleep time since I shower and get dressed during my commute. My evening "commute" hour generally is another 15 minutes of studying, writing (and reviewing) and depending on the day I spend the rest of the hour either on a short walk, or practicing the guitar.
Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.
The commute is a big part! I was thinking about this recently and calculated that, since I started working from home (January 2020, slightly before everyone else), I've saved $4500 and 750 hours that I would have spent commuting.
Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never really minded being in the office, but thinking about it now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than any commute I ever had.
And it changed and people's lives got better. I don't think it's unjustified to say they want it to stay. If the company started offering free coffee for 3 years and then took it away people would be annoyed.
> Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer saying “You’re going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a week to work where you won’t be compensated and won’t be productive”.
Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that, not your employer. I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
[0] There obviously are some, and even some where the distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
> For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
You presumably wouldn't, because you have a set of preferences due because of various (from your description, non-rent) lifestyle impacts of location.
Which is, if you read my upthread post, rather than lobbing insults without doing so, exactly what I was talking about.
Now, in your case rather than overriding concern for commute time (which is evidently the case for lots of other people), neither those preference nor your commute time preference arr negotiable, so you would just resign if your employer decided to make your job an onsite job. Other people wpuld choose to commute. Other people, who dislike the commute and don’t have the other factors you have holding you in place, might move closer to the office.
In any case, the employer isn’t dictating commute time, but work site. Your preferences will determine commute time if you work (or, for that matter, will determime if you continue working at all.)
> I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
"Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might be looking really long and hard at those houses in the east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that bad (it really, really is).
When I interviewed before Christmas, my message to recruiters was that I expected 20%-30% more in base salary of an employer wanted me in the office for that reason (it'd have been closer to 8-10 hours with typical commutes here). I was confident (and was right) that I could find a company that was committed to fully remote.
I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to be that picky).
> watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral
This is why you document key conversations (though obviously this requires more discipline than searching for the information after the fact).
Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams, YMMV if you have different tools).
> the office is full of distractions
You should encounter my home!
> Commutes suck
Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office which helps my preference for working here.
My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and home life don't have a good solid door between them.
I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I find they help little and anyway the proponents of them usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person communication with the bad points of written comms.
Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility in return and consider answering messages/mails by message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they know is by far not my preferred option!).
It's a shame that you don't have the perfect working environment at home but the answer isn't "make everyone else leave their house cause mine sucks". Go into the office, rent your own, find a coffee shop, etc because now you have the freedom to choose your work place and let everyone else do the same. If your company has more than one office or your customers aren't coming in for service then at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
> but the answer isn't "make everyone else leave their house cause mine sucks".
That isn't my answer at all, if you read my entire post.
People on both sides need to stop with the "you are 100% with us or your arguement is 100% incorrect" attitude.
> at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Which I'm fine with. But they way many want to manage that communication does not work well for all, hence I suggested people have done flexibility on that along with the flexibility they want/need in other matters.
"Water cooler" is something that can only happen at an office. You can have two devs talking about something, but then a person from legal/marketing/art chimes in with their view. Or even a dev from a completely different team overhears and has some insight you don't.
It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use more limited team chats or private messages.
Definitely won't be going back to a physical office, but I understand some people prefer it and/or struggled with working remotely. A little sad that some companies are moving to a limited-hybrid approach instead of making either option available for whatever works best for each employee.
I've worked remotely for...9 years, I think? I do like facetime in the office, but I've found that as long as people are willing to give a little bit extra to the work chat and also make a real effort to put faces to names when you are in person, you can build meaningful connections wherever you are.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
Likewise, I think I’m now at 12 years majority remote. I actually prefer working in an office, but I moved out of London when my son was born and all the good jobs are there. I find a good balance for me is to be in the office once or twice a month, and on those days I don’t expect to get any real work done, it’ll all be either formal meetings or less formal catching up with people.
At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
I've mostly worked at FAANG and in general I think it breaks down to (but obviously generalization)...
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
Hybrid feels good but produces very little. The context switch tricks us into thinking we are more productive at those hybrid meetings and on those in person days it's about socializing
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
> Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
These mythical water cooler discussions really are quite amusing.
I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics.
I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
Yeah in 20 years in industry, I've never experienced these important water cooler interactions. Important conversations need thought and be intentional.
In addition to the other comments about the downsides of in-person, upsides also largely depend on people you work with actually being in physical proximity. If they're in a different city, building, or even floor you lose most of the potential benefits.
I think this is a really good detail you bring up. Often, I see the conversation talking about the absolute worst forms of in-office setups: cubicles or open office, with teams far apart, and long driving commutes everyday.
In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
I've been more remote than not for almost 20 years with it varying a bit depending on what I was working on. But, if I could walk to the office or even have 5-10 minute drive? If people I worked with were mostly there? I would absolutely come in some of the time.
Water cooler conversations never lead to anything, other than me shooting the shit with Coworker Jim while I was waiting on my build to finish baking.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
Companies want to have it both ways and not have anyone notice what they're doing.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
I don't actually mind RTO 3 days a week as long as (a) it's not 5 days a week and (b) there is flexibility to work from a remote location for a month or two a year as necessary for family/relationships/seasonal-related mental health.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
I prefer coming into the office, but my commute influences my decision: 15 minutes of stress-free, pleasant driving, and I charge my car (free) at my office.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
> A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office).
I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
> I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs
I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
Not having a commute is such a game changer for work/life balance that it's hard to give up. I would actually prefer to go into the office more often if I could instantly teleport there and home as needed. I'd rather read my emails in the morning at home, go into work, and leave early to spend the afternoon in silent working.
You get wildly different results depending on how the team and leadership adapts to the situation. Neither is guaranteed to succeed and either can work if the team is committed.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
I've been working remotely since 2008 and what you describe has been my experience. Working remotely effectively requires leadership to change their ways. It only work if it's "remote first" and if there's no hybrid of having a some people being remote and others in the office.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
I have a paid-off house in a beautiful place with gigabit fibre an hour from a major city by train. If I needed to go in to the office it would need to be for roughly €90,000 extra per year to offset that.
There's no legitimate reason to force knowledge workers to commute to a dedicated work space. It is a good practice to offer it as an option for those who want it, though.
I could be 100% remote, but I usually end up in the office 0-2 times a week just because some things are just easier when I knock on a door and chat compared to trying to do the same thing via Slack or Zoom.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
Wear a "uniform", as Steve Jobs did. He had multiple copies of the same jeans and turtleneck sweater, one less decision to make in the morning. Now Elizabeth Holmes famously copied this, but she wasn't a con woman because she cargo-culted Jobs, it's the other way round.
I took a work from home job 3 months or so before the pandemic, because I was already sold on never going into the office again. It's not that I'm extra-productive at home, it's that I was operating below my baseline level when working in the office, with its many distractions. For me, I consider the office a hindrance more than than working from home is a bonus.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
And just like that, someone in my family got covid because their coworker decided to tough it out and come to the office sneezing their head off.
Even though they have unlimited PTO and unlimited paid sick days.
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
It's a shift where many will avoid FAANGs because they start offering less upside. Stocks are down, public imagine slightly toxic and less benefits. When you subtract the cost of living close to FAANG people are going to go for more work life balance.
You really think you're going to keep your job if you don't show up to work?
Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
I would simply continue to WFH. I don’t need to work for a woeful company that tries such antics. Amazon is a trash company in my view so I would be indifferent.
I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.
This is what I find so frustrating. Every company running the same percentage of layoffs and bringing everyone back from WfH at once simply can't be a coincidence. How else can workers get their companies to negotiate with them as individual companies rather than cartel members but to unionize?
"Rational" is arguable. There are a lot of analyses that would indicate that layoffs hurt your company in the medium-to-long term, even if it props up your short-term prospects.
There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels.
If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
Just like after all the smart guys in suites read books like The World is Flat and decided most work should be immediately outsourced to India as a fool proof cost saving measure.
I think this proves the opposite. Companies bid up salaries and perks to a level they can't actually sustain. Now that the stock markets are back to normal they can't afford this anymore and need to make cuts.
Exactly. This is just a symptom of belt tightening. A lot of money losing companies will have to cut benefits like remote/WFH and start laying off people.
OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote now, then I'd say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.
At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for re-election.
I don't understand why eliminating wfh would be a cost savings, isn't office real estate expensive and don't companies externalize costs into their remote employees?
Remote shouldn't be considered a 'benefit'. It's not a gift to the employee to provide a much better work environment. Which doesn't even cost the company any money.
What are you going on about? Google laid off employees while still making a net profit per employee of about 400k, more than they're paying employees on average.
If your company is the kind of place that's dead-set on using its office space, 3 in, 2 remote is a pretty good compromise.
I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?
I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
I see this "justifying office space as a sunk cost" argument a lot, but it seems like an oversimplied and very uncharitable read of the situation. It wouldn't surprise me if it were some minor consideration, but there are definitely advantages lost in a remote-only situation that are easier to keep in-person; properly integrating and socializing fresh-out-of-school employees, for example.
My point was just that, if you're a company like Apple and you just spent $5 billion to build a corporate HQ, you're far more motivated to make use of the space than a company that rents out a skyscraper in the city.
Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
It's unclear whether this is for all employees, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. For example, my position is virtual--meaning I can work anywhere within my state and don't have a physical office
There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over the idea of making friends outside of college and have been seeking the work place as an option.
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and education that you don't even know about, because it happens when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and place. I say this as someone who strongly preferred to work from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided. Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has happened when I was in the office.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
I’ll take that over the peril of ruining my health by driving an hour every day to be forced to stay inside all day and eat at shitty restaurants around the office.
This is nonsense. There is no paradox. Some people don't do good with remote, some people do good with it. I was a junior engineer when open office work was the norm. I can tell you right now nothing was harder on my ability to learn to engineer than being interrupted by loud people having calls, or being interrupted by coworkers, or being interrupted by other distractions. Now that I am a staff level engineer WFH (and have been WFH for many years now) I have NEVER been more productive.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
Some talking points are repeated ad exhaustion as if they were absolute truths, when they are largely relative:
- People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews, code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
- Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen through text,
- Humans are social beings and need human interaction: Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not, find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering. Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert, anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
> Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway)
I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first, but if that still exists years later it is interesting
> People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text
Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs and have more of an async setup
I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH model.
> I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
I remember my time in college. From my experience, many of my peers there also didn't know how to code after taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that invested the time to learn. The classes were there to speed it up things only.
This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced developers haven't done any coding outside of school and work.
> Many developers are introverts.
Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most developers I've seen in person need social interaction and half get little of it apart from their office.
It's not astro turfing, some of us just have different experiences. E.g. a good friend of mine got horribly depressed and unproductive by the forced remote working and now says she'll never do remote again.
Edit: it looks like you don't have a habit of doing this. That's good—and I understand that everyone gets activated sometimes. But when that happens, please try to avoid posting like this, or at least make a habit of editing them after the fact until they no longer break the guidelines.
I frequently hear the notion that remote work makes it impossible to train juniors/next generation.
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
Remote working makes it easier for Seniors to avoid Juniors, whereas in the office it would reflect poorly on the Senior if they just pretended the Junior didn't exist while in the physical presence of the rest of the team.
Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while maintaining remote working for all.
My company has hired and grown many remote employees over the years… a few extremely junior. I’m sure some prefer in person but acting like it’s everyone is just ridiculous.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
Not in this job market. When all the plausible alternative employers are freezing hiring, many people will stay even if they don't like it.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
My company decided to go the worst of all worlds approach: force seniors (full-time) employees into the office on a hybrid schedule while only hiring juniors as fully-remote contractors. It's insane.
Since it seems that "bring employees back to the office" is the next "layoff 5-10% to appease shareholders," what are all these companies going to do that hired people all over the country and had employees leave the area when they switched to fully remote/fully flexible? Are they actually going to ask people to move?
Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
Actually Walmart is also closing offices that were around in some instances a number of years before the pandemic. So they’re downsizing even further than expected.
Several different teams at Amazon were trying to get me to join - from my home nowhere near an office - less than a year ago. Are they literally firing everyone who isn’t commuting distance from an office?
Personally my theory is I think it’s less about leverage and more about real estate. Working fully remote at one of the most heavily invested tech companies, I have witnessed most of my coworkers that haven’t gone fully remote still work from home most of the time. Offices are either overcrowded or empty depending on the day. I think the powers that be want to fully utilize space by forcing folks to either go fully remote or commit to coming in sometimes. This gray area thing is probably a waste.
About time. The amount of value you get from having random conversation with your coworkers is too much to pass up on. Breakdown of communication through text also sucks.
They must have some data that shows people are more productive (whether it's against their will or not/whether they hate their lives sitting in traffic to and from work or not/whether they thinking being in the office surrounded by a bunch of people who are mostly fake is soul sucking or not) in the office. There's no way Google + Apple + Amazon + Meta are all aligned on "work from home isn't a viable option" without dating backing it.
It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
I've heard this a million times, but isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? They don't get their money back when people come back, and they can either stop renting or sell. They aren't charging employee's rent for using the offices.
Maybe? But it's human nature to feel a little better about shelling out cash on something if it actually gets used.
To make an analogy, let's say your kid insisted you buy them a car. Not some lame Toyota, it has to be a Ferrari (read: lavish office in expensive downtown location). They use it, they're happy. Then some event happens that makes them not want to use the car anymore, but for contractual reasons you still have to keep it around for several more years (read: pay insurance and maintenance). It doesn't ever get used, but you're still paying for it (read: paying for maintenance and utilities for a mostly empty office). You'd feel at least a LITTLE better if your kid at least attempted to drive the car a few times per week, but they just want to stay home and call you an asshole.
I strongly prefer WFH, but I get the thinking. Also keep in mind that city governments are probably breathing down the necks of these companies telling them to get workers back into the office ASAP because the local economy is going to shit without thousands of office workers buying Starbucks, going to lunch, etc. every single day.
Yes, what you describe is a sunk cost fallacy. I get it, people do fall for them, we're wired that way. But a public company with stockholders shouldn't make decisions like this. It's either better for the company to make the people come back, or it isn't. "The CEO has buyer's remorse" is not an argument for such a highly impacting decision.
You might be onto something with the cities asking for this, but I have not seen any data or anecdotes pointing to that.
Yes. It is a sunk cost fallacy. That doesn't mean that they're not engaging in it. The fact that it's named shows how common of a fallacy it is.
Amazon spent $2.5 BILLION on HQ2. It's not just a some normal office complex, but rather a massive custom complex with domes full of trees and all sorts of weird stuff.
It's the same thing with Facebook's MPK 2x, Apple's Apple Park, and Google's "circus tents". These buildings aren't just for housing people, they're statements to the companies' -- and through extension their executives' -- greatness.
They're modern day temples... and they're empty.
Selling or renting out these buildings is literally unthinkable for the executives, but also impractical. It's humiliating to have have to part with your custom shrine to yourself. You can't sell item because the only companies that have the money buy it, and the people to fill it, are your competitors, and they have their own shrines to fill. You can't subdivide it and rent it out, because the buildings are giant aircraft hangers that no one wants, and they're not easily subdivided due to the location of cafeterias and bathrooms.
So what do you do?
Exercise your capricious and unaccountable power to force the serfs back into the temple. You like seeing the building filled because it makes you feel important. They'll even admit this to an extent when they talk about the joys of seeing people in the office, being able to ask people what they're doing. If we want to be charitable, we can call it the primacy of management by random encounter.
But they know, we know it's all bullshit, because everyone has witnessed the growth and effectiveness of when the company was (almost) fully remote.
I like the way you put this… best plausible explanation (for me)
. In this regard upper management isn’t driven by data, like you said it’s mainly about them and how it makes them feel to be in control again.
Worked at one of those four companies you mentioned on one of the teams analyzing employee productivity during the pandemic through EOY 2022. The one liner (that ignores all nuance) is that remote work does not negatively affect productivity, at least for the company I was at. Decisions by leadership are not significantly influenced by what the data shows.
> Decisions by leadership are not significantly influenced by what the data shows.
If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no work from home", what is it? I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee control" narrative.
> 1) Working in an office full of people is what they personally prefer
Why does it matter what leadership prefers/why do they prefer it if 80% of their employees are saying "I'd rather work from home / going into the office in inconvenient for me / I'm just as productive at home"?
My theory is it makes people less likely to job hop - its much easier to schedule job interviews when working from home and you aren't drained from a daily commute.
because it's genuinely better for the way THEY work. ie, meetings with people 100% of the day, dropping in on people, status checks, etc. Standing up in front of rooms of people presenting and feeding off the energy. Leadership is blind to the fact that thats not how regular employees work. Or just doesnt care, in office is better for them personally and thats all that matters.
> They must have some data that shows people are more productive
I think it comes down to not liking the idea of paying $$$ on lavish offices that are ghost towns. And I also wouldn’t doubt cities are “encouraging” companies to force BTO because local economies have been hit hard by the lack of office workers.
The city I live in did this. Gave all sorts of tax breaks to companies downtown to get people back in the office because lack of employees was hurting all the other small businesses that were built up around downtown to service those employees during the day (think restaurants, coffee shops, dry cleaners, day care, etc).
I keep thinking that; I don't want to believe this is just people who don't know how to use email and slack, enforcing their habits on everybody else. But, why has nobody come out and shared that data? All I keep hearing is these nice anecdotes about meeting random people accidentally, and vague hand-waving about collaboration.
(my own team is operations/application maintenance, and we are WAY more effective and efficient now that everybody is remote and on the same level. I understand that may not be the case in all fields/areas/teams).
What a dumb post. Remote work can be just as productive or more productive. Workers work for a paycheck and want a good quality of life. That's not entitlement, it's called not being a bootlicker.
What I'm struggling with is, even my own leadership and executives, have struggled to meaningfully communicate the WHY; they have not succeeded in selling the back to office, to myself at least.
My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new person from another team and they had a nice chat.
Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations" and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45 year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and priority needs.
When working at the office, it felt meh. We mostly talked on slack, worked async, and ignored each other. But the weekly outings for lunch were nice.
When working from home, it’s b been great. We talk a lot on many channels, work together, and feel a great sense of camaraderie. But we mostly haven’t met in person.
Team morale has more to do with it than physical presence.
BUT whenever we do meet in person, you always find out the inside scoop about all sorts of goings on. You hear murmurings of big decisions months before they’re made.
I think the grape vine is a crucial information channel for people in leadership and it’s almost impossible to reproduce virtually. But it’s much less, if at all, valuable to us peons.
In my neck of the woods, the higher up you go, the more "Sales" is part of your job description. And I think a lot of people are finding it hard to do sales (formal or informal) remotely. A lot of sales is about building a relationship and being near the potential customer and informal conversations and to your point grapevine etc. I 101% understand how they are struggling in doing their job effectively, remotely.
> Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed,...
No offence, and from a place of love.... I think you're being slightly biased, and prejudicial. Clearly you're on the side of working remotely, and I'm sure you have a solid set of reasons you tell yourself why that is supper great for you. By all means continue to believe those reasons, as they are clearly important to you, and part of who you are as a person. I too share much of those sentiments.. but ultimately disagree.
What is more important is if those reasons and ideas represent the proverbial "hill you're willing to die on", where you will have your last stand defending the ideas you stand for? Also, you might want to try reasoning about the idea that there are good reasons for going back into the office, even if the employer doesn't recognise a need to explain those reasons to you, and comprehensively persuade you. Many would consider these reasons to be self evident, but even if they were not, it probably doesn't matter.
A positive in-person interaction is worth 10 positive remote interactions, and so much more. Any time two co-workers form a friendship, to the point it goes to the level of taking lunch together, or even socialising outside of work... is priceless. That's free team building. But beyond that, rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
I've been working remotely for a long time, and I both love and hate it. My little anecdote is this: I found out that my team in Boston was going out after work to eat pizza, or would have the occasional team lunch at a restaurant. My manager was paying for that, and my team was bonding together, but not me... At first I was angry that I've never been afforded a budget for weekly pizza delivery, and then I realised it wasn't about me, or what I initially saw as inequitable, like a benefit I was unfairly not being given... I then realised it was all about fostering a human connection, and team building. Then suddenly I got even more angry by that realisation. I felt dehumanised, marginalised, and overall demoralised.... I wasn't ever going to really be part of that team, and would exist as a useful "Resource" on the other side of a network connection. Nobody was personally invested in knowing me, and if I left the company or whatever there was no strings attached for any of them.
You're mentor was trying to tell you how they were attaching strings, and even randomly so... you 100% failed to see that, and you seemingly focus only on your selfish reasons why working remotely is good for you. And, that's not wrong, we all have to protect our self-interests. If not forming relationships with other people is a major aspect of your self interest... then go with that! I've known plenty of people over the years that were nice folks, good workers, but only ever went into the office on-time, left exactly on-time, never socialised with anybody outside of work... and they were great workers, and by all accounts probably great people as people go... But even having those reclusive quiet-quitters around is a net positive for them, and everyone else.
Ah, so people that have fulfilling social lives outside of work and don’t need to fill that void with people they have to work with are “reclusive quiet quitters”. Sure. I don’t see how people described by yourself as “great workers” are simultaneously quitters, but you’ve got it figured out I guess.
> rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
Link please, you astroturfing HR shill. Your stupid anecdote doesn't speak for all people.
I would almost feel sorry for you needing work to have fwiends and warm little feelings of belonging if you weren't so biased in your own stance.
For most companies there aren't many reasons to force people back.
Productivity was higher for my firm, yet some executives want people back.
In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information, etc.
I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5% of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god damn disaster.
I'm not sure what it's like at Amazon, but I expect they're in a similar situation as the place I currently work, which is that probably a third of the talent has simply moved away and doesn't even have the option of coming to an office anymore. Are they going to tell Jane the Star Dev that she needs to sell her house and move back into the city or else she's fired? If anything they're probably going to have to wait a few years and let natural attrition sort it out.
Software engineers want a seat at the table, but refuse to form unions that would actually give them one. I'm curious if that will begin to change during this era of greater pressure from management (but I doubt it).
Unions are not needed because you do want competition for jobs. People who are getting rejected/fired from Amazon aren't exactly hurting for money or job opportunities.
We are in a market where hiring good managers is extremely difficult. Remote work combined with some of your managers not being great can be really problematic. I love remote work, but it has some serious problems.
No offense but what about in person work made good managers more effective? Arguably my interactions with managers did decrease after more work, but imho there effectiveness did not, assuming they were effective in the first place
Many employees were hired over the past two years being told they'll work from home - and have been. They simply don't live near an office. What's being done about them? Or is this a way to get rid of them without having to lay them off?
I feel bad for the younger out of college hires. Anyone else should know better. If you expect a company to treat you better than they have to as required by contract/law - including keeping verbal promises - you will be screwed my friend. Wrong and right are independent of reality.
This kind of policy can also be a hidden layoff forcer. You never know what they actually want. They make ambiguous statements about vague gains, culture, etc. It's never concrete. It's just what they want.
I almost ended up in this situation. Interviewed with this company last summer and from the feedback I got, it sounded like they were on the fence about whether to extend me an offer. They don't have any offices in the Philly area and there's no way I'd consider selling my house to relocate when the interest rates have more than doubled since I bought it!
Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this.
My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
They'd either have been hired as a remote employee, or with an expectation to come to the office at some point. If that wasn't communicated, something went wrong at the time of hiring.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
That's right. When I worked there, I had a colleague planning to move away from Seattle. Our director wouldn't allow remote work, so this person switched teams into an official Virtual location under a director that would.
I don't know what Amazon is doing but when apple moved to hybrid in-office, they made the pandemic hires move to within commuting distance of their department's office, with paid relocation. I.e. the same thing they did with new hires before the pandemic.
So I guess we’ll see a rise of supercommuters flying cross-country 2-3 days a week, because I can’t imagine many remote employees either want to relocate back to the Bay Area (Seattle in the case of Amazon) or take a 70% compensation hit by picking up a job in the local market.
I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
Personally, I could imagine doing a long weekly commute like that if it were by train. I’m in Montreal, and if I were to take a hybrid job in Toronto, I could take a 5 hour train ride Monday afternoon (work on the way), get in around dinner, stay 3 days, and head home Friday while working. It would probably be a lot less pleasant than I imagine, and it would certainly be expensive, but if I’m getting a big pay raise then I think it would work fine.
I know people in Japan who take the bullet train on their daily commute to work 200 km away. I would find that quite comfortable, if someone would pay for it! But I definitely wouldn't want to do the same by plane.
Most SWEs don't work at Amazon, Google or Meta. Maybe they'll just keep rolling along while their companies reap the advantageous reach into the national/global talent pool.
The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
If you are staying in the city four nights a week you'll probably be better off getting a studio apartment, both in costs and comfort. SLU studios would be ~$2100/mo with utilities. If you assume $5000 for initial furnishing a studio will cost $30,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr for a hotel.
It'll also be faster to go between SEATAC and SLU on the Link Light Rail than an uber (unless you are traveling between 9pm-6am), which costs $2.25/ride compared to $50. So that reduces the costs by another $5000.
If you claim Washington state residency you can probably stop paying your current state income tax (Washington doesn't have one) which will save you thousands or tens of thousands a year.
After looking deeper into it my $15,000 estimate is way too low, but your $85,000 is much higher than reality for Seattle.
Amazon has corporate offices in almost every major city. I assume what will happen is as long as you are going in some office it will satisfy the requirement for now.
Doesn't sound like it. The rationale, according to the article is to "learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues." If they're true to their stated reasoning, then you gotta be in the same office as everyone else on your team.
If they force you to any office, then their stated reasoning is BS and they just want to lord authority over you.
This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated a remote employee who could not be called back into the office (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before starting).
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
Can you give more details. What position? Examples of stingy benefits? I've considered joining Amazon as an experienced SWE to get experience working on apps with higher scaling needs. I'm thinking it could be worth putting up with some of the downsides I've heard about for awhile just to get this experience and move on.
Sure. They give you 8 paid holidays a year, their employee purchase program is basically a $100 gift card if you spend $1,000 on their website, but only on products they sell, their PTO benefit is very 1990s (accrued and limited), they subjectively apply their leadership principles (read arbitrarily beat you over the head with them), management is abusive, and their internal tools are jankey as hell.
EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
I’m going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional, have more mobility, don’t benefit from the same level of coaching as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office. Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running.
What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?
Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
(based on my conversations with friends, family, and peers who started during and after the remote work boom, and my own experience switching from Eng to Product during the pandemic)
It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
Junior in that exact situation here. Works out way better than in person would. One of the key things is that by using Slack, domain language is findable. I don’t have to bug my seniors until I encounter something I can’t find a solution to or need clarification on. And the best part? That becomes searchable knowledge too by anyone since i asked in the team slack channel. I have regular 1:1 meetings with team members as I can ask for assistance.
The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.
This is a good point. As a senior working remote, I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched slack for discussion about a problem I hit. It’s great.
Junior here. Joined my current company in june last year straight out of college and I already have great success doing mostly remote work. After less than a year one of my senior colleagues wants to recommend me for a mid position.
I do have to note that I try to come to the office once a week and I only have senior colleagues who've been more than helpful in guiding me. It was pretty rough at first being remote and now looking back at it and comparing it to the experience of one of our new senior colleagues the introduction was a lot slower but on the other hand my mentor almost never came to the office so spending hours on a teams call was the usual.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadI do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._
But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.
But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:
- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.
Rando feels entitled to interrupt 2 Co workers whenever instead of working around their schedule.
Sounds like a few things need fixing here.
I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.
How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.
I’m not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
This is a downside, not a benefit. I don't want to hear about your compilation error when I'm heads down on my own work.
With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
Now, I’ll submit there are people who are not considerate at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way worse since the pandemic. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be far more disruptive in person than they can be remote. But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by telling them that you’re busy and not indulging them when they’re disturbing you, and very quickly they’ll get the hint).
Personal productivity does not necessarily map organizational productivity. You might be insanely productive by focusing heads down on your work all the time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to point it out because a lot of people here wonder why managers would ask them to come to office even though they believe they’re clearly more productive at home. There are non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer people asking for help.
If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least understand their problem on their own in the meantime, they should be fired.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
It is also valuable to be at home in a quiet environment.
https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/#:~:text=Amaz...
(if you don't have a Chromium-based browser, scroll to the heading "How the WBR Accomplishes This").
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
- Commutes suck
What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?
Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.
On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really does suck.
Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.
Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never really minded being in the office, but thinking about it now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than any commute I ever had.
Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that, not your employer. I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
[0] There obviously are some, and even some where the distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
You presumably wouldn't, because you have a set of preferences due because of various (from your description, non-rent) lifestyle impacts of location.
Which is, if you read my upthread post, rather than lobbing insults without doing so, exactly what I was talking about.
Now, in your case rather than overriding concern for commute time (which is evidently the case for lots of other people), neither those preference nor your commute time preference arr negotiable, so you would just resign if your employer decided to make your job an onsite job. Other people wpuld choose to commute. Other people, who dislike the commute and don’t have the other factors you have holding you in place, might move closer to the office.
In any case, the employer isn’t dictating commute time, but work site. Your preferences will determine commute time if you work (or, for that matter, will determime if you continue working at all.)
If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
"Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might be looking really long and hard at those houses in the east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that bad (it really, really is).
I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to be that picky).
Fixing the statewide housing shortage, or replacing the suburbs with something dense and walkable enough to allow good public transport, is not.
If you think we can do the latter, please do so! I'd be happy to return to the office after it's been done.
This is why you document key conversations (though obviously this requires more discipline than searching for the information after the fact).
Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams, YMMV if you have different tools).
> the office is full of distractions
You should encounter my home!
> Commutes suck
Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office which helps my preference for working here.
My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and home life don't have a good solid door between them.
I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I find they help little and anyway the proponents of them usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person communication with the bad points of written comms.
Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility in return and consider answering messages/mails by message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they know is by far not my preferred option!).
That isn't my answer at all, if you read my entire post.
People on both sides need to stop with the "you are 100% with us or your arguement is 100% incorrect" attitude.
> at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Which I'm fine with. But they way many want to manage that communication does not work well for all, hence I suggested people have done flexibility on that along with the flexibility they want/need in other matters.
It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use more limited team chats or private messages.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
Isn't feeling good something worth producing?
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics.
I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office).
I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
I’m pretty sure my pudgy form can’t intimidate them even if I tried.
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
This has not been my experience.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
Here is one data point:
https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe...
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod...
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
It's just similar companies responding to the environment (market, covid, etc.) in a similar rational way.
And a bit of a herd mentality too, which is human nature. But that doesn't require collusion, it's just board members reading headlines.
There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels.
If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
Even if that wasn’t happening, public announcements like this signal copycat behavior is fine.
OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote now, then I'd say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.
At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for re-election.
I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?
I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 97 points, 105 comments
"Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first" (aboutamazon.com)
Therein lies the paradox IMO
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
- People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews, code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
- Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen through text,
- Humans are social beings and need human interaction: Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not, find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering. Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert, anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
> Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway)
I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first, but if that still exists years later it is interesting
> People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text
Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs and have more of an async setup
I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH model.
I remember my time in college. From my experience, many of my peers there also didn't know how to code after taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that invested the time to learn. The classes were there to speed it up things only.
yeah, and they are the generally low performers that waste other peoples time.
Passionate people do just fine WFH. So hire them.
This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced developers haven't done any coding outside of school and work.
> Many developers are introverts.
Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most developers I've seen in person need social interaction and half get little of it apart from their office.
Do you not actually know what astroturfing and shill mean?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you don't have a habit of doing this. That's good—and I understand that everyone gets activated sometimes. But when that happens, please try to avoid posting like this, or at least make a habit of editing them after the fact until they no longer break the guidelines.
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while maintaining remote working for all.
It is but people are really terrible at doing it and even worse remotely.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
From an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 (100 comments)
From 30 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 (54 comments)
> He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch or in the elevator.
> It’s easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended
nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without consulting them.
It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
Maybe? But it's human nature to feel a little better about shelling out cash on something if it actually gets used.
To make an analogy, let's say your kid insisted you buy them a car. Not some lame Toyota, it has to be a Ferrari (read: lavish office in expensive downtown location). They use it, they're happy. Then some event happens that makes them not want to use the car anymore, but for contractual reasons you still have to keep it around for several more years (read: pay insurance and maintenance). It doesn't ever get used, but you're still paying for it (read: paying for maintenance and utilities for a mostly empty office). You'd feel at least a LITTLE better if your kid at least attempted to drive the car a few times per week, but they just want to stay home and call you an asshole.
I strongly prefer WFH, but I get the thinking. Also keep in mind that city governments are probably breathing down the necks of these companies telling them to get workers back into the office ASAP because the local economy is going to shit without thousands of office workers buying Starbucks, going to lunch, etc. every single day.
You might be onto something with the cities asking for this, but I have not seen any data or anecdotes pointing to that.
Yes and all people should be decent and look out for each other as well.
Amazon spent $2.5 BILLION on HQ2. It's not just a some normal office complex, but rather a massive custom complex with domes full of trees and all sorts of weird stuff.
It's the same thing with Facebook's MPK 2x, Apple's Apple Park, and Google's "circus tents". These buildings aren't just for housing people, they're statements to the companies' -- and through extension their executives' -- greatness.
They're modern day temples... and they're empty.
Selling or renting out these buildings is literally unthinkable for the executives, but also impractical. It's humiliating to have have to part with your custom shrine to yourself. You can't sell item because the only companies that have the money buy it, and the people to fill it, are your competitors, and they have their own shrines to fill. You can't subdivide it and rent it out, because the buildings are giant aircraft hangers that no one wants, and they're not easily subdivided due to the location of cafeterias and bathrooms.
So what do you do?
Exercise your capricious and unaccountable power to force the serfs back into the temple. You like seeing the building filled because it makes you feel important. They'll even admit this to an extent when they talk about the joys of seeing people in the office, being able to ask people what they're doing. If we want to be charitable, we can call it the primacy of management by random encounter.
But they know, we know it's all bullshit, because everyone has witnessed the growth and effectiveness of when the company was (almost) fully remote.
I hope us the serfs can ‘win’ this.
If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no work from home", what is it? I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee control" narrative.
Unfortunately, my background is in data science. I would say the field of psychology is better suited to answering that question.
Remove the "they're evil" part and I don't see what's reductionist about it being about "having more control over employees"?
That to me sounds like a very likely explanation.
1) Working in an office full of people is what they personally prefer, and
2) They have large investments in physical infrastructure that they need to use.
Why does it matter what leadership prefers/why do they prefer it if 80% of their employees are saying "I'd rather work from home / going into the office in inconvenient for me / I'm just as productive at home"?
Why, exactly?
I think it comes down to not liking the idea of paying $$$ on lavish offices that are ghost towns. And I also wouldn’t doubt cities are “encouraging” companies to force BTO because local economies have been hit hard by the lack of office workers.
(my own team is operations/application maintenance, and we are WAY more effective and efficient now that everybody is remote and on the same level. I understand that may not be the case in all fields/areas/teams).
DaTa DRiVeN cOMpaNY
My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new person from another team and they had a nice chat.
Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations" and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45 year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and priority needs.
When working at the office, it felt meh. We mostly talked on slack, worked async, and ignored each other. But the weekly outings for lunch were nice.
When working from home, it’s b been great. We talk a lot on many channels, work together, and feel a great sense of camaraderie. But we mostly haven’t met in person.
Team morale has more to do with it than physical presence.
BUT whenever we do meet in person, you always find out the inside scoop about all sorts of goings on. You hear murmurings of big decisions months before they’re made.
I think the grape vine is a crucial information channel for people in leadership and it’s almost impossible to reproduce virtually. But it’s much less, if at all, valuable to us peons.
No offence, and from a place of love.... I think you're being slightly biased, and prejudicial. Clearly you're on the side of working remotely, and I'm sure you have a solid set of reasons you tell yourself why that is supper great for you. By all means continue to believe those reasons, as they are clearly important to you, and part of who you are as a person. I too share much of those sentiments.. but ultimately disagree.
What is more important is if those reasons and ideas represent the proverbial "hill you're willing to die on", where you will have your last stand defending the ideas you stand for? Also, you might want to try reasoning about the idea that there are good reasons for going back into the office, even if the employer doesn't recognise a need to explain those reasons to you, and comprehensively persuade you. Many would consider these reasons to be self evident, but even if they were not, it probably doesn't matter.
A positive in-person interaction is worth 10 positive remote interactions, and so much more. Any time two co-workers form a friendship, to the point it goes to the level of taking lunch together, or even socialising outside of work... is priceless. That's free team building. But beyond that, rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
I've been working remotely for a long time, and I both love and hate it. My little anecdote is this: I found out that my team in Boston was going out after work to eat pizza, or would have the occasional team lunch at a restaurant. My manager was paying for that, and my team was bonding together, but not me... At first I was angry that I've never been afforded a budget for weekly pizza delivery, and then I realised it wasn't about me, or what I initially saw as inequitable, like a benefit I was unfairly not being given... I then realised it was all about fostering a human connection, and team building. Then suddenly I got even more angry by that realisation. I felt dehumanised, marginalised, and overall demoralised.... I wasn't ever going to really be part of that team, and would exist as a useful "Resource" on the other side of a network connection. Nobody was personally invested in knowing me, and if I left the company or whatever there was no strings attached for any of them.
You're mentor was trying to tell you how they were attaching strings, and even randomly so... you 100% failed to see that, and you seemingly focus only on your selfish reasons why working remotely is good for you. And, that's not wrong, we all have to protect our self-interests. If not forming relationships with other people is a major aspect of your self interest... then go with that! I've known plenty of people over the years that were nice folks, good workers, but only ever went into the office on-time, left exactly on-time, never socialised with anybody outside of work... and they were great workers, and by all accounts probably great people as people go... But even having those reclusive quiet-quitters around is a net positive for them, and everyone else.
Link please, you astroturfing HR shill. Your stupid anecdote doesn't speak for all people.
I would almost feel sorry for you needing work to have fwiends and warm little feelings of belonging if you weren't so biased in your own stance.
In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information, etc.
I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5% of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god damn disaster.
Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this.
My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
Doing 10 hours/week on a plane sounds hellish.
The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
$300-500 roundtrip flight every week, $250/night in a hotel X 4 nights, $50 Ubers to/from the airport at both ends, plus meals and other incidentals.
That's closer to $85k/year.
If you are staying in the city four nights a week you'll probably be better off getting a studio apartment, both in costs and comfort. SLU studios would be ~$2100/mo with utilities. If you assume $5000 for initial furnishing a studio will cost $30,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr for a hotel.
It'll also be faster to go between SEATAC and SLU on the Link Light Rail than an uber (unless you are traveling between 9pm-6am), which costs $2.25/ride compared to $50. So that reduces the costs by another $5000.
If you claim Washington state residency you can probably stop paying your current state income tax (Washington doesn't have one) which will save you thousands or tens of thousands a year.
After looking deeper into it my $15,000 estimate is way too low, but your $85,000 is much higher than reality for Seattle.
If they force you to any office, then their stated reasoning is BS and they just want to lord authority over you.
What about this seems inconsistent with Amazon's business practices?
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
We should expect more of this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-ca...
What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?
Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
At the workplace? It only works in large orgs where your friend might be in a different department altogether.
The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.
Playing devil's advocate here.
These are non representative.