> remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person work
Agree 100% here, with the assumption that the system is healthy to start with. And it's safe to assume it to be true for startups, which is the focus of PG's tweet. (If it's not, that start-up is already dead or close to be)
For startups, a competitive advantage is to do things that don't scale while you can. This includes "O(n²)" non-scalable communication, since n is still very small. And that kind of communication obviously works better in-person.
Late stage companies where async communication and slow-to-move things is the norm (due to the switch to a scalable communication method) actually benefit from remote work if the in-person office was kind of unhealthy for some people. Unhealthiness can be from the unavoidable slowness of communication/bureaucracy in a 50k+ employees company, or it can be from a rotten local culture in the office closest to you.
For this type of companies, remote options makes sense, the same way that expanding to other regions made sense. At this stage your communication is by nature scaled up, slower, and was already spanned across multiple buildings in original campus, so why not remote?
I think the interesting question is: can you combine the benefits of in-office collaboration and social connection with the advantages of remote (lower real estate costs, larger hiring pool, and better focus time) with a hybrid model?
The new default seems to be trending toward hybrid with 1-3 days in office per week and the rest remote for this reason. The other model that seems to work well is fully remote with quarterly offsites at the company and/or team level.
It is most definitely my experience that being able to all stand around a whiteboard and socialize together creates better work. On the other hand, no company will ever pay enough to compensate for the lack of affordability and poor livability of the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC. The only people who love RTO are new grads with no life or execs who already cashed out.
I was working for a big non-tech financial company when covid hit. The biggest issue with going remote was this inertia in how the company worked, and a push back by higher levels who did not want to change things. So you got more and more meetings and booked calendars. Even though we had more productivity as shown by number of deployments a day, the company leadership did not want to remain remote and pushed return to office. But the big problem was that as it was a campus, with teams across multiple states, if you did have a meeting there was a good chance that you had a meeting online anyways, so that aspect didn't change.
The good things of in person working is comradery, problem solving speed, etc. But most large companies are not designed to work towards this in the first place.
The problem, in my opinion, is that many companies tries to do work the same way that they would do it in office, when working remote. I don’t think that work.
The way of working need to change, the way people communicate, how they measure progress, etc.
That is my opinion. I do not believe in going back to commuting to offices like before, I do believe in changing the way we work.
There is a distinct competitive advantage to be able to express your thoughts in writing so that it can be digested async without your intervention. Most founders, managers and of course, leaf workers, don't have this ability. We rely on others to help us clarify what we want to convey.
Honestly, I feel that being able to access a global workforce and needing to create processes that can be followed asynchronously and distributed is a major plus for a startup, even an established company. My gut feeling is that companies that operate like this will be more efficient and scalable, but only time will tell if this is true.
Typical org charts look like an upside-down tree, where the topmost, single node is the CEO. From there branch the others, VPs, managers, and so on to the end. These terminal ends are "leaves."
These "individual contributors" span the widest across and are the "leaf workers."
Imagining oneself to be a leaf brings a shift in perspective versus just being an IC: we sway in the wind; we forward rain drops to the earth; we spin and settle to ground.
The seasons change: the tree is part of some large forest, and we gaze unknowing at walkers below. In the soil we nestle; the sun marks patterns across us above.
I guess the assumption here is that the founders are correct in wanting to do this, because it improves overall productivity. Further, an assumption is that founders, being highly motivated and data-driven, are probably correct in this belief, and the bottom line will bear out their decision in the long run, despite any argument from their employees. But this does not match my experience with founders, who are not wiser or less biased than most people, and who make bad guesses frankly all the time.
If there is new data about remote work that makes this a rational decision, so be it. Absent that, this is just as consistent with the hypothesis that management wants people in the office so they can be seen to do their job, regardless of the actual effect on work.
Remote work may be “harder” in some dimensions (communication barriers), but there are tradeoffs for removing those barriers.
In-person costs: Reducing your talent pool size, raising the cost of that talent, an increase in the politicization of workplace success, regional and cultural myopias from localized hiring (which can damage the output of everything), cost of workspace.
Some of those risks are existential so it’s not a simple “one way is better” equation.
I would try to build a remote-first business and work hard on the communication challenges before surrendering the natural advantages it affords. I think what you lose is often less than what you gain, especially in terms of culture.
Someone help me out here. Most incredibly smart people I know and even most of you here on HN, we basically grew up on discord, irc,etc... I hate to make myself look bad but if my IRL social skills and sociability is 3/10, remotely it is at least 7/10. Are there really a lot of high caliber people who somehow spent time to develop IRL social and communication skills?
My theory is that people who are now in their 40s or older can't figure out how to work remotely, especially as managers. There are people that talk to me in private message when I work remotely and then there are those that only engage with me in person, that's why I theorized that.
They need to train people explicitly and show them how they unconsciously avoid engaging with others remotely.
Also, my coworkers that like to brown-nose the most and they are social butterflies that are very attentive to managers and respond socially to their every needs get the most recognition but really smart full-WFH guys that are getting so much quality work done basically don't exist in the eyes of management. It is a travesty, I specifically chose this field because your technical skills are rewarded, and that was my strength.
I am not an extremist, a balanced approach is what I advocate for. If you can't manage people remotely, you can't manage people. For regular employees, they should let people WFH based on performance and partially (bad performance=3days office, good=1day office). If that isn't viable then at least let it be at the discretion of managers instead of company wide.
I also theorize that founders are very social people and they especially typically can't figure out remote management.
Tangential, but I think strong social skills are very important if you want to improve as a software engineer. Examples of strong social skill would be being able to set project direction, set up cross team collaborations, communicate impact, mentor and grow your colleagues, etc. Exclusively having strong technical skills can lead you down the "evil genius" archetype, where you're able to deliver technically complex software, but in a way that alienates contributors and collaborates (ie Haskell elitists).
I think you are mixing soft skills with social skills. To me, social means you are good at chit-chat,watercooler talk, going to lunches, parties, events,etc... i.e.: a social person is what oldschool hr people mean when they say "can I strike a conversation with this person in a line at the airport or starbucks".
What you are talking about imo is "soft skills", being able to work with others and communicate well. You can have great softskills and also have terrible table manner or bad emotional-intelligence.
I am 100% with you on technical-skills only being a bad thing. But you can communicate and do all those things you mentioned virtually. You can ping someone and just chat with them about stuff without taking them to lunch, dinner or walking up to their cubicle/desk and interrupting them.
Look at open work areas for example, even before covid, I and many others were screaming in pain over them. Out brains are just wired different. Extroverts tend to become managers and founders and refuse to consider that others think and function differently.
Look at most opensource projects, did people sit around in an office to code them? Was there a Linux kernel developers office somewhere? Then paulg's point is invalid.
> I also theorize that founders are very social people and they especially typically can't figure out remote management.
I think this is a large part of the problem that isn’t being explicitly pointed out. Extroverts likely hate this style of work and it feels like some folks, instead of really compromising or trying to find an effective model that works with this new reality, just go the safe route. I was happier with the way things were...
Ahem, I'm an older manager and one of the biggest proponents of remote in my company, and I know many 40+ managers who are big into remote too. So your theory is wrong. More than half of my team live on different states (and even countries at one point), so even if we were not working from home, they would not be in the same office as me "collaborating".
You probably just know a bunch of bad managers that gave you the impression this is age-related. Interestingly, and this is an anecdote, it's the younger managers who usually haven't yet sorted out the control problem and are less into remote work.
I didn't mean to imply that it was because of age or that only older managers had that issue. My observation was that people who spent 10+ years managing people in the office have a hard time managing people remotely, and undesrstandablu so, that's why I suggested remote management training.
I suspect a lot of it is "one bad apple spoils the bunch". If 9/10 workers are more productive remote and 1 totally dysfunctional, the 1 bad apple makes a bigger impression on execs then the 9 good ones.
> remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person work
FWIW, while this may be sufficient, it isn’t necessary: our company has been remote for years, and always has been, with hardware and software products and professional services offered. For critical projects and for at critical times we will have in-person meetings at a virtual office, but otherwise everything is remote.
We have no trouble on-boarding new people, working through challenging designs, or otherwise getting things done.
It starts from the top, of course: our owner fully supports and prefers remote work, as do the rest of us.
This very much depends on the job so it's impossible to generalise.
For software development, IMHO there is no need to be in an office whatsoever. Even the standard 'hybrid' approach makes little sense.
Now, it is useful to meet in person but then I think these occasions should be special days when the focus is to make the most of the face to face interactions instead of being "a day in the office". So no coding but discussions, brainstorming, lunch/dinner as a team, etc.
22 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadAgree 100% here, with the assumption that the system is healthy to start with. And it's safe to assume it to be true for startups, which is the focus of PG's tweet. (If it's not, that start-up is already dead or close to be)
For startups, a competitive advantage is to do things that don't scale while you can. This includes "O(n²)" non-scalable communication, since n is still very small. And that kind of communication obviously works better in-person.
Late stage companies where async communication and slow-to-move things is the norm (due to the switch to a scalable communication method) actually benefit from remote work if the in-person office was kind of unhealthy for some people. Unhealthiness can be from the unavoidable slowness of communication/bureaucracy in a 50k+ employees company, or it can be from a rotten local culture in the office closest to you.
For this type of companies, remote options makes sense, the same way that expanding to other regions made sense. At this stage your communication is by nature scaled up, slower, and was already spanned across multiple buildings in original campus, so why not remote?
"that's like your opinion dude"
The good things of in person working is comradery, problem solving speed, etc. But most large companies are not designed to work towards this in the first place.
The way of working need to change, the way people communicate, how they measure progress, etc.
That is my opinion. I do not believe in going back to commuting to offices like before, I do believe in changing the way we work.
Honestly, I feel that being able to access a global workforce and needing to create processes that can be followed asynchronously and distributed is a major plus for a startup, even an established company. My gut feeling is that companies that operate like this will be more efficient and scalable, but only time will tell if this is true.
Typical org charts look like an upside-down tree, where the topmost, single node is the CEO. From there branch the others, VPs, managers, and so on to the end. These terminal ends are "leaves."
These "individual contributors" span the widest across and are the "leaf workers."
Imagining oneself to be a leaf brings a shift in perspective versus just being an IC: we sway in the wind; we forward rain drops to the earth; we spin and settle to ground.
The seasons change: the tree is part of some large forest, and we gaze unknowing at walkers below. In the soil we nestle; the sun marks patterns across us above.
If there is new data about remote work that makes this a rational decision, so be it. Absent that, this is just as consistent with the hypothesis that management wants people in the office so they can be seen to do their job, regardless of the actual effect on work.
In-person costs: Reducing your talent pool size, raising the cost of that talent, an increase in the politicization of workplace success, regional and cultural myopias from localized hiring (which can damage the output of everything), cost of workspace.
Some of those risks are existential so it’s not a simple “one way is better” equation.
I would try to build a remote-first business and work hard on the communication challenges before surrendering the natural advantages it affords. I think what you lose is often less than what you gain, especially in terms of culture.
Someone help me out here. Most incredibly smart people I know and even most of you here on HN, we basically grew up on discord, irc,etc... I hate to make myself look bad but if my IRL social skills and sociability is 3/10, remotely it is at least 7/10. Are there really a lot of high caliber people who somehow spent time to develop IRL social and communication skills?
My theory is that people who are now in their 40s or older can't figure out how to work remotely, especially as managers. There are people that talk to me in private message when I work remotely and then there are those that only engage with me in person, that's why I theorized that. They need to train people explicitly and show them how they unconsciously avoid engaging with others remotely.
Also, my coworkers that like to brown-nose the most and they are social butterflies that are very attentive to managers and respond socially to their every needs get the most recognition but really smart full-WFH guys that are getting so much quality work done basically don't exist in the eyes of management. It is a travesty, I specifically chose this field because your technical skills are rewarded, and that was my strength.
I am not an extremist, a balanced approach is what I advocate for. If you can't manage people remotely, you can't manage people. For regular employees, they should let people WFH based on performance and partially (bad performance=3days office, good=1day office). If that isn't viable then at least let it be at the discretion of managers instead of company wide.
I also theorize that founders are very social people and they especially typically can't figure out remote management.
What you are talking about imo is "soft skills", being able to work with others and communicate well. You can have great softskills and also have terrible table manner or bad emotional-intelligence.
I am 100% with you on technical-skills only being a bad thing. But you can communicate and do all those things you mentioned virtually. You can ping someone and just chat with them about stuff without taking them to lunch, dinner or walking up to their cubicle/desk and interrupting them.
Look at open work areas for example, even before covid, I and many others were screaming in pain over them. Out brains are just wired different. Extroverts tend to become managers and founders and refuse to consider that others think and function differently.
Look at most opensource projects, did people sit around in an office to code them? Was there a Linux kernel developers office somewhere? Then paulg's point is invalid.
I think this is a large part of the problem that isn’t being explicitly pointed out. Extroverts likely hate this style of work and it feels like some folks, instead of really compromising or trying to find an effective model that works with this new reality, just go the safe route. I was happier with the way things were...
You probably just know a bunch of bad managers that gave you the impression this is age-related. Interestingly, and this is an anecdote, it's the younger managers who usually haven't yet sorted out the control problem and are less into remote work.
FWIW, while this may be sufficient, it isn’t necessary: our company has been remote for years, and always has been, with hardware and software products and professional services offered. For critical projects and for at critical times we will have in-person meetings at a virtual office, but otherwise everything is remote.
We have no trouble on-boarding new people, working through challenging designs, or otherwise getting things done.
It starts from the top, of course: our owner fully supports and prefers remote work, as do the rest of us.
For software development, IMHO there is no need to be in an office whatsoever. Even the standard 'hybrid' approach makes little sense.
Now, it is useful to meet in person but then I think these occasions should be special days when the focus is to make the most of the face to face interactions instead of being "a day in the office". So no coding but discussions, brainstorming, lunch/dinner as a team, etc.
for any startup with an office and other place based expenses, a placeless startup with lower expenses is coming to eat your lunch.
where we’re going we don’t need places.
stay hungry my friends.
Would it help to see colleagues in person regularly? Maybe. It’d be mostly useful to those who need it.