Assessment in favour of the bosses - Companies seem to be okay with people in gig jobs working multiple jobs.
Assessment against the bosses - Most full-time jobs need not be full-time jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done by people working multiple jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done from home.
Conclusion:
Contract laws need to change to prevent certain types of contracts from being drawn. For example, no contracts should prevent a person seeking additional employment.
2. Culture: Bossess feel that culture development slows with WFH. A hybrid work setup can help prevent this.
Why aren't people paid a full time salary for the work they're expected to do instead of the time they sit at a desk? It's a question I genuinely struggle with.
If the employee is doing all that's expected of them, then the "contract for owning someone for a period of time" (not my words - and relatively creepy) should be fulfilled. It doesn't seem a period of time that is expected but a force of work delivered.
I am willing to be wrong in this assumption, however, given the right argument.
> Why aren't people paid a full time salary for the work they're expected to do instead of the time they sit at a desk?
If the work you are expected to do is fixed--your boss can't come to you with an ad hoc assignment that's not in some formal job description--then you're not an employee, you're an independent contractor. (And that means the corporation no longer has to worry about things like your health care and retirement benefits.)
The real value proposition for having an employee vs. an independent contractor is that the work the employee is expected to do is not fixed--your boss can come to you as an employee with an ad hoc assignment that's not in any formal job description and expect you to do it. In other words, the belief the article describes, that paying someone a full time salary as an employee means the company owns their time, is actually mistaken (even though I think it is very common among corporate managers and executives). What you're actually paying them for is being able to give them ad hoc new jobs to do as the company's environment and needs change, and not have to go through the hassle of writing up a new contractor's statement of work and negotiating a new price. The only justification you need to give an employee a new ad hoc assignment is "this is going to help the company".
The real value prop of having a full time employee, is you own their full time focus five days a week. It's not about practicing a trained skillset, or providing expertise ONLY, it's also about owning part of the business, managing other employees, and deep understanding of the product and how to market and deliver it to the user.
I'm not saying that's good or bad, however it is definitely not clearly stated-- not in schools, universities or in job descriptions. Society tells your for decades you're supposed to specialize and then get paid for that skill, yet most companies are expecting so much more.
That is the kind of "ownership" that the article is describing, but I don't think it's actually true. Even employees sitting in a office aren't focusing full time on the business for every single minute they are in the office.
That's why I phrased it instead in terms of assignments and how specific the definition of the job is, as compared with an independent contractor. You might not be focused on the business every single minute of your nominal working hours--but your boss can come to you in any one of those minutes and basically redefine what your job is. That's what the company "owns" if you are an employee. And that can happen just as easily if you're remote.
> it's also about owning part of the business
But employees, unless they are also stockholders, don't own any part of the business. And even in cases where employees do own stock on paper, their ownership share is so tiny that it arguably does not provide any meaningful motivation.
Yeah I agree with that. It's about owning your "main" focus. Being late one day and having the excuse that you had to do another job would not be ok, yet you can give many other typical excuses regarding family or dealing with life in general.
> But employees, unless they are also stockholders, don't own any part of the business. And even in cases where employees do own stock on paper, their ownership share is so tiny that it arguably does not provide any meaningful motivation.
Right, even though you don't own the business, it seems the expectation is still to behave in a way that you do. That is at least rewarded, if not punished by not promoting and/or having a negative review because you don't have the "soft skills".
Exactly - full-time is about paying someone for availability more than hours of focused labor. It just so happens that being available remotely looks way different (and is generally more leisurely) than in-office availability.
Having slack is key to being an effective business. And slack is literally people not being at max utilization 40 hours a week.
Moreover: in the high skilled tech teams we’re mostly talking about, the expectation is that you as a team member are helping to identify and drive the work itself. Reporting issues, looking for opportunities, talking to users and partners, etc. That requires soft skills, relationships, and active engagement. The idea that you’re hired just to do the obvious things which are easier from home (churn out code, not much else) seems strange to me for most modern tech workers.
Well, if person B being able to handle a given workload in 30 hours is roughly the norm, and someone else consistently takes 60, you probably have a performance problem to deal with. (And, yes, a lot of this stuff is hard to specify and measure.)
> If the employee is doing all that's expected of them,
It's all about those expectations. It seems having a trained skillset is never enough. It's not about practicing what you are an expert in, but rather increasing business value at any costs, even if it means doing a lot more than what you were trained to do. These expectations are typically more business skills, management skills, and even marketing skills. This is why going to the office is seen as a must for many "leaders" of companies.
You're not just a programmer that contributes code, you are also a business person who ones part of the company, a manager who has to lead teams of people, and a marketing person that needs to think what the end user wants and how to deliver it. When there are so many cross-disciplinary expectations (which are rarely stated clearly), it's no surprise they want people in one place in order to have them coordinate through this complex web of roles.
That model is not all sunshine and roses either. Wages were a concession sought by labor in the Industrial Revolution because piecework was considered to be worse. Gig work revived all those old problems for a new Gilded Age.
All these problems are coming about because software doesn't fit nicely into any of the traditional arrangements. We really fit in more as consultants external to the business, but the software consulting industry as it exists today is corrupted by the perverse incentives of generating billable hours and essentially scamming clients.
I'd like to see the emergence of software partnerships modeled after law firms, where engineers are owners and not employees. The problem is, tech is currently dominated by criminal monopolists who regularly collude to drive wages down in violation of numerous laws. Musk and his PayPal mafia buddies are running the same racket right now, that Apple and Google were convicted of 10 years ago. They would simply refuse to work with any tech worker co-ops, because they have monopsony power over our labor, and they can just lobby Congress for more H1-Bs.
I agree, but sooner or later the time component comes in. If you're being paid piecemeal for work, a lot of dynamics emerge after a while including reduced perunit pay and increased expectation of throughout. In other words what happens when deliverables expected take 70 hrs of your time a week?
Speaking as huge wfh proponent as the project I'm managing has benefited from it tremendously (we had one primary and a few satellite offices before covid. Satellite offices were effectively second tier citizens. Wfh enabled everybody to be on the same page and tier. We are way more effective and I dread the return to primary office to exclusion of satellite ones. Everybody else's milleage may vary).
> Why aren't people paid a full time salary for the work they're expected to do instead of the time they sit at a desk? It's a question I genuinely struggle with.
Because it's hard to quantify what's expected of someone.
It's much easier to just count the time they're working, so that's what we're doing.
If that's the case I'd expect performance reviews to be limited to attendance. Since they're not, it would suggest we do indeed have ways to quantify our expectations for a role.
> Why aren't people paid a full time salary for the work they're expected to do instead of the time they sit at a desk? It's a question I genuinely struggle with.
Turns out just being present is a substantial part of what many (most?) employees are paid for. Participation and quality of contributions are optimizations once that bare minimum is attained...
What do you think school is conditioning everyone to do anyways? Get up early and show up, follow instructions, every. day.
That doesn't sound very humane. When you employ someone FTE (vs contract), you employ the whole person, not a machine in a factory. People have good days, people have bad days. Some tasks get unexpectedly complex. Sometimes you need to switch to other tasks. Paying someone for the time lets you average things out, provides psychological security, and lets you share risks.
We expect to purchase X hours of your time in exchange for Y dollars.
If you can get more done in that time, you’re worth more.
If you can get less done, you’re worth less.
If you try to do the minimum “force of work” required, you’re worth less, and likely to be replaced by someone who will maximize the value produced in the amount of time that has been paid for.
I think a key point in the 'WFH bad' discourse is that while WFH is great for engineers, the experience is pretty similar for managers. Managers are still in meetings 8-10 hours a day even with WFH. A manager doesn't really see a big benefit from WFH, he is just attending the same meetings remotely.
It can be pretty similar for ICs too though. Even if everyone came into the office, there's almost no one I regularly work with who is in the office I would go into.
> there's almost no one I regularly work with who is in the office I would go into
Then you already fundamentally have a remote job. A non-remote job would organize business units / teams by location so that you're in the same office as people you're working with. And yes, this would require relocations and imply a smaller hiring pool. That's the tradeoff of not having remote work, not just spending more time in the office. You're not comparing remote to non-remote work, you're just comparing two flavors of remote work.
At large companies, co-location seems to drift over time. My company has long been pretty remote-friendly and I expect most teams are pretty distributed at this point.
ADDED: You can force co-location but, as you say, it reduces company options as well as employee options. And may not even be very practical; I work extensively with other teams both in another state and in Europe.
As a manager I love WFH for myself and based on feedback I love it more than many of the ICs at the company. No walking between meeting rooms, no taking notes on a tiny laptop screen, no forgetting someone's name (or role), no sitting in uncomfortable meeting room chairs, no ad-hoc conversations taking up my limited non-meeting time, no juggling being even more late to a meeting versus using the bathroom, etc.
The real difference in my experience is that extroverts prefer WFH and those tend to more often become managers however plenty are ICs as well.
My home is great. I like going outside of it. I like to meet my colleagues in person. I need the seperation. I find video calls dystopian.
I am in a minority, it seems.
So it goes. I moved on from professional software development two years ago now.
edit, my replies are limited: Being in my home is great! But it's designed for leisure, not for fake sugar-free social interactions through a screen. I leave my work at work, and I use my home as a base to explore from, not as some sort of tortoiseshell to retreat into.
It's worth keeping in mind a lot of people (myself included) like WFH exactly because we go to the office to sit doing video calls all day.
I totally understand wanting to be in the office when your whole team is there and your work lets you brainstorm with them all the time. My work environment was like that before and I totally understand preferring the office in that situation.
But most places aren't like that, most places half your colleagues are in india.
I too prefer full time office. Worked from home for 4 years cumitively and I will never go back. In person human interaction is really underrated these days.
Sure, this is always used as a counter argument to people who like working in the office. Both can be true. I personally would also like my 8 hours a day spent working to be with other people in person. Even meeting people after work regularly when I was working remotely wasn't enough - and I consider myself an introvert.
I fully understand that some people prefer wfh, and I think it's cool that they can do it. But on the other hand, I think many people have fell into the trap of working from home all the time since the pandemic, and I think the social isolation will catch up to them.
Personally, I don’t think you’re in the minority at all. I suspect many people prefer working in an office collaborating with their peers (myself included).
The amount of time saved by not having to commute is easily less dystopian than any video calls if I can spend it with my family instead of sitting alone in a huge metal box for (unpaid) hours every week.
Maybe this is anecdotal, but all the people I've seen who love working at the office are either single, or have something at home they don't want to be around (whether that's partner, kids, neighbor, parents, etc).
All the people I see at my (current and previous) jobs complaining about WFH and wanting to be in the office are the people who I'd see there still working at 10pm.
If being in your home is "sad and depressing", perhaps that is a "your home" problem?
I'm very happy that the company I work for was recently acquired by a "full time remote" company.
I started here at the beginning of the pandemic, so my only times at the office have been to pick up equipment, or for large all-hands meetings. The majority of my team does not live in state, and half do not live in the country.
Yet, prior to the acquisition, management had begun to talk about transitioning back to the office. It made no sense to me. We'd been working perfectly fine as an all-remote team for nearly 3 years. I'd heard similar sentiments from other departments.
In the article, they says that "a smart business should appreciate those who can accomplish tasks in less than 8 hours, as they can achieve more in less time, and if they're engaging in non-competitive side work, perhaps their compensation should be increased to prevent them from pursuing it full-time."
However, this places employers in an impossible situation. Many companies already provide competitive salaries for software developers. Additionally, if an employee has a second job, it can be argued that their performance might suffer due to being overworked in such a cognitively demanding role.
And there is a real cost of firing someone for the company. e.g. I know Google employees morale and respect for the company is very different now it laid off employees, which a year back it didn't even bothered employees for slacking off completely.
I bet the number of people working a side job like this is tiny. RTO advocates bring it up like everybody is doing it, but save for an anecdote here and there, I doubt it's happening that often.
I've seen people go and "work" for decades in an office and do nothing all day. There's nothing new under the sun.
> I've seen people go and "work" for decades in an office and do nothing all day.
Exactly. So either the 'butts in seats' are to please the managers or they're incompetent at discovering/dealing with unproductive employees, whatever that might be the reason. So which is it?
Self-employed knowledge workers generally work both 'remotely' and 'at the office' everywhere, all of the time. Salaried people don't have this kind of attachment to their work so they need to be compelled to. Being present at the office is a good behavioral tool for that, forcefully isolating them from other concerns and temptations. There are many ways to replicate that in a remote working situation, but they mostly require pervasive monitoring of the employee.
As the world is coming out of the trough of disillusionement from WFH, it seems that the trend will be towards new monitoring tools or other ways of proof of work. This is the compromise workers will have to make, because working remotely is a too damn good thing to miss.
Edit: the other option is for everyone to become contractors and charge for results
With knowledge workers isn't there like... an end result? I usually know who on my team will get stuff done vs who will struggle with a task for days on end. Whether the person is working 4 hours a day or 12 who cares about anything beyond the output and impact they have.
I guess it feels too meritocratic? I used to work in grocery and while stocking some people could shelve 30+ boxes of product an hour while others slowly put up 10. Is it fair to pay both those people the same hourly rate when their output is so disparate? It feels bizarre to me in retrospect that being able to "own" the 8 hours of someones life is more important than them actually achieving something during that time.
It takes being an actual manager who can evaluate the work being done and progress towards a goal instead of “who’s in the office for how long” assuming that an hour in the office is an hour worked
regardless of the outcome, it is salaried work, which is a remnant of feudalism and even older slavery, and pay is presumably for time and attention. maybe people shoulkd become contractors en masse and charge for outcome
You then get other problems as you incentivize output over work done properly, which if implemented improperly can just result in endless rush jobs that pump up the metrics while lowering overall quality. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
A common example is doordash and similar delivery services where people are paid by delivery and not by time spent on the job, so they race around ignoring all traffic laws and nearly get themselves killed half the time to shave off those extra 30 seconds.
Yeah and there is the other side of it. Workers are being overpaid for work they don't do, and there are even workers doing nothing yet still being paid to show up. It's all inefficient , in both directions. If the world of work decides to fundamentally change these relationships it will be a big shift, and it will have to address outcome measures, location arbitrage etc. The developed world is still wholly unpreprared for true remote work
This line of thinking that lead to worse and worse environments. More pervasive monitoring generates more sneaky and worse workers. Better goals and work definitions generate results. Having people at the office just means they're wasting time on coffee or staring at a blank screen instead of putting a laundry load or other home distraction. No amount of office environment will solve a bad working environment, and the work environment is not physical.
You can also measure the work output directly which is not hard in most industries.
I don't work in an IT shop, but we have no issue seeing who is slacking and who is actually working when working from home just from the deliveries, no monitoring required. But I guess that's included in your "other proof of work".
There are some people who need discipline though, there were some guys in my previous company that were notorious for showing up at the 10 am teams meeting with a bed head and a yawn or the 2pm meeting outside in their garden. You could also notice their output go down quite drastically.
>> You could *also* notice their output go down quite drastically.
neither waking up at 10am nor taking a meeting from outside imply that they are not being productive. We should measure output by output, not by how it's done. By linking the two I feel like you have a bias against people waking up late or taking a meeting from a non conventional location. Those things are not inherently bad unless they are also linked to low output.
The discussion of WFH is so politically loaded at this point I don't now what to do about it anymore. Note here the particular use of "bosses", the mocking tone, and trying to shoehorn the whole thing into a vague, unmoored, anti-capitalist rant. So exhausting.
My view is that it's perfectly fine for companies to choose how they want to work, and people can choose to work at the companies that match their preference. If there is a significant business advantage to working one way or another, the problem will solve itself.
Personally, I think I work about twice as well or more in the office than at home. But I also want to be able to not go into the office if I'm not feeling up for it whenever I want. So I wouldn't want to work at an office-only company.
One of the big problems in this area is it's really difficult to come up with an alternate metric than "butt-in-seat" time for employees, even though that's a terrible metric for most office jobs.
But I think it's fair to say, hey at our company the deal is we pay you X for Y hours of time per year. That's not the deal I'd want, I'd prefer to be more flexible on timing and be measured in some way on output, but I don't know a generalizable way to do that.
The piece of the WFH debate that I think is most interesting is the “I want X and for me to have X you all must do X too” mindset. It reminds me of my four year old, who insists his brother come play with him.
People who want to WFH? Great! People who want to work in the office? Great! People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem.
And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
fully agree here. i often go to the office, then no one is there and i am sad. i used to be in that problem bucket. but its easy to solve. make good connections with colleagues and invite them for working days. ends up that sometimes more ppl are at the office, and alternatively i found people relatively close by are also happy to have me over at their house for a workday. super nice =). gotta think in solutions rather then problems!
That solution works pretty well, but also has limitations. I much prefer WFH, but am happy to head to the office every once in a while (current rate is about quarterly). But COVID made it reasonable to hire fully-remote workers, and now that the office is open (and has been for a while), our coworkers thousands of miles away can't really pop in on short notice.
it does have it limitsfor sure. but those limits are mainly relatable to my own shortcomings as a person (in my experience). i am alone usually, so i am happy to be around ppl at work. not everyone suffers this. i work on it, and as i get better, those limits become less of a hurdle :). i just think that if i have an issue, i cant demand things of others to come towards that. however a lot of people are actually really kind, and do come towards others in their struggles. you can always ask but not expect or demand.
I think a lot of this has already happened; the problem is that some companies don't seem to realise it's happened, and are changing their minds after their employees have made a decision.
How we work and get more effective at working is more of an issue than something being inherently wrong with working remote, hybrid, or in person.
I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it.
Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored.
Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote.
Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all?
Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it.
Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement.
Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it.
Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential.
Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users.
'remote work' requires expressly documenting and writing things out. This is what companies have _said_ they wanted since forever. (Probably to in theory make employees more fungible.) Done well, this promotes clarity and consistency.
The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder.
There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.
Wait, sorry, your argument in favor of remote work is that in increases paperwork and pointless documentation that doesn't allow for flexibility? And your argument against working in the office is that sometimes people get sick?
I will say, if those are my two options, I'm going to choose getting sick for a few days a year over filling out thousands of words of tech specs that don't actually clarify anything for anyone (because all of the actual questions get answered over slack DMs anyway) every single time.
(Not saying all tech specs are bad, but they're certainly not a one size fits all process and if remote work means we need more of them then that means we're spending more time writing them then we need to be)
You're completely twisting the words. Documentation is not pointless and not "paperwork" (a term used to describe bureaucracy e.g. rules and regulations and approvals). Writing documentation is en exercise of efficiency, when information is distilled into concise writing. Others can then process this information or recall it whenever they want. There are great tools to discuss and resolve questions in a collaborative way. It's just much more thoughtful than just blurting out what first comes to mind.
Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%.
The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
> Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested.
The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.
> A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication.
We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.
Try the ones that try to mimic the whiteboard experience, Apple Freeform, Microsoft Whiteboard, Explain Everything, Invision, Milanote, Miro, etc. It really is such a powerful format, as long as some ground rules are established (not creating a totally new board every single time, as there's plenty of space due to digital format, and to prioritize expanding space use rather than wiping each other's notes).
Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time.
I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
The "animation" part is my biggest problem with these services.
with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated.
in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again."
might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
You don't have to use any animation software with them either. What you're doing on a physical whiteboard is utilizing symbols. So use symbols on the whiteboard app. Change node colors, change node border, add stickers, whatever is appropriate for the team and the app used.
The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me.
COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!
If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re available). If they’re constantly not available, maybe there are other reasons they can’t come that should be followed up on. I just don’t believe that most of your team is not busy and then all of the remote workers are never available at the same time.
Working remotely is a culture. It is very easy to turn your ad-hoc in-person meetings into ad-hoc “here’s a link to an online meeting”. Get your work to buy you an iPad Pro and an Apple Pen and you even get the whiteboard experience.
I have worked in many places where teams are located in different states or offices (but still work in the office). Is it okay to not engage a 1/3 of your team because they work at a different office? What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?
It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up.
> What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?
I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
No. In reality, I'm more able to find times that work for other people where I'm not disrupting them, by using context clues and non-verbal information to determine what the best time to talk to them is.
And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.
If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional. There are a few rare scenarios where code reviews are higher priority (high chance of merge conflicts, hotfixes) but code reviews themselves should be asynchronous. But that situation should be rare and clearly signalled as higher priority.
> If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional
So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
As I said, context-switching and interrupting my work to review code is going to be less of an impact then setting down a task entirely to work on implementing a completely different task. Reviewing already written code just doesn't require as much context as writing the code from scratch, and the other engineer (in theory) has already done the job of putting all the context into the pull request description so you can review it easily.
No, it doesn't. What I'm saying is that context-switching what you're actually coding on to pick up a new task is a more costly endeavor than just context-switching in or out of a review. In the synchronous model, there are only two tasks involved—one per employee. In the asynchronous model, you need to pick up a second task to work on while you're waiting for me to review your code. So you'll need to context-switch fully onto the other task to work on it, and you're probably going to get less work done than if you can devote all of your attention to one task at a time.
This isn't about "me struggling", it's about ways the entire team's productivity can be affected by choosing an asynchronous vs synchronous code review model. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/context-switchin...! has some more info on how certain types of context switches can be more damaging than others. I've been working remote for 3 years now with a synchronous code review system, and I wouldn't give it up for the world.
If it took you a day to write a branch, do you really want to sit quietly watching me read and think for an hour? Anyway, everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year.
> If it took you a day to write a branch, do you really want to sit quietly watching me read and think for an hour?
Yes, absolutely, if that hour is going to be productive and collaborative in coming up with ways to make the code better (which every in-person code review I've been in has been)
> everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year
No, everything that you can't understand without asking me should be fixed by both of us so that it can be understood by everybody. Approving hard to understand code just because it's been "documented" hurts the entire codebase.
> Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important?
Correct, yes. Your current problem is at a state of being done, beyond any code review feedback you may receive. Expecting people to immediately cancel everything they're doing and review your code is not only absurd but also leads to poor quality code reviews. Because rather than actually think about the code and spend time on it, you want them to approve it as fast as possible so you are unblocked as soon as possible.
> Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching.
The reviewer has to context switch and juggle multiple tasks. They have to understand what your code does, why it does it and why it was necessary in the first place. They have to open the ticket, read what it's about, read any conversations and then figure out any potential concerns.
> In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task).
If you have one person review your code then I question that your code review process even matters. For extensive reworks, redesigns etc you are going to pull in more individuals and there is going to be more time taken.
> In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
They take far more time in my experience. I've had review turnaround be a few hours to a day in an async context for major reviews. They review the code, we hop on a call when convenient and go over the issues in 15m and we're done. If it's nothing major or understandable over text, then comments are good enough.
Sure, the same people that absolutely cannot get their remote coworkers into a group chat for five minutes or have an ad-hoc Zoom call without scheduling a meeting, resolving schedule conflicts and sending out an agenda, are suddenly able to pick up "clues".
That depends on the person. If your coworker is someone who requires pre-planed meetings for any type of interruption, you'd know. Oh boy would you know very quickly. I usually only feel bad for the cleaning or mail staff, but you and I would immediately know those people.
Otherwise, most other people are either available, or will tell you when they are not and you can easily say back "no worries, ping all of us when you're done" and everything moves 100% more efficiently.
because 9 out of 10 times I'd ping someone saying "Hey X, got a minute we want to discuss Y and Z" then I'd get a response 40 minutes later of "sorry I was focusing on W. What's up? How can I help?". Then I look around and 2 of the 4 people are not at their desks anymore and it's all just a shitshow.
If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails
So let me break something down for you real quick. Higher up you say the following:
> You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway.
In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting.
The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish.
Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.
It's a lot easier to look around, see that 1 out of 6 has headphones on, think "they must be busy", let's wait for them to put their headphones down or the next major office interruption or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in vs everything you've mentioned.
You can do the same thing in a remote environment. Schedule a meeting in the morning of the next day as people are logging onto work. Or schedule stuff for after lunch before people get back into focus mode. All of this stuff can be done with proper scheduling rather than just grabbing people as they go and assuming that it's not interrupting their work.
of course. The whole point of OP and that I was responding to is that an organization needs to make a decision. Are you a 100% remote organization or are you a predominately in-office with occasional WFH type allowance. WFH isn't a new thing. Long before the pandemic we had plenty of people who would WFH every Friday or when they had a contractor or a delivery they needed to be home for. Or when they had one part of the project they wanted extra focus on.
An organization should have the balls to say "fuck it, we're 100% remote work" then let employees figure out how that would work for everyone and hoe to organize their meetings and work schedule for everyone. Or they should equally have the same amount of balls to say "we're 100% work from office with the occasional exceptions like we did before and you should figure it out".
I've been wanting a commitment to one of the approaches from management for a long time. I'd also like some form of commitment from other companies when I'm applying for jobs. I have no interest in working in a "hybrid" team. You're either 100% remote or you're not. Just tell me which you are and let me pick.
If you're going to wait for me to take my headphones off in an open office, your going to wait till I'm heading out. Your better off sending a meeting invite, I'll make sure I'm available.
What's funny is your solution "or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in" should be a meeting invite rather than a morning ambush.
And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. A said x to B, B said y to C, C said z to A, and it's all wrong but "we discussed it so it's good, right?" - months of endless meetings and fixing up wrong in-everybody's-head specs.
> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others.
The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time?
It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.
> And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth.
Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication
> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.
Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.
In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.
> Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this.
Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars.
As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.
Can’t control who forwards the meeting invite to who. At the end of the day a 1 second scan for 14 people can tell you, those are agreeing, those are disagreeing, those are confused, those have no skin in the game and are on their phones and I don’t need to worry about them.
On a team of ICs, making your job easier is making everybody else's job easier, because you're all doing the same kind of work. If you're on a team where everyone insists on having everything documented down to the T before any code actually gets written, then you're on a team that's going to ship features slower and have less flexibility. That's what's making everybody's job harder.
"PERIOD"? Really? Is that supposed to somehow convince me?
Your problem is not remote work, your problem is that you seem to work in a toxic environment. And judging by the discussion style you employ here, it could also be that you're used to rely more on intimidation than arguments. That indeed doesn't work nearly as well in an e-mail.
Now, I have worked in remote-first teams, in an office-first team that during Covid was suddenly forced to become a remote-first team and in one of those oh-so-dreaded "mixed" teams. The latter has some challenges but nothing that cannot be worked out. And you will find assholes, that report their own account of events to the boss all the time, in the office as well.
What I never encountered was, that quickly getting a few colleagues together to exchange ideas about a problem would be some kind of challenge. You post to the group channel, quickly explain the problem and ask people to join a short call. Done.
> All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.
There seem to be trust issues between you and your team. No wonder.
> The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh.
Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.
The problem is that this just doesn't happen like that. Instead, 1 person of 8 will write a document, 1 or 2 people will review it, and then either 1) you'll have to schedule a meeting to finish the review with everybody else (in which case you're paying a high synchronization tax), 2) you just give up and go ahead with no review or 3) you'll have to keep bugging people to review it async and it won't get done. What we're saying is just "remote work pays a higher coordination tax". That's a tax you can maybe decide is worth paying for various reasons (talent pool, work-life balance, etc), but acting like the tradeoffs don't exist is just wishful thinking.
> The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.
This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.
Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office.
Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible.
If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.
> Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office.
I don't entirely agree, I think hybrid can work well. It's just that like your colleague Robert the remote workers need to realise that there is a trade-off. You might save on commute etc but the price you pay is that in-office staff might make more decisions etc without you especially if there is a critical mass of workers in-office.
People who prefer the office shouldn't force their preferences on those who prefer remote but remote workers shouldn't try and force the company to be structured around them. Life is all about trade-offs and so long as people go in with eyes wide open it can work well for everyone (in that more people get to work in ways more closely aligned with their preferences).
The parent comment is essentially that if we have small remote contingent we'll treat them as outliers/second-class citizens and so long as everyone is fine with that we'll get along. I guess. Doesn't sound great for the remote person but as long as it works for them, OK? As you say, tradeoffs. I'll take being sort out of the workflow a lot of the time for not commuting/living in a cheaper area.
I've also known teams that basically had a rule that as long as anyone was remote you worked from a work perspective as if everyone were. But it sounds as if that wasn't acceptable in this case to the majority.
If you read the parent comment as being an example of treating people as "second-class citizens" I'd suggest you need a hard look at your own biases.
It is getting increasingly tiresome to have some people who prefer remote behaving as if the world revolves around them. It isn't enough that they get to work remote, they also need to have everyone and everything else change so that there own lifestyles choice doesn't lead to any downsides for them.
> This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email?
It's possible if all team members in the office went out for lunch and didn't see the messages and emails in time. The remote members wouldn't exclude them, but the in person team members wouldn't be able to provide their input in a timely manner.
> This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email?
That's the point. Remote workers normally don't exclude the ones who go to the office, and office workers should not exclude remote workers either. That's how inclusivity works in many other cases too - you don't rely on spoken communication if you have a deaf colleague, you don't send your blind colleague architecture diagram in PNG, you don't require attendance to after-work beers, because people have all the kind of circumstances that require them to be present for their families etc.
There is a small price of convenience for in-office workers, but the total result is better documentation of decision making, less influence from office politics, decisions being taken more rationally - and that is not even considering that you can employ people from different cities, countries and timezones.
Yep. At least the people I work with have generally been pretty good about it for a while but written documentation generally, meetings agenda, minutes to at least some level of detail, etc. all seem pretty useful especially in situations where at least some people are going to miss the meeting for whatever reason.
You added this yourself. Documenting stuff is not pointless or "paperwork" (e.g. filling forms to get certain things done).
Working remotely async requires people to document their meetings, have documentation in place for newcommers to your project, etc. It's far from pointless.
The alternative is to have these mythical "watercooler chats" that people keep saying exist where 2-3 people gather together and exchange ideas and decide on things without letting other participate or know about until it's too late. I've never seen much of that while I worked in an office but if it exists, the company has way bigger issues.
The implication of "pointless" was added specifically by the person I was replying to. They said that working remotely required more written documentation. If that documentation would not be required by the same team working in person, then I think it's fair to call it "pointless"—it's a tax paid for remote collaboration. I think different people can disagree over whether or not we should pay that tax, but saying that there's no tax at all is just ignoring the reality of remote work.
Over decades of my programming career, I have seen piles of poorly documented code and dozens of poorly documented systems. What I almost never seen is "pointless documentation". The default state of a software system is under-documented. Anything that improves upon it is good.
"…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography"
We seem to have forgotten how much the individual contributor disliked the open floor plan workplace for its sea of distractions. We remember this aspect when enough other people have returned to the office.
We're RTOing, to a hybrid model. I don't really give a shit, work is equidistant from my home and my kids preschool and daycare -- I have to spend ~60 minutes a day in a car regardless of where I work, and my particular office set up is pretty comfy. But, I'll be on Zoom calls because the other half of my team is RTOing on the other side of the country. The "reasons" (justifications by any other word) given for RTO are asinine.
Haha, recognise. Except our colleagues are in the US, UK and other countries. So there are pretty much never meetings that don't involve sitting in front of a screen. They still want us all in on a few days a month, for reasons...
I am currently working mixed mode. In the past, I have worked mostly office, and mostly mobile, depending on the primary role in play for me at the time.
This variety can be a big deal!
One aspect is I am completely free to maximize an opportunity. Work at customer site, work at home, work at office... whatever gets the task done at max value.
Having that experience over a sustained time has shown me a few things, and one of those is how communication channels and context work.
Let's take that water cooler convo.
People like those because they appear casual, spontaneous and the context is compartmentalized away from the usual, sort of a back or side channel.
I have the same conversations over Skype, for example, or via a phone call while traveling.
I believe this struggle will result in more people being more flexible in how they communicate and why and as they do, the strong pressure to be in an office all the time will be reduced in a large number of cases.
There is almost no difference between a Skype chat, text messages, phone call or water cooler, break room, smoke room chat.
People who try it will soon adapt and everyone involved will be better off.
> The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes.
I can't stand the creeping of "social" office life into my private life. Hey let's catch drinks after / see the match together / get to know each other. It brings way more negatives than positives into the work life. I spend less energies deflecting this kind of interactions in remote work, and I can concentrate on the actual work even more. It's okay to be detached.
Non-imposing mixed work as in "and we supply an office if that's your thing" is basically the same as WFH, so it can't be the worst of both worlds.
Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities.
The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.
Why would a company furnish an office space for employees who have elected to WFH? The flip side of that argument is that WFH employees should be getting a bonus for all the extra money a company has to spend to babysit the in-office employees.
In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.
Have you ever attended a meeting where some people are remote while others are gathered in an office? That's often worst of both worlds. The alternative of just having everybody use zoom even if they're in the office disturbs everybody else in the office.
Not OP, but same experience. Before COVID we had a few teams with some remote members (usually in a different timezone), and we consistently got feedback that:
- they felt excluded from the discussion
- it was hard for them to hear everyone (e.g. people sitting in the back of the room)
- it was hard for them to speak (e.g. the delay made it)
All above issues could be alleviated with some meeting etiquette, but that was challenging on its own. In our case the vast majority of teams didn't have remote members, so there wasn't much willingness to introduce company wide rules.
The simple solution was to introduce a single rule. If one person is remote, everyone must be remote (join from their own laptop).
Not OP but we are forced to dial into the meetings separately even if many of us are in the office and could use a whiteboard in a conference room. Remote colleagues can join the conference room remotely and at least those in office can get to have a conversation of a higher fidelity. But our company bans it for "fairness" - as in everyone must suffer Zoom equally.
We have this happen very often because our main offices are on both coasts. Just get the company to spend like $100 on good microphones and some kind of an easy dock for those meeting rooms.
The main problem usually is that people are oblivious and surprised that a MacBooks tiny built in microphone can’t capture a whole room
We had good Polycom conference mics. The problem isn't tech. In person meetings have latency and bandwidth advantages that tech can't overcome. Conversation flows between participants more naturally. Speakers overlap. Body language indicates flow.
As soon as it’s mixed in anyway, it’s the worst of both worlds. The company has the overhead of maintaining an office building, people cannot move to low cost of living locations, companies are restricted to hiring candidates that live within a 30 mile radius, meetings will automatically cater more to those present in the office instead of diving completely into remote first, there will be an unspoken pressure to come in more often etc. It truly is the worst.
It doesn't have to fail that way. The company I work for has an office, but there's no pressure to use it, and we hire people from anywhere within a reasonable time zone overlap. We are all on Slack all the time, and all of our meetings are video based. I was 100% remote for a while, and that worked fine; these days I'm in the office more days than not, and that's working fine too. I think mixed office/remote the way we're doing it is actually the best.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. It definitely can be, but I think adjustments can be made.
I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room: https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f
But often if you suggest this to traditionally office based people they feel daft doing it and plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.
This is where remotes are trying to force the in office people to cater to them. A proper compromise would be better microphones like lapel mics that are used in panel discussions or a single high quality conference mic. One of the reasons people want to be in an office is to have better meetings, taking that away from them is the same as taking away a WFH perk like forcing you to use a standardized work station and chair instead of your own setup or something.
As a side note the Logitech rally systems are quite good and you can get more mics to cover a room quite well.
The only thing they do not handle well is multiple simultaneous conversations and people talking over each other, but those shouldn’t be happening anyway.
There are a few technical hurdles that must be overcome for "everyone wears a headset to work" to work at all.
* The headphones must block outside sound sufficiently, so you only hear the people in the same room through the call and not directly.
* Your headset must not pick up when other people in the same room are speaking.
But even then, it has serious drawbacks compared to an in-person meeting:
* Latency. With anything over a 50 ms roundtrip (including hardware), people inadvertently start speaking over each other, and typical latencies are much much higher than that. It becomes more difficult to break into a discussion, trying to make a small interjection often disrupts the flow of conversation.
* Lack of non-verbal communication. Webcams remedy this to some extent (though many are negative to using webcams in their home for other reasons).
It can be argued that this is a small price to pay for the ability to WFH, but it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it.
it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it
It's just the reason I've been given. It would have been disingenuous for me to say latency or non-verbal communication was a factor because no one's given me either as a reason. Possibly because I'm talking about what are already hybrid environments trying to improve, as opposed to assuming an office environment is the default position - so neither of those were differentiating factors because they were already present.
> plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.
there’s really no excuse not to have a decent conference phone in meeting rooms. i’ve seen them in use since 2000 at least, and personally purchased one that wasn’t even $1k.
we had meetings and calls with remote people long before covid.
I've never seen (or rather heard) one that worked well enough.
Most recent one I've used was a Meeting Owl 3 which I think was in that $1k ballpark. It has quite a novel way of picking up on the 360 camera who it thinks is talking which works pretty well, but the audio just isn't anywhere near as good as everyone having their own mic attached. I'm not sure anything could be.
One downside of the mixed model is decisions may get made without the remote people’s input. I was at a job where I was remote but a peer was two desks away from the ceo. Strategic discussions and decisions would get made there without me. It drove me nuts and I ended up leaving (wisely it turns out).
> The problem is that mixed office/remote is the worst of both worlds.
What issues do you see with it?
The startup I work for has an office, for those who want to use it, but there's no obligation, and many of us work remote full-time. This seems to be working out well for us, so I'm curious what obstacles you foresee.
The piece of the WFH debate that I think is the most interesting is the “I work for someone else but think I get to dictate where and how that happens, despite the mountains of labor laws that say the exact opposite” mindset.
Negotiate what you want from your employer, move on to a different employer, or hang a shingle. Leave the entitlement out of it. This has nothing at all to do with “freedom.” Business is business. If you sell your labor to someone who chooses to buy it, you’re in business.
Every workplace demand could be cast into this mold. A conversation ender like this is not productive.
Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity.
In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him.
The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.
The challenge with this mindset is it leads to violent worker uprising when employers don't give enough compared to what they take. History is littered with examples of bloody workers movements.
Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?
Violent uprising? Good lord the self importance of the keyboard class knows no bounds.
Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. In the middle term, companies will simply replace those who down tow the company line with those who will. Gather ye WFH days while ye may.
> Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers.
Prognostications with no limiting principle are intellectually lazy; they also lack the substance to be respected as cynical.
The industry has gone through that once. The second time around even the MBAs learned how remarkably stupid offshoring is. All of the remote/WFH companies have been going about it for three or more years now. If all these jobs were going to be offshored why hasn't it happened by now?
What exactly prevented this fantasy from happening over the last several years? In other words, what makes you so confident that someday in the future things will converge into this prediction? The timelines of your argument don't really match up, making this really no different than Pascal's wager.
> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH
One potential reason is that some companies don't treat WFH employees as first class citizens, and due to various reasons in-person employees get ahead, get better projects, are promoted more, etc. I think I agree with the child comment saying companies probably have to pick one.
But you're not impossible to promote... maybe you also don't think that but also don't cast yourself as that if you're remote. The boss is choosing to find you impossible to promote.
I get what he is saying though. Now that I work remote I am mich more content not making more money via promotions. There are costs to being fully remote, and if one of them is that my career progression is heavily stunted or even halted, I'm ok with that now, because I don't spend 1.5 hours in a car 5 days a week. Tradeoffs.
I want to cast myself as that. With remote, I don't care if you invest in me. I don't care if I get along with co-workers. I desire no advancement. I am willing to work on the boring dreck of projects.
Give me remote and you can screw up everything else. I am happy being a lifeless drone while remote.
I might be the luckiest person in the world, but my first real job (full time), was during the pandemic and straight WFH (I have worked on premise for years before that. Part time, as a student). I feel such a good connection to my colleagues, some of whom I have never met in real life. Honestly thinking of inviting a few of them to my wedding. We always tattle before and after meetings, we have our own injokes, I've been welcomed and cared for really well as a new employee by them. Work is going really well, and even in stressful times I always feels like my colleagues have my back and I have theirs. And every once in a while when we do meet up, its like a family reunion.
Jeez, now that I'm thinking about, I really do have struck gold. Maybe I should stick around a little longer before I make the jump to a (even) better paying job...
I had a similar conversation with my newly hired manager recently. She was saying, "But you're so capable! I could sew your career going so many directions!"
I told her I like what I do, and I love how little it demands of me. I have no desire whatsoever to devote more of my time and energy to work for the sake of more money or career "advancement." I'm perfectly content with the idea of continuing to do the same work for the same pay, as long as it keeps pace with inflation.
There is nothing I want or need that I don't have or couldn't get as things are. My desires are right-sized for my role. And I'm not even a 6-figure earner. I just also don't want things that require it, like living in a major city or traveling.
Don't try to force me forward into a role or life you think I should want just because I could have it. I already have what I want, and I wouldn't trade contentment for any of that stuff other people have.
These days, meaningful pay increases, promotions, and other things generally require moving to a new company anyway, so not being in a pool of candidates for internal promotions/etc isn't as bad as it used to be.
Ding ding ding. Another way the power dynamic has been shattered. I could very well be applying for other jobs from my personal computer while I'm in a meeting on my work computer. They don't want to give you a carrot to stay. They want to bring you a into the office so they can reach you more easily with a stick.
The workplace is not about freedoms, it's about an effective team.
Are in-office teams more effective? WFH teams more effective? The debate will rage on.
For decades, the most successful companies in the world found value in geographic focus, despite high cost of living, questionable infrastructure, stagnant development, etc. Were they right? Are they right? IDK.
Kaban? Scrum? Waterfall? Make your argument.
Just don't reduce a good faith argument about team practice to toddlers.
---
EDIT: FWIW, my 2c as a manager for many years, I notice some ICs focus narrowly on their individual "productivity" without considering the sum of the parts. (And I'm sure the reverse is true as well.)
You're glossing over the fact that your choice of WFH or in-office affects your coworkers too. WFH when you're the only one doing it and everyone has in-person communication all the time is much more difficult. Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your communication will still have to be in chat and video calls, not in person, and you essentially end up being remote but from a different location.
So it’s more complex than you’re making it out to be - you can’t just tell people to do whatever they want; you need to align with the rest of your team/company.
> Or if most of your team is remote, even if you want to go to the office, your comminication will still have to be in chat and video calls
For anyone working at a company with either multiple locations, dealing with customers, etc your communication is going to be chat, email, video calls anyway
Fail to see how you avoid that
And you still fail at gp’s points: RTO folks wanting WFH to go back to the office
You don't. But you interact with your own team 1-2 orders of magnitudes more than the rest of the company. So as long as your team is all in the office, you get a nice boost to communication and you avoid having to do all team activities on zoom.
> WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH
To insist? No. However, I think there's a reason to prefer that their colleagues WFH. Being the only WFH in a group that's otherwise all in the office together suuuuuuuucks, or at least it did in the several pre-pandemic years that I lived it. What I remember is constantly being informed of decisions that "we" had reached while I wasn't present, of every meeting being full of cross-chatter and lunch-eating so I couldn't hear, of not being able to see (let alone approach) the whiteboard, of being interrupted or cut off more than anyone else because of the latency, and so on. Most of this abated somewhat when the pandemic came along and everyone was remote, though the "hallway conversations" remained exclusive even when they were online. That might have been fixable with enough support from managers and other allies, but only if everyone had remained remote. "All remote" and "only remote" are very different experiences.
> There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
Your pun is noted, and I think apropos because this does show up in politics too. The attitude that "freedom" exists only within a certain social structure with oneself at its apex, and that others' (well justified) rejection of that structure is an abridgement of one's own freedom, is unfortunately rather common.
You are aware that a pun involves multiple meanings, right? Maybe it was intentional and maybe it wasn't, but the word "trump" certainly lends itself to such a pun and obviously that would have been one of the meanings.
Paul Graham himself posts a bunch of crap himself on Twitter around why wfh is bad.
I have 2 close friends that are co-founders/CEOs of big companies. One, funny enough, is a YC company as well. The YC is 100% remote only, the other is big on RTO and my friend has posted multiple times his strong feelings for RTO on placed like LinkedIn.
Additionally, I work a decent size start up as well. A company where a couple of years ago they might have been bragging about record revenue growth during the pandemic but is now putting strict RTO policies in place.
Their communication/announcements about this policy are almost comical. The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds.
I’ve genuinely tried hard to understand the RTO argument in more depth beyond the typical “relationships are harder to build remotely” or “people slack off”. I’ve asked my friend about it repeatedly, along with some of the execs where I work, on top of the numerous tweets and LinkedIn posts. I’ve tried but I’ve never really found anything substantial, I’ve never found something where I could say, “you know, I disagree with you and dislike, but you have a point”.
Personally, the explanation that makes the most sense to me after all these discussions, is that it’s one of those subconscious biases that by definition they aren’t aware of.
It really feels to me like employers just simply begrudge workers getting any sort of win, getting any modicum of control over how they work and more importantly where they work. That’s before going into the added leverage wfh might give people when looking for new jobs. Very much to your point - the people who feel “empty” when not in the office should figure out how to solve that problem for themselves vs trying to undo one of the very few decent things that came out of the pandemic.
> The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds.
Waiting for the "research" [0] is the Silicon Valley rendition of Waiting for Godot.
If some people want to work places where everyone works in-office, it seems reasonable to permit that as option. If the marketplace has a gradient of options, workers can vote with their feet.
We don't have the ability to say "everyone should do what I want" but there can be workplace-wide policy. I empathize for people who feel it's pointless to RTO when half their colleagues are remote anyways. It diminishes the in-office experience, and I can respect that other people may desire a workplace where all are present in-person, even if I don't want that, but I can self-select out of an organization with that policy.
Unfortunately, we're starting from a default position where there really aren't, not in terms of the scope of supply and demand. Instead, the base position is in-office work, and the RTO's and Management would all argue they're the ones doing what you're suggesting here, and it's the WFH people being unreasonable, afterall, the workplace policy explicitly says to come into the office, at exact times, with exact places for you to go and do your work, and that's a policy that's been the default since the modern incarnation of "employment" and office work came to be.
So you can't just quit and go work somewhere else that matches your "culture", because the policies in place at most of these companies aren't crafted to fit, synergize or otherwise work with the companies culture. Their largely born out of legal liabilities and ongoing service contracts and legal agreements and leases and stuff that would be expensive to break.
Doesn't mean it can't be done, but they take one look at all that and start to panic as that is such a huge fundamental shift in organization, because the worst shift of all for going WFH for existing offices is that fear that middle management has that their employees can't be trusted, because they haven't trusted them or treated them with respect or really treated them as anything other than a disposable cog in the machine. Sure, plenty of places do care, and are transitioning/embracing WFH great. But we're talking about corporate America here and the trend setters and large employers that tend to set the pace and policy of the rest of the corporate world. There is no empathy when the bottom line is threatened for many of these institutions, and while they may even agree the end result would be superior to the previous way, they all too often view the cost of transition too high to be worth it, or at least, too high to be able to sell it too investors.
I am glad the discussion is happening though, that alone is such huge progress that me in 2019 wouldn't have expected in the next few years.
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
Kind of, though. If a single person wants to attend a meeting remotely, that forces everyone to talk to them remotely, which may be seen as the worst of both worlds by people at the office: commute to the office, and get bad quality (often worse than everyone remote) remote meetings.
> People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem.
Well, not really that much of a problem. We're an in-office company and it's working quite well. We just select for people who want to work like that. It's been pretty good.
This is a good point. The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices. It's the changing of the conditions with the "take it or leave it" stance toward the workers that's landing like a lead balloon.
If an office has only ever hired people to work in the office, a the people who worked for them remotely during the pandemic would be people who chose a job where they would be in an office. It's reasonable to expect they would prefer that environment and not mind returning (even if a few were converted to WFH preference by the experience). But any new hires chose WFH roles on purpose, and the conditions are being changed on them.
I worked for a company in 2017-8 where my whole team was remote, but then they decided to open offices and hire people to do the same work on-location. They flew me out to train them, and it was a disaster. My manager said, "I don't know what your problem is. All these other people work fine in an office."
I told her, "All these other people applied for an office job. They self-selected based on this requirement. I never, EVER would have. I do not work well in an office. I know this about myself, thus did not apply for an office job. Your temporary demand that I visit an office for two weeks is going exactly as I expected it would. I hate it, and it hates me."
> The part of the WFH/RTO debate that seems to get overlooked is that people who were hired to WFH are the ones who are now being cajoled into working from offices.
Let's not forget that the opposite is also true. Most of us were hired to work in the office (before COVID), but after COVID most (?) companies kept going in various forms of hybrid work. My team never went back to the office. I didn't sign up to work from an empty office and take every meeting on zoom, but that's what I got.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad remote work is more popular now because it allowed me to move close to family. But had I decided to stay in the city I lived for the last 6 years, I would have to leave a company I love and look for a new job because I absolutely hate remote work.
I haven't seen the stats I guess, but with as much turnover as there was during and after covid, are most people actually working for the same companies they were in 2019?
It's probably largely industry-dependent, and probably split along several demographic lines besides, but only a handful (<10%ish) of my coworkers worked for the company before the pandemic.
hybrid work is never going to work unless VR gets really good. If you aren't remote first as a company in terms of communication policy the remote people are going to get left out of the loop a lot compared to office workers. I don't think there is a good middle ground here, you have to go all in on remote or office
The question is if any of the supposed benefits of office work exist, there's really no data I've seen . Remote has plenty of easily measurable benefits like no office costs, no commute, no office distractions, easier to recruit, salary arbitrage geographically, etc.
I love that the FAANG companies claim to be "data-driven" and AFAIK not a single one of them has shared any data to prove it makes sense to RTO (because it doesn't, they're trying to get people to quit, not be more productive).
Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.
You can say whatever you want about the Meta analysis, but you can't say that they didn't do one and that they haven't presented the data.
I feel that perhaps you prefer, or simply didn't notice, the changes. Maybe you've always worked for huge companies.
Remote work requires that Zoom calls and chat are used for almost everything, even if only 10% of people are not present.
Prior to coronavirus this was not how any of the companies that I dealt with worked (small companies with <5 offices). Some meetings were remote, but most were in the break room with real faces.
As a result, I left software development during the pandemic to pursue a life with more social interaction.
The cerebral element was balanced out for me before, then it wasn't.
Theres this assumption from the wfh crowd that everyone wants to wfh (and if you don’t want to youre some sort of scab) when that isn’t the case, for starters.
What a naive take. Simplifying the WFH discussion to be just about the physical location of people doesn't make sense. WFH fundamentally changes how teams and companies have to work. It's reasonable for people to be opinionated about how they like to work. Comparing someone to a 4yo because they might not like how remote teams work is obtuse at best and offensive at worst.
(I say this as a 100% remote worker who's very glad of having had the opportunity to move close to family without losing my job)
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
As if.
WFH people might not care about the physical location of their coworkers, but they certainly care about what their teammates can or cannot do. Every team process needs to be tailored to remote workers.
If you join an in person team and then request to WFH you are basically expecting everyone to adapt to your way. "But hey don't worry, you can still sit the zoom meeting from the office if you want". How generous.
> There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
There are some things that make this less black and white though.
1. If most work in office and one is constant WFH, they will almost always feel more distant and excluded.
2. Some folks want to work from home, but when they do, their performance and quality will tank, like immediately. But they arent necessarily self aware enough to see its not working.
I think a place like this (Hacker News) is chock full of self-motivated higher achievers that are generally well suited for independant work from home and can overcome some of the negatives. But the reality is, there are LOADS of folks, especially in tech that arent that way, like at all.
Well yes of course. Its measured in quality of work, deadlines missed, projects stalled Week over Week, projects/upgrades that have basic steps missed that cause break/fix engagements etc. etc. And on the whole those things are higher with many of my remote staff than on-prem. Its all tracked in Jira.
Also some jobs have ebs and flows of work and not everything is measured in binary pass/fail ways. And there are times when you need someone to engage even when it’s not traditionally busy.
I have had my remote employees tell me things when a "fire"/break-fix event starts and we call to engage during business hours often when that employee has been online all day to that point but now needs to be in a position to suddenly collaborate or share their screen.
"Power just went out"
"I am in the car"
"Internet is out" (we pay for their internet AND a mifi)
"My kids is sick"
Never gotten any of that from someone in office, worst case I have to grab them from the breakroom or they are clear cut out with a sick kid or helping their wife. Or they walk up unprompted and say they have to leave to deal with wife or kids. Those examples where a small sample and werent that, they werent unprompted my kid is sick i need to take the day they were said once something was assigned or they are asked to engage.
Peers have had similar where their direct reports are awol and they start getting texts from constituents saying “have you seen or heard from so and so, it’s been hours”
Again, I have some that are NEVER a problem and even more productive in the office. I totally support that. But since COVID I would say thats only been about 25% of my direct reports. It’s certainly not the majority. Some have, unfortunately, been let go as a result. Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work.
My point of the original comment is to point out that the folks here may have a bit of bias as it tends to have very highly motivated folks that may even be more productive when given a wide berth. I do that too with the folks that can manage it. But on the whole those are not the majority and arguably even exceptions to the rule and its those that are abusing this that are causing it to become policies to return to the office. One of my takeaways from COVID is that many adults dont have the self-discipline or self-motivation to be fully remote 100% or even 40%. Again not everyone but many/most.
> But since COVID I would say thats only been about 25% of my direct reports. It’s certainly not the majority. Some have, unfortunately, been let go as a result.
Well, I'd say it's good. Remote work also requires commitment and responsibility. If the excuses are feeble and are always the same then, well...
> Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work.
Yeah, see above. It is important to reinforce that remote is not a "free for all".
Sure, everybody goes in an errand once in a while, but productivity/meeting attendance etc is needed
Yeah agree. On a personal level my executives have full trust in me. So I get a wide berth myself to run my department as needed. Including making exceptions to the policy.
I wish people wouldn’t be on the take with stuff like this. I wish more were dedicated to their craft as lifelong learning too. But it is what it is.
Social compromise is an ancient concept. Some things require social contribution to work, even from individuals who don't want to contribute. This has always been a problem (e.g. taxes "I don't want/need the government to pay for roads/education/infrastructure so why should I pay", "why should I pay for healthcare for people who live unhealthily", etc.)
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
Of course it is symmetrical. While designing a complex system, I prefer talking to colleagues in person over a whiteboard. Even if 3 of us are in the same room and 2 remote, my company forces everyone to log in and chat via Zoom. Separately from our individual laptops. We are not allowed to dial in from a conference room where we can use a whiteboard.
What’s the solution to the problem you paint? I’m that person. I think an office is a place where people come do their work in the same way a construction site is.
Another child offered the point of view that hybrid models are the worst of both worlds, which I agree with. Is the solution to go either or, and let workers pick companies based on the model they uphold? To me that seems like the way to go.
This is not an issue of efficiency. Most of the software stack upon which these executives’ companies depend was written remotely by distributed teams.
Over dial-up. In the 90s. Using CVS.
We know how to run efficient distributed organizations.
This is a problem primarily with executives who came of age in a marginally digitized world unable to navigate the new fully digital reality.
It is the final form of the pointy-haired boomer boss who looks around his physical desk whenever asked to find an icon “on his desktop.”
I think this WFH articles are generilizing too much. Remote work is challenging for companies that, and I need to say this, in the end must deliver predictable realiable value to their customers at reasonable prices. There are safety, security and trust problems to mention 3 very important things in 2023 with remote work. Just imagine what can happen if you need to fire an employee and they must give you back the work laptop with sensitive data… but they are working from a remote beach in Thailand. Best case they collaborate. Worst case they sell the laptop to hackers. This doesn’t mean remote work is doomed or bad, it just means we are dealing with a complex issue, it’s not going to be a black/white solution.
Very far down the list considering most companies employ remote management software that can immediately lock and wipe a machine.
Not to mention the legal ramifications. If your company IP is so critical that the legal consequences are not enough, you probably have other controls in place and it isn’t just sitting on an employee’s laptop.
You will not like the answer, but it's the face to face trust and relationship you build with them over time. I know, I know, it's not a perfect logical answer, but it's been working like this well enough for longer than 100% remote options were so common. I am not saying I am right and I am not saying remote is bad, I am just saying this isn't a black and white topic yet, maybe one it will be, right now we should be OK to say "ok it might be good in some cases, but not all cases".
Exactly - this argument is just manager/CEO paranoia.
Which is a real thing. The CEO I cofounded a small business with always had these level of "can they destroy our business" questions for me about foreign contractors he wanted to hire. I always said the same thing - "we have common-sense controls in place for our size, but at the end of the day, you have to trust the people you hire to be successful."
We started leasing our laptops because the IT department didn't want to deal with used laptops anymore. Said that they're essentially e-waste to the company.
There are enterprise solutions for device management and access that solve this problem. Additionally, someone wanting to do such things would have already been building up that sensitive data and it wouldn't matter what happens when you fire them.
> Remote work is challenging for companies that, and I need to say this, in the end must deliver predictable reliable value to their customers at reasonable prices.
This is a fear that remote work would somehow not provide value, not a fact. The perhaps unconscious choice of adjectives - "reliable" seems particularly indicative of a fear. If one isn't in a high security requirement field where things like usb ports are locked down even in office, why is there worry about data exposure with remote vs in office work?
Have you got experience on this? Because I have seen it first hand and reliability goes down with remote, people can leave anytime which happens less if you have developed a face to face rapport. No I don't have numbers, but neither you do? This is my point, there is no black and white here and it should be normal to discuss the topic. I fear too many people are jumping into this "remote is better" without putting enough thought into it.
I've worked remote and non-remote jobs - the variation in productivity was imho independent of remote vs non-remote, and more a function of management curated environment & culture and developer mix. Distrust is a bigger anti-efficiency red flag.
> The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul.
This is a bit silly.
Kind of like saying Netflix imprisons our bodies on the couch for hours on end, and even charges us $20/month!
The reality is we’re getting compensated in exchange (monetarily in the case of a job, and with entertainment for the Netflix example).
For anyone who feels like their soul is captured or imprisoned at work, it’s time to start looking around for a new job or a new career that you’ll enjoy more than whatever you’re currently doing.
>For anyone who feels like their soul is captured or imprisoned at work, it’s time to start looking around for a new job or a new career that you’ll enjoy more than whatever you’re currently doing.
Sadly, some of us don't enjoy any job. I still have do it to pay the bills, though.
> For anyone who feels like their soul is captured or imprisoned at work, it’s time to start looking around for a new job or a new career that you’ll enjoy more than whatever you’re currently doing
I’ve been trying to do this for years. Was getting close, but then the pandemic happened followed by layoffs, followed by a ton of other shit and now I’m not sure it’s possible. Especially regarding a “new career”.
It tends to be that you are saddled with a contract that takes all of your creative output, and prevents you from working with competitors.
It's not a one and done so some work and get paid, it is a takes-your-soul.
You can compare to say shoveling snow -- when you do a job to shovel somebody's walk, they aren't going to prevent you from shoveling the next door's walk too, but if you develop biomes research for one company in the morning, you generally can't go develop biomes research for another company in the afternoon
You are confirming that you are heavily biased by what seem to be extremely poor and uncommon experiences (I mean, leaky roofs?). It's normal to be biased based on personal experiences but it still does not make wfh objectively superior (or vice versa).
Yet another post that is pure bias. I won't bother listing the reasons you're wrong, because I feel they're fairly apparent, but instead just point out that every single one of your points is also possible when working from home.
I know you have made your mind, but still I could try. And please do not reply by saying these things don't matter. They might not matter to you and that is your choice, but it matters to me.
- No background noise of children in people's microphone.
- No exhausting hour long zoom calls. For me, online meeting is much more exhausting than in person.
I can't speak to your first two points, but the watercolor discussions, parties, and social aspects were things I used to enjoy too. In 2020 a lot of that changed, and as much as people want to go back, I don't think that's possible.
There's a segment of ICs around 30-36 years old who had a difficult time with lockdowns and only now starting to get their lives back together.[1] It's also a question whether or not WFH is a Title I accommodation. I'm sure there's plenty of disability and labor lawyers that can make the argument office settings are unnecessary and psychologically harmful.
I like it more is a valid point if expressed collectively by workers.
And yes, for me WFH is much better, so much better that I'll never again work in an office if I can avoid it.
I think that I am about just as productive, but happier because of the increased freedom.
I think that people will vote with their feet on this subject, the toothpaste is out, this is not for everyone, but I don't think that a dozen of CEOs and VCs can decide for us all.
> I like it more is a valid point if expressed collectively by workers
“I like it more” is a valid point period. Disguising “I like it more” in attempt to declare something objectively better is just biased nonsense.
> And yes, for me WFH is much better, so much better that I'll never again work in an office if I can avoid it.
Great! I’m glad you found this out about yourself. You’ll meet me in the middle in acknowledging that this is a feeling you hold about yourself and not a universal truth, surely.
> but I don't think that a dozen of CEOs and VCs can decide for us all.
You’re talking about something unrelated to my post. No individual person can declare their opinion as universal truth. The person I responded to did so, and I’m pointing out they’re as biased (and ridiculous) as the CEOs you’re disagreeing with.
As a fully remote manager who has never been an in-office manager, I have to wonder if the control being lost is really necessary. In two years of leading a department of 25 engineers, I've never found a need to exert any control that I couldn't from my home. This is at a Fortune 500 (non-FAANG).
Given the global nature of labor, as well as the ability to envision new ways of working the only barrier to these changes are entrenched powers
The only viable and ethical pathway I see going forward is re-organizing globally as cooperatives and union workplaces. I see no other way to rebalance our economic system to prioritize the growth of everybody.
However, this has always been the most existential, largest fight in human history, and that means that individuals as laborers need to actively collectivize
You’re free to try those out for yourself just don’t go trying to force everyone else into it. There are much bigger barriers to a global workforce though like timezones and language.
Haven’t capitalists forced their system, to be the default pathway for all of us via regulatory capture?
I am literally forming a cooperative right now, and it is insanely hard to find legal experts, lawyers, funding, or anything that would be trivially easy in a capitalistic fashion.
The legal structure of the US at least, does not understand the concept of non-stock organizations. Why? Because there is a demand for legal control that is not diffuse such that the government through private networks can control the way in which capital is allocated and work is done.
What you call forcing sounds more like legal precedent established slowly over a long history of commercial law. Forming a coop is not illegal it’s just unusual. The more people that do it the more the law and the legal profession will accommodate it.
The whole point of it is that only works if everyone does it because it gives people leverage. If people are replicable then there is obviously none, unless everyone agrees to bargain collectively.
One cannot dam a river by leaving a few meters open because someone likes to fish there. Either he gives it up, or the entire town continues to flood.
It's not just bosses brains, imagine working in a low payed role with no WFH option, and you don't get any benefit like WFH, what is being done for those people so they don't resent the WFH class.
IMO the simple problem here is that people are being paid for their time, not their output. Sure, the output is what is valued, but folks are paid for their time via an annual salary.
In part, this is because it’s too challenging to value and measure each person’s output, especially in orgs with a lot of different roles. It’s just easier to say, “well the market for a designer is X so let’s pay some % of that”.
The problem with that, often, is that folks don’t actually know how much output they might expect from a lot of roles. Is this designer performing? This PM? Unless you have a real breadth of experience in these roles (almost nobody does), you look to other metrics like “are my teams unblocked”, “did this product ship”, “do these slides seem reasonable”, etc.
IMO those are also imperfect because a great team, a great project, etc. can sometimes easily mask someone’s meagre contributions.
I think some employees knowingly exploit this knowledge gap. I don’t think it’s common, but it happens. We’ve seen people post their own examples of doing that here on HN.
So, given they often lack experience evaluating output, some managers want to see their high-priced employees at work to even understand what they’re buying. You can call that onerous micromanaging, if you want. A less cynical take could be “managers want other signals to understand how their team members contribute.”
So if you perform badly, you get paid less? Or if you perform exemplarily do you get paid more? How much do you get paid for each unit of output? Can you measure it so it's always the same, for every person, at any time?
If not, you're selling your time - not your output.
This is just… false? Yes, if they cared/could, they would lower the salary of underperformers. The definition of a salary is that you’re paid to fulfill a role, not to work specific hours. That’s why hourly is called hourly.
Either I’m taking crazy pills or this is a silly debate :)
Obviously I'm not privy to your contract of employment, but so far in over 20 years in the market, all of mine established work hours.
If I worked less than that, I'd get paid less.
Some contracts had provisions for overtime, in which case I could be paid more for more hours of work.
That's selling my time. I'd still get paid the same for the same number of hours, regardless of my output.
With good or great output, there was a small chance I'd get a promotion, or a pay rise in the next round of performance reviews (which in my experience are nothing of the sort). With bad output, there was a small chance I'd get fired. In either case, my pay was never tied to my output. I'd still get paid for the hours I worked, regardless of how well I performed.
> you’re paid to fulfill a role
See above. You're usually getting paid to fulfill a role for a certain amount of time. If "number of hours you've fulfilled your role" is how you measure your output, then I 100% agree this is a silly debate.
That is not what I consider output though. A factory is paid per output. If they produce 100 cars, they get paid 100 * price of 1 car. If they produce 90 cars, they get paid 10% less, and so on.
Thanks for the polite reply :) I am very confident I am right about this very pedantic point, though obviously it matters little in the end for many roles, as you’ve noted.
Your job may require you work 40h, but that’s more of a employment requirement, such as “you’re a boat captain and need to be on the bridge for X hours in normal workdays, but get paid a monthly salary regardless.” That doesn’t mean you’re paid for your time any more than a dress code clause means you’re being paid for your fashion :)
But again all moot in our industry in most cases! Really gets important in cases such as fast food, where they’ll promote people to salaried “manager” positions paying $40K/y that have no set working hours, but their responsibilities require them to work well over 40h/week
EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!
> EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!
That's what a salaried position seems to mean in the US from what I can gather. Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view, so maybe your definition is relevant.
I don't think that's a universal definition of salary, though. I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it's in the books.
That's still different from an hourly wage where the pay is calculated directly per hour and varies with the exact number of hours worked and recorded.
The pay also doesn't directly vary based on actual useful output. Whether I work one day's worth of hours effectively or half as effectively doesn't affect how much I'm paid. So, I'm really directly selling my time, not my output. (The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached.)
That, to me, seems to be approximately what some of the other comments in this thread mean when they're saying you're selling your time, not your output. Whether they're talking about the US or not.
Of course if you have a set amount of real output you're expected to produce within a day or a week and it's entirely your problem if you don't manage to produce that in a set number of hours, you're in some sense paid for your output. Your quantifiable useful output probably doesn't directly map to bucks paid, though; most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.
I assume that even in the US, you'd still be expected to be present for a set number of hours even if you managed to produce the expected output in less. In that sense you'd also be selling your time, not output.
I don't think that's a universal definition of salary, though. I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it's in the books.
Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this. This would make you a non-exempt worker in the US and in many other similar jurisdictions, meaning that you're being paid hourly instead of salaried. Most companies with similar policies instead have the following language:
Comp time is granted to exempt positions. There is no legal requirement or obligation of [Company Name] to grant comp time to exempt employees. A supervisor may choose to grant comp time to exempt employees who are required to work in excess of 40 hours per week for special projects or during weekends or any normally scheduled time off.
Note "special projects" and "may choose to". The company is offering this as a benefit, not a requirement of the contract
> This would make you a non-exempt worker in the US and in many other similar jurisdictions, meaning that you're being paid hourly instead of salaried.
Yes, in the US. I questioned whether that's a universal definition.
I'm not being paid hourly. I get paid the same monthly salary regardless of how many working days or hours exactly there happen to be in a particular month. A February that happens to have the fewest possible work days pays the same as a 31-day month that happens to have the highest possible number of working days.
The number of hours per working day is set in the contract, but it's flextime so I might work one hour less than that one day and one hour more on another. Paid overtime is also a thing, but either way, I'm entitled to compensation in either form if I work more than X hours a day.
"Salaried position" may have a specific meaning in the US but that doesn't mean that's exactly what salary universally means. I think that particular phrase is just language specific to the US and some other similar jurisdictions.
"Hourly" and "no compensation for overtime" aren't the only two logical possibilities.
And either way, since real output from most knowledge work isn't directly quantifiable anyway, I'd say people are at least to an extent paid for their time rather than directly for their output. That was the original claim, and I think whoever pointed that out was right about it being part of the problem.
> Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.
Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
> > Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.
> Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything! I am honestly curious about how different labor laws exist around the world. But I don't think this distinction is rare. Germany, for example, has one of the most regulated and regarded-as-worker-friendly payroll systems in the world. But even Germany still makes a distinction between the fixed pay scale and außer tarif employees, which almost universally has an expectation of vertrauensarbeitszeit ("trust-based working hours" i.e. non-hourly work)
I would be surprised if there is a modern country that does not make this distinction between hourly and non-hourly pay in some way.
It's a bit complicated since most of the terms are not directly written in my employment contract.
The overall framework concerning working time comes from labour law. That would include the maximum of regular working hours per day (8 hours max per day or 40 per week in the legislation, can be less by contract or agreement). The law also includes provisions for flexible working time which allows the actual daily working time to vary the way I described, i.e. +n hours here and -n hours there, instead of being a constant X hours a day. Flextime arrangements are the norm in white collar work.
Overtime (exceeding regular hours without being compensated with reduced hours at another time) is also possible but must be explicitly agreed upon and paid for. That requirement also comes from the legislation.
Some of the details concerning overtime compensation and the implementation of flextime arrangement come from a collective labour agreement. The collective agreement does not and cannot supersede legislation but it can specify some of the details that the law leaves open.
My employment contract specifies the (regular) number of hours per day and defers to the collective agreement for most other details such as the specifics of flextime.
There is a distinction between hourly and monthly pay, as in my example about the varying number of working days per month; hourly would mean that I'm literally paid X euros per hour multiplied by Y recorded hours of working time. My contract is still essentially time-based, so it may be more on the "hourly" side of the divide the way you see it, but it's considered a salary, not an hourly wage. I'm still effectively selling my time.
Some roles are indeed exempt from legislation that concerns working time. That would include e.g. independent leadership roles, so if you're a director of an organization or a branch, the legislation does not apply. Your working hours aren't limited and you're not legally entitled to compensation for exceeding any specific number of hours. Other exemptions made on the legislation level include e.g. teachers, researchers, clergy, and some public sector and government roles. Some of those may still have regulations set in a collective labour agreement specific to the sector, but practically, if you're e.g. a professor, you probably end up working more than 40 hours a week and the concepts of comp time or paid overtime don't exist.
The exemptions do not include e.g. most engineers or most other white-collar work. Some people in those roles do end up doing unpaid and unaccounted for overtime in practice but that's despite the regulation, not in accordance with it.
IANAL and I don't really have the time to verify which parts of the rules exactly come from legislation and which ones come from a collective agreement, but that's the overall picture. It's been the same way in every white collar job I've had outside of the academia.
This is in Finland.
> I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything!
Ok, sorry. I read it as more of insistence or questioning than curiosity.
> Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view
I'm beginning to wonder the same. I don't really understand the "job market" in the US or the regulations around it. Every time I hear or read something about it I get even more confused.
> I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week.
That's the kind of employment contract I'm familiar with.
> If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point.
That's one possibility. To take time in lieu. Another is to be paid overtime. They're both different ways of dealing with the same situation.
> The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached
Precisely the point I made prior as well. We seem to have a similar understanding of this.
> most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.
Indeed. That's the point I raised in my first comment on this thread.
> So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality.
There's always an expectancy of output in any work relation. That said, if your pay is more tied to "doing work" for a certain amount of time, you're getting paid for that. Normally your output or some approximation of it will be used to determine better pay, or even whether you get to keep the job. Even if you get fired though, you're normally still given a notice period - and get paid for showing up during that.
That's still selling your time, with an expectation of output.
It sort of makes sense that working life discussions here tend to have a US-centric bias, considering the connections to SV. But it does seem to lead to kind of narrow assumptions sometimes.
I get paid for 40 hours of my time per week, on average. So I am being paid for my time. Every extra hour I work in one week, I have to compensate in another. And vice versa.
Both salary and hourly roles ultimately have expectations around both time spent and work contributed. On average, in both cases, the time spent portion is tracked more closely while the worked performed portion is functionally given more leeway.
That’s why the original comment nails it in the first two paragraphs. It may not be intended this way, but effectively people are paid for their time much moreso than their output.
Maybe it would be more clear if you specified salary is in exchange for a certain minimum amount of output, then I would kinda agree. But then you also are expected be at work for the remainder of your contractual work hours. So it’s not as easy as saying one or the other is completely true, it’s a mixture of both time and output
My contract explicitly states that any week in which I perform any work, I’m to be paid a prorated weekly amount.
Managers do not care what hours I put in if my tickets + other duties are performed — and typically, I managed to get away with 35-37 hours. Some weeks were more like 50. Again, the role was duty based, not hourly.
Every salaried job I’ve had has been output, not time.
> IMO the simple problem here is that people are being paid for their time, not their output. Sure, the output is what is valued, but folks are paid for their time via an annual salary.
This is incorrect in the United States. Most WFH employees are under exempt status, and so by definition from US department of labor, they are explicity _not_ paid for their time. I'm on mobile so I can't find the link easy on the DOL website, but on desktop it is easy to find.
i don't think op was referring to a legal definition but rather how things de facto are seen. I'm technically salaried too but i can't say I'm really valued based on my output
Here's a perspective from a SWE (15+ YoE) from a third world country about this whole WFH thing.
I have a Linkedin profile, connections to SWEs that I have previously worked with in my country and who have since moved to the US/EU. Plenty of those connections posted gushing words about our time together in the same engineering team on the recommendations section of my Linkedin profile.
I have a huge Nota bene at the top of my profile telling recruiters that I'm only interested in fully remote positions and that I'm not interested in leaving my country no matter what.
I work for a telecom company here and over the years I have worked with all sorts of stacks/technologies ranging from reverse engineering, embedded C, crypto.. and even more recently rewriting a (small) production tool from C++ to Rust. My salary over the last 10 years has gotten to an impressive ~ $40_000 per annum, and that's before taxes.
It's a safe/stable job and I have family to take care of that I can not leave, so the prospect of landing a fully remote job writing js for a mouth watering TC of $200_000+ makes me salivate.
But every advertized "fully remote" job out there comes with a huge asterisk: "it's fully remote but you have to be in a country where our company has offices, or you'll have to settle for being a contractor getting paid half that and dealing with taxes in your country and time zones that ungodly, or better yet, get paid in stable shitcoins!".
So whenever I see the people with mouth watering TCs rewriting the same crappy code bases in $new_hyped_js_framework on HN/Reddit complain about hybrid work schedules or fully remote but once in 6 months you have to hop on a flight to be at the bi-annual work barbecue... I wonder when a truly full remote positions will be available, because there are a lot of us out there with incredible skills/YoE working for peanuts because we can't leave our disabled loved ones behind to be in the US/EU... or when a non-shitty-LLM will be good enough to turn english sentences into viable business logic. Now, _that_ will make me too appreciate my shitty salary instead of being envious of you guys' TCs.
>In reality, a smart business should be grateful that there’s someone that can get shit done in less than 8 hours, it means that they can do more for you in less time, and if they’re doing non-competitive side work, maybe you should pay them more so they don’t go and do that full-time.
In my view, the biggest crime of a manager is disconnecting my incentives from my work as an IC. If I create more value, it should be a manager's top priority to create the positive feedback loop of incentives. Because why else am I doing more, then? It should seem like common sense, but every manager I've had has not been remotely interested in creating that positive feedback loop. Instead "that salary is too far out of the band for this role and wouldn't be fair to everyone else, and you have to do X,Y,and Z to qualify for this other role, and your last self-review was too honest so I'm going to use it to negotiate against you..." I've even had a manager complain about my salary being too close to his salary, as if there was some requirement for his ego that I make less than him!
Every raise or promotion I've ever had has devolved into some form of "you're giving me this or I'm going to leave", and then 9/10 times they reluctantly fork it over. There is no good faith, only power. And power is getting what you want after calling all the bluffs. Managers are adversarial, and their role is to get you to do as much as possible for as little as possible, while at the same time swallowing their pride when their bluffs are called. I hate that it is like this, because it could be a lot better. But nobody seems to know how to manage.
Don't get me wrong, I get the position that managers are in. The upper management demands they get certain results, and if they don't do it, they get replaced. But it's still a failure of the manager for not communicating effectively how creating positive feedback loops with your top performers will make everybody money. Of course this depends on the upper management to actually pick valuable things to work on...
The reason positive feedback loops don't exist is because it's very hard to properly measure impact and managers aren't trusted more than anyone else to do it. They act like they're trusted but the reason they can't set compensation at will is because they're not actually trusted.
For example, Managers get to pick salaries for their reports. Every manager now says every one of their reports is a top performer and especially those who kiss their backsides. Okay, shit, rewind. Company creates a massive set of detailed metrics with which they can measure every employee and team. Metrics are incomplete, get gamed, morale decreases. Okay, shit, rewind. Etc. Etc.
Honestly, a lot of bosses and employees that prefer in office work quite simply hate their families and don't want to be around then.
I get that, sometimes being around the wife and kids can be grating 24/7. Thankfully I'm not one of them.
Then there are bosses who simply want the control.
Last contract I had I was required to go into an office 3 days a week. All of my meetings were on chat and video. None were in person. They just wanted adult daycare.
I wish we could just do hybrid in office days Monday through Wednesday and then remote Thursday and Friday. No one does this and it drives me nuts.
The trend over the long term however are fully remote companies based in co working offices. My wife works for a fortune 500 that is pushing towards remote first because that means eliminating expensive office rent.
Companies that have spent a lot of money on flashy offices or outright own their real estate will be more resistant to this simply because of sunk cost. However not having to pay rent or a mortgage speaks to shareholders.
Outside of FAANG and a few select finance companies, ove the long term if companies can avoid rent they'll do so and I don't blame them.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] thread1. Gig jobs v/s ‘full time’ jobs:
Assessment in favour of the bosses - Companies seem to be okay with people in gig jobs working multiple jobs.
Assessment against the bosses - Most full-time jobs need not be full-time jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done by people working multiple jobs. And thus most full time jobs can be done from home.
Conclusion: Contract laws need to change to prevent certain types of contracts from being drawn. For example, no contracts should prevent a person seeking additional employment.
2. Culture: Bossess feel that culture development slows with WFH. A hybrid work setup can help prevent this.
If the employee is doing all that's expected of them, then the "contract for owning someone for a period of time" (not my words - and relatively creepy) should be fulfilled. It doesn't seem a period of time that is expected but a force of work delivered.
I am willing to be wrong in this assumption, however, given the right argument.
If the work you are expected to do is fixed--your boss can't come to you with an ad hoc assignment that's not in some formal job description--then you're not an employee, you're an independent contractor. (And that means the corporation no longer has to worry about things like your health care and retirement benefits.)
The real value proposition for having an employee vs. an independent contractor is that the work the employee is expected to do is not fixed--your boss can come to you as an employee with an ad hoc assignment that's not in any formal job description and expect you to do it. In other words, the belief the article describes, that paying someone a full time salary as an employee means the company owns their time, is actually mistaken (even though I think it is very common among corporate managers and executives). What you're actually paying them for is being able to give them ad hoc new jobs to do as the company's environment and needs change, and not have to go through the hassle of writing up a new contractor's statement of work and negotiating a new price. The only justification you need to give an employee a new ad hoc assignment is "this is going to help the company".
I'm not saying that's good or bad, however it is definitely not clearly stated-- not in schools, universities or in job descriptions. Society tells your for decades you're supposed to specialize and then get paid for that skill, yet most companies are expecting so much more.
That is the kind of "ownership" that the article is describing, but I don't think it's actually true. Even employees sitting in a office aren't focusing full time on the business for every single minute they are in the office.
That's why I phrased it instead in terms of assignments and how specific the definition of the job is, as compared with an independent contractor. You might not be focused on the business every single minute of your nominal working hours--but your boss can come to you in any one of those minutes and basically redefine what your job is. That's what the company "owns" if you are an employee. And that can happen just as easily if you're remote.
> it's also about owning part of the business
But employees, unless they are also stockholders, don't own any part of the business. And even in cases where employees do own stock on paper, their ownership share is so tiny that it arguably does not provide any meaningful motivation.
> But employees, unless they are also stockholders, don't own any part of the business. And even in cases where employees do own stock on paper, their ownership share is so tiny that it arguably does not provide any meaningful motivation.
Right, even though you don't own the business, it seems the expectation is still to behave in a way that you do. That is at least rewarded, if not punished by not promoting and/or having a negative review because you don't have the "soft skills".
Having slack is key to being an effective business. And slack is literally people not being at max utilization 40 hours a week.
What if my definition of full time work takes person A 60 hours and person B 30 hours?
It's all about those expectations. It seems having a trained skillset is never enough. It's not about practicing what you are an expert in, but rather increasing business value at any costs, even if it means doing a lot more than what you were trained to do. These expectations are typically more business skills, management skills, and even marketing skills. This is why going to the office is seen as a must for many "leaders" of companies.
You're not just a programmer that contributes code, you are also a business person who ones part of the company, a manager who has to lead teams of people, and a marketing person that needs to think what the end user wants and how to deliver it. When there are so many cross-disciplinary expectations (which are rarely stated clearly), it's no surprise they want people in one place in order to have them coordinate through this complex web of roles.
All these problems are coming about because software doesn't fit nicely into any of the traditional arrangements. We really fit in more as consultants external to the business, but the software consulting industry as it exists today is corrupted by the perverse incentives of generating billable hours and essentially scamming clients.
I'd like to see the emergence of software partnerships modeled after law firms, where engineers are owners and not employees. The problem is, tech is currently dominated by criminal monopolists who regularly collude to drive wages down in violation of numerous laws. Musk and his PayPal mafia buddies are running the same racket right now, that Apple and Google were convicted of 10 years ago. They would simply refuse to work with any tech worker co-ops, because they have monopsony power over our labor, and they can just lobby Congress for more H1-Bs.
Speaking as huge wfh proponent as the project I'm managing has benefited from it tremendously (we had one primary and a few satellite offices before covid. Satellite offices were effectively second tier citizens. Wfh enabled everybody to be on the same page and tier. We are way more effective and I dread the return to primary office to exclusion of satellite ones. Everybody else's milleage may vary).
Because it's hard to quantify what's expected of someone.
It's much easier to just count the time they're working, so that's what we're doing.
Turns out just being present is a substantial part of what many (most?) employees are paid for. Participation and quality of contributions are optimizations once that bare minimum is attained...
What do you think school is conditioning everyone to do anyways? Get up early and show up, follow instructions, every. day.
We expect to purchase X hours of your time in exchange for Y dollars.
If you can get more done in that time, you’re worth more.
If you can get less done, you’re worth less.
If you try to do the minimum “force of work” required, you’re worth less, and likely to be replaced by someone who will maximize the value produced in the amount of time that has been paid for.
If layoffs come, they’ll be kept over lower performers.
When it comes to setting direction for the company or team, they’ll have more political capital.
Then you already fundamentally have a remote job. A non-remote job would organize business units / teams by location so that you're in the same office as people you're working with. And yes, this would require relocations and imply a smaller hiring pool. That's the tradeoff of not having remote work, not just spending more time in the office. You're not comparing remote to non-remote work, you're just comparing two flavors of remote work.
ADDED: You can force co-location but, as you say, it reduces company options as well as employee options. And may not even be very practical; I work extensively with other teams both in another state and in Europe.
much less time wasted in between meetings.
they definitely also get more done
The real difference in my experience is that extroverts prefer WFH and those tend to more often become managers however plenty are ICs as well.
Why are meeting room chairs so uncomfortable?
I find working from home sad and depressing.
My home is great. I like going outside of it. I like to meet my colleagues in person. I need the seperation. I find video calls dystopian.
I am in a minority, it seems.
So it goes. I moved on from professional software development two years ago now.
edit, my replies are limited: Being in my home is great! But it's designed for leisure, not for fake sugar-free social interactions through a screen. I leave my work at work, and I use my home as a base to explore from, not as some sort of tortoiseshell to retreat into.
I totally understand wanting to be in the office when your whole team is there and your work lets you brainstorm with them all the time. My work environment was like that before and I totally understand preferring the office in that situation.
But most places aren't like that, most places half your colleagues are in india.
I fully understand that some people prefer wfh, and I think it's cool that they can do it. But on the other hand, I think many people have fell into the trap of working from home all the time since the pandemic, and I think the social isolation will catch up to them.
This is like saying that you have holidays for your nature. I still like to have flowers in the garden or go to the park as well.
The amount of time saved by not having to commute is easily less dystopian than any video calls if I can spend it with my family instead of sitting alone in a huge metal box for (unpaid) hours every week.
All the people I see at my (current and previous) jobs complaining about WFH and wanting to be in the office are the people who I'd see there still working at 10pm.
If being in your home is "sad and depressing", perhaps that is a "your home" problem?
I started here at the beginning of the pandemic, so my only times at the office have been to pick up equipment, or for large all-hands meetings. The majority of my team does not live in state, and half do not live in the country.
Yet, prior to the acquisition, management had begun to talk about transitioning back to the office. It made no sense to me. We'd been working perfectly fine as an all-remote team for nearly 3 years. I'd heard similar sentiments from other departments.
I've seen people go and "work" for decades in an office and do nothing all day. There's nothing new under the sun.
Exactly. So either the 'butts in seats' are to please the managers or they're incompetent at discovering/dealing with unproductive employees, whatever that might be the reason. So which is it?
Self-employed knowledge workers generally work both 'remotely' and 'at the office' everywhere, all of the time. Salaried people don't have this kind of attachment to their work so they need to be compelled to. Being present at the office is a good behavioral tool for that, forcefully isolating them from other concerns and temptations. There are many ways to replicate that in a remote working situation, but they mostly require pervasive monitoring of the employee.
As the world is coming out of the trough of disillusionement from WFH, it seems that the trend will be towards new monitoring tools or other ways of proof of work. This is the compromise workers will have to make, because working remotely is a too damn good thing to miss.
Edit: the other option is for everyone to become contractors and charge for results
I guess it feels too meritocratic? I used to work in grocery and while stocking some people could shelve 30+ boxes of product an hour while others slowly put up 10. Is it fair to pay both those people the same hourly rate when their output is so disparate? It feels bizarre to me in retrospect that being able to "own" the 8 hours of someones life is more important than them actually achieving something during that time.
A common example is doordash and similar delivery services where people are paid by delivery and not by time spent on the job, so they race around ignoring all traffic laws and nearly get themselves killed half the time to shave off those extra 30 seconds.
The only incentive for quality work is a quality working environment, quality product to work on, and quality people to work with.
I don't work in an IT shop, but we have no issue seeing who is slacking and who is actually working when working from home just from the deliveries, no monitoring required. But I guess that's included in your "other proof of work".
There are some people who need discipline though, there were some guys in my previous company that were notorious for showing up at the 10 am teams meeting with a bed head and a yawn or the 2pm meeting outside in their garden. You could also notice their output go down quite drastically.
neither waking up at 10am nor taking a meeting from outside imply that they are not being productive. We should measure output by output, not by how it's done. By linking the two I feel like you have a bias against people waking up late or taking a meeting from a non conventional location. Those things are not inherently bad unless they are also linked to low output.
My view is that it's perfectly fine for companies to choose how they want to work, and people can choose to work at the companies that match their preference. If there is a significant business advantage to working one way or another, the problem will solve itself.
Personally, I think I work about twice as well or more in the office than at home. But I also want to be able to not go into the office if I'm not feeling up for it whenever I want. So I wouldn't want to work at an office-only company.
One of the big problems in this area is it's really difficult to come up with an alternate metric than "butt-in-seat" time for employees, even though that's a terrible metric for most office jobs.
But I think it's fair to say, hey at our company the deal is we pay you X for Y hours of time per year. That's not the deal I'd want, I'd prefer to be more flexible on timing and be measured in some way on output, but I don't know a generalizable way to do that.
People who want to WFH? Great! People who want to work in the office? Great! People who want to work in the office, but only if everyone else is there to fulfil their desired workday experience? That’s a problem.
And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
I think that companies have to choose a model, then employees will choose companies based on this criteria.
I’ve worked remote for a very long time including cycles in and out of it.
Some remote work principles come and go and others remain mandatory but are often ignored.
Primarily, people are not as good communicators as they imagine themselves to be and don’t dedicate a great deal of effort to improving constantly. This is in person, online and remote.
Underdeveloped communication skills play themselves out through attempting to over communicate for hybrid work but the core competency is not where it needs to be. One test is if someone can’t explain a slide deck using only a voice call, do they know the material at all?
Doing hybrid/distributed work well requires a clean slate in terms of space design both at office and home, and technology that elevates communication to the point where it’s invisible. Since that’s rare, working with what’s in place at a company and will take work if both parties to be willing to do it.
Employees also have to realize a pandemic created many of the nascent remote/hybrid practices and there is a lot of room for improvement.
Since most places will never invest or obsess enough over both deputizing and empowering their folks to have an unstoppable environment both at home and work, most are doomed to fail at it.
Generally, startups work at a quicker pace from the very start at one table, until enough is in place to start leaving the building and bring back insights. Some ideas will not need this as a must but also not be their full potential.
Startups are more than features and software development ceremony. In many cases it’s establishing a new way tech will work for and care for users.
Edit: grammar and clarity.
The water cooler chat model, that tends to lead to other outcomes. Maybe the core goal does see some innovation, but documenting that becomes much harder.
There are also detractions to the everyone together models. Anyone with kids _will_ bring the latest mutations of colds into work. They'll vector out of daycare and schools through the parents and infect everyone in the office. Frequent Fliers might also have a similar effect based on their sheer exposure. Allowing WFH isolates these fault domains and minimizes the spread.
I will say, if those are my two options, I'm going to choose getting sick for a few days a year over filling out thousands of words of tech specs that don't actually clarify anything for anyone (because all of the actual questions get answered over slack DMs anyway) every single time.
(Not saying all tech specs are bad, but they're certainly not a one size fits all process and if remote work means we need more of them then that means we're spending more time writing them then we need to be)
Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%.
The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
> Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.
You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested.
The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.
We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.
Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time.
I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated.
in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again."
might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me.
COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!
> What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?
I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.
So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
But anyway, needing everyone into an office because you struggle isn't the fault of WFH
This isn't about "me struggling", it's about ways the entire team's productivity can be affected by choosing an asynchronous vs synchronous code review model. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/context-switchin...! has some more info on how certain types of context switches can be more damaging than others. I've been working remote for 3 years now with a synchronous code review system, and I wouldn't give it up for the world.
Reviewing code together is reasonable, but having to review it as soon as you say "done it" is an interruption.
Yes, absolutely, if that hour is going to be productive and collaborative in coming up with ways to make the code better (which every in-person code review I've been in has been)
> everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year
No, everything that you can't understand without asking me should be fixed by both of us so that it can be understood by everybody. Approving hard to understand code just because it's been "documented" hurts the entire codebase.
Correct, yes. Your current problem is at a state of being done, beyond any code review feedback you may receive. Expecting people to immediately cancel everything they're doing and review your code is not only absurd but also leads to poor quality code reviews. Because rather than actually think about the code and spend time on it, you want them to approve it as fast as possible so you are unblocked as soon as possible.
> Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching.
The reviewer has to context switch and juggle multiple tasks. They have to understand what your code does, why it does it and why it was necessary in the first place. They have to open the ticket, read what it's about, read any conversations and then figure out any potential concerns.
> In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task).
If you have one person review your code then I question that your code review process even matters. For extensive reworks, redesigns etc you are going to pull in more individuals and there is going to be more time taken.
> In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
They take far more time in my experience. I've had review turnaround be a few hours to a day in an async context for major reviews. They review the code, we hop on a call when convenient and go over the issues in 15m and we're done. If it's nothing major or understandable over text, then comments are good enough.
Otherwise, most other people are either available, or will tell you when they are not and you can easily say back "no worries, ping all of us when you're done" and everything moves 100% more efficiently.
If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails
> You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway.
In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting.
The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish.
Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.
An organization should have the balls to say "fuck it, we're 100% remote work" then let employees figure out how that would work for everyone and hoe to organize their meetings and work schedule for everyone. Or they should equally have the same amount of balls to say "we're 100% work from office with the occasional exceptions like we did before and you should figure it out".
I've been wanting a commitment to one of the approaches from management for a long time. I'd also like some form of commitment from other companies when I'm applying for jobs. I have no interest in working in a "hybrid" team. You're either 100% remote or you're not. Just tell me which you are and let me pick.
What's funny is your solution "or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in" should be a meeting invite rather than a morning ambush.
That’s fine. I’ll catch you next morning or when you’re grabbing a soda or water or …
> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.
This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others.
The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time?
It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.
Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication
That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.
Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.
In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.
Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this.
Also, you've moved the goalposts again. The GP suggested video. Not writing a book in Markdown.
Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars.
As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.
I get your point, less work for you and job security, but don't be surprised if you're not met with sympathy or not taken seriously.
"Documenting" is not "documenting everything down to the T". You can have that attitude with verbal communication too.
Your problem is not remote work, your problem is that you seem to work in a toxic environment. And judging by the discussion style you employ here, it could also be that you're used to rely more on intimidation than arguments. That indeed doesn't work nearly as well in an e-mail.
Now, I have worked in remote-first teams, in an office-first team that during Covid was suddenly forced to become a remote-first team and in one of those oh-so-dreaded "mixed" teams. The latter has some challenges but nothing that cannot be worked out. And you will find assholes, that report their own account of events to the boss all the time, in the office as well.
What I never encountered was, that quickly getting a few colleagues together to exchange ideas about a problem would be some kind of challenge. You post to the group channel, quickly explain the problem and ask people to join a short call. Done.
There seem to be trust issues between you and your team. No wonder.
You just described why written communication is vastly better.
Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.
This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.
Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible.
If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.
I don't entirely agree, I think hybrid can work well. It's just that like your colleague Robert the remote workers need to realise that there is a trade-off. You might save on commute etc but the price you pay is that in-office staff might make more decisions etc without you especially if there is a critical mass of workers in-office.
People who prefer the office shouldn't force their preferences on those who prefer remote but remote workers shouldn't try and force the company to be structured around them. Life is all about trade-offs and so long as people go in with eyes wide open it can work well for everyone (in that more people get to work in ways more closely aligned with their preferences).
I've also known teams that basically had a rule that as long as anyone was remote you worked from a work perspective as if everyone were. But it sounds as if that wasn't acceptable in this case to the majority.
It is getting increasingly tiresome to have some people who prefer remote behaving as if the world revolves around them. It isn't enough that they get to work remote, they also need to have everyone and everything else change so that there own lifestyles choice doesn't lead to any downsides for them.
It's possible if all team members in the office went out for lunch and didn't see the messages and emails in time. The remote members wouldn't exclude them, but the in person team members wouldn't be able to provide their input in a timely manner.
That's the point. Remote workers normally don't exclude the ones who go to the office, and office workers should not exclude remote workers either. That's how inclusivity works in many other cases too - you don't rely on spoken communication if you have a deaf colleague, you don't send your blind colleague architecture diagram in PNG, you don't require attendance to after-work beers, because people have all the kind of circumstances that require them to be present for their families etc.
There is a small price of convenience for in-office workers, but the total result is better documentation of decision making, less influence from office politics, decisions being taken more rationally - and that is not even considering that you can employ people from different cities, countries and timezones.
You added this yourself. Documenting stuff is not pointless or "paperwork" (e.g. filling forms to get certain things done).
Working remotely async requires people to document their meetings, have documentation in place for newcommers to your project, etc. It's far from pointless.
The alternative is to have these mythical "watercooler chats" that people keep saying exist where 2-3 people gather together and exchange ideas and decide on things without letting other participate or know about until it's too late. I've never seen much of that while I worked in an office but if it exists, the company has way bigger issues.
Remote work forces companies to work as they should have already be doing things. Or in other words, it exposes dysfunctional orgs.
The map is not the territory.
Open floor full of people - all doing Teams calls...
With colleagues who could not come, because there was not enough desks at the office, for everyone to book...
This variety can be a big deal!
One aspect is I am completely free to maximize an opportunity. Work at customer site, work at home, work at office... whatever gets the task done at max value.
Having that experience over a sustained time has shown me a few things, and one of those is how communication channels and context work.
Let's take that water cooler convo.
People like those because they appear casual, spontaneous and the context is compartmentalized away from the usual, sort of a back or side channel.
I have the same conversations over Skype, for example, or via a phone call while traveling.
I believe this struggle will result in more people being more flexible in how they communicate and why and as they do, the strong pressure to be in an office all the time will be reduced in a large number of cases.
There is almost no difference between a Skype chat, text messages, phone call or water cooler, break room, smoke room chat.
People who try it will soon adapt and everyone involved will be better off.
I can't stand the creeping of "social" office life into my private life. Hey let's catch drinks after / see the match together / get to know each other. It brings way more negatives than positives into the work life. I spend less energies deflecting this kind of interactions in remote work, and I can concentrate on the actual work even more. It's okay to be detached.
Not just documentation -- all communication needs to be more explicit and deliberate. Organic "water cooler chats" can happen but in different ways.
Task-based mixed as in "those activities require coming to the office" doesn't create a lot of problems, but you will discover that workers will demand some incentive to engage on those activities.
The one that is the worst of both worlds is just the "we require your presence 3 times a week", but that is just the failure mode the article talks about presenting itself on a different way.
Meanwhile, employees who strive in in-person collaboration suffer in their development.
In terms of the collaboration, you are implying that I need to be in the office in order for you to be able to progress as a human. I’d once again wonder why you see this as a problem created by the WFH employee and not the in-office employee who needs personal emotional support from others in order to get the job done.
All above issues could be alleviated with some meeting etiquette, but that was challenging on its own. In our case the vast majority of teams didn't have remote members, so there wasn't much willingness to introduce company wide rules.
The simple solution was to introduce a single rule. If one person is remote, everyone must be remote (join from their own laptop).
Not OP but we are forced to dial into the meetings separately even if many of us are in the office and could use a whiteboard in a conference room. Remote colleagues can join the conference room remotely and at least those in office can get to have a conversation of a higher fidelity. But our company bans it for "fairness" - as in everyone must suffer Zoom equally.
I usually point at the way F1 teams do their meetings where everyone wears a headset, even if a bunch are in the same room: https://tinyurl.com/2uenm69f
But often if you suggest this to traditionally office based people they feel daft doing it and plough ahead with a mic/speaker in the middle of the room and the remote guys become second class citizens, not being able to hear half the room.
The only thing they do not handle well is multiple simultaneous conversations and people talking over each other, but those shouldn’t be happening anyway.
* The headphones must block outside sound sufficiently, so you only hear the people in the same room through the call and not directly.
* Your headset must not pick up when other people in the same room are speaking.
But even then, it has serious drawbacks compared to an in-person meeting:
* Latency. With anything over a 50 ms roundtrip (including hardware), people inadvertently start speaking over each other, and typical latencies are much much higher than that. It becomes more difficult to break into a discussion, trying to make a small interjection often disrupts the flow of conversation.
* Lack of non-verbal communication. Webcams remedy this to some extent (though many are negative to using webcams in their home for other reasons).
It can be argued that this is a small price to pay for the ability to WFH, but it's disingenuous to say that pushback against "everyone on headset" is just due to people feeling "daft" doing it.
It's just the reason I've been given. It would have been disingenuous for me to say latency or non-verbal communication was a factor because no one's given me either as a reason. Possibly because I'm talking about what are already hybrid environments trying to improve, as opposed to assuming an office environment is the default position - so neither of those were differentiating factors because they were already present.
there’s really no excuse not to have a decent conference phone in meeting rooms. i’ve seen them in use since 2000 at least, and personally purchased one that wasn’t even $1k.
we had meetings and calls with remote people long before covid.
Most recent one I've used was a Meeting Owl 3 which I think was in that $1k ballpark. It has quite a novel way of picking up on the 360 camera who it thinks is talking which works pretty well, but the audio just isn't anywhere near as good as everyone having their own mic attached. I'm not sure anything could be.
That's because F1 cars are LOUD and without noise cancelling and headsets you may miss someone's comment.
What issues do you see with it?
The startup I work for has an office, for those who want to use it, but there's no obligation, and many of us work remote full-time. This seems to be working out well for us, so I'm curious what obstacles you foresee.
Negotiate what you want from your employer, move on to a different employer, or hang a shingle. Leave the entitlement out of it. This has nothing at all to do with “freedom.” Business is business. If you sell your labor to someone who chooses to buy it, you’re in business.
Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity.
In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him.
The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.
Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?
Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. In the middle term, companies will simply replace those who down tow the company line with those who will. Gather ye WFH days while ye may.
Prognostications with no limiting principle are intellectually lazy; they also lack the substance to be respected as cynical.
The industry has gone through that once. The second time around even the MBAs learned how remarkably stupid offshoring is. All of the remote/WFH companies have been going about it for three or more years now. If all these jobs were going to be offshored why hasn't it happened by now?
What exactly prevented this fantasy from happening over the last several years? In other words, what makes you so confident that someday in the future things will converge into this prediction? The timelines of your argument don't really match up, making this really no different than Pascal's wager.
One potential reason is that some companies don't treat WFH employees as first class citizens, and due to various reasons in-person employees get ahead, get better projects, are promoted more, etc. I think I agree with the child comment saying companies probably have to pick one.
Give me remote and you can screw up everything else. I am happy being a lifeless drone while remote.
Jeez, now that I'm thinking about, I really do have struck gold. Maybe I should stick around a little longer before I make the jump to a (even) better paying job...
I told her I like what I do, and I love how little it demands of me. I have no desire whatsoever to devote more of my time and energy to work for the sake of more money or career "advancement." I'm perfectly content with the idea of continuing to do the same work for the same pay, as long as it keeps pace with inflation.
There is nothing I want or need that I don't have or couldn't get as things are. My desires are right-sized for my role. And I'm not even a 6-figure earner. I just also don't want things that require it, like living in a major city or traveling.
Don't try to force me forward into a role or life you think I should want just because I could have it. I already have what I want, and I wouldn't trade contentment for any of that stuff other people have.
Weird language.
The workplace is not about freedoms, it's about an effective team.
Are in-office teams more effective? WFH teams more effective? The debate will rage on.
For decades, the most successful companies in the world found value in geographic focus, despite high cost of living, questionable infrastructure, stagnant development, etc. Were they right? Are they right? IDK.
Kaban? Scrum? Waterfall? Make your argument.
Just don't reduce a good faith argument about team practice to toddlers.
---
EDIT: FWIW, my 2c as a manager for many years, I notice some ICs focus narrowly on their individual "productivity" without considering the sum of the parts. (And I'm sure the reverse is true as well.)
So it’s more complex than you’re making it out to be - you can’t just tell people to do whatever they want; you need to align with the rest of your team/company.
For anyone working at a company with either multiple locations, dealing with customers, etc your communication is going to be chat, email, video calls anyway
Fail to see how you avoid that
And you still fail at gp’s points: RTO folks wanting WFH to go back to the office
You don't. But you interact with your own team 1-2 orders of magnitudes more than the rest of the company. So as long as your team is all in the office, you get a nice boost to communication and you avoid having to do all team activities on zoom.
To insist? No. However, I think there's a reason to prefer that their colleagues WFH. Being the only WFH in a group that's otherwise all in the office together suuuuuuuucks, or at least it did in the several pre-pandemic years that I lived it. What I remember is constantly being informed of decisions that "we" had reached while I wasn't present, of every meeting being full of cross-chatter and lunch-eating so I couldn't hear, of not being able to see (let alone approach) the whiteboard, of being interrupted or cut off more than anyone else because of the latency, and so on. Most of this abated somewhat when the pandemic came along and everyone was remote, though the "hallway conversations" remained exclusive even when they were online. That might have been fixable with enough support from managers and other allies, but only if everyone had remained remote. "All remote" and "only remote" are very different experiences.
> There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
Your pun is noted, and I think apropos because this does show up in politics too. The attitude that "freedom" exists only within a certain social structure with oneself at its apex, and that others' (well justified) rejection of that structure is an abridgement of one's own freedom, is unfortunately rather common.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump
I have 2 close friends that are co-founders/CEOs of big companies. One, funny enough, is a YC company as well. The YC is 100% remote only, the other is big on RTO and my friend has posted multiple times his strong feelings for RTO on placed like LinkedIn.
Additionally, I work a decent size start up as well. A company where a couple of years ago they might have been bragging about record revenue growth during the pandemic but is now putting strict RTO policies in place.
Their communication/announcements about this policy are almost comical. The messages are long and they never really articulate good reasons. They are of the flavor “research shows”, and then when people ask to see that research no one responds.
I’ve genuinely tried hard to understand the RTO argument in more depth beyond the typical “relationships are harder to build remotely” or “people slack off”. I’ve asked my friend about it repeatedly, along with some of the execs where I work, on top of the numerous tweets and LinkedIn posts. I’ve tried but I’ve never really found anything substantial, I’ve never found something where I could say, “you know, I disagree with you and dislike, but you have a point”.
Personally, the explanation that makes the most sense to me after all these discussions, is that it’s one of those subconscious biases that by definition they aren’t aware of.
It really feels to me like employers just simply begrudge workers getting any sort of win, getting any modicum of control over how they work and more importantly where they work. That’s before going into the added leverage wfh might give people when looking for new jobs. Very much to your point - the people who feel “empty” when not in the office should figure out how to solve that problem for themselves vs trying to undo one of the very few decent things that came out of the pandemic.
Waiting for the "research" [0] is the Silicon Valley rendition of Waiting for Godot.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258148
We don't have the ability to say "everyone should do what I want" but there can be workplace-wide policy. I empathize for people who feel it's pointless to RTO when half their colleagues are remote anyways. It diminishes the in-office experience, and I can respect that other people may desire a workplace where all are present in-person, even if I don't want that, but I can self-select out of an organization with that policy.
Unfortunately, we're starting from a default position where there really aren't, not in terms of the scope of supply and demand. Instead, the base position is in-office work, and the RTO's and Management would all argue they're the ones doing what you're suggesting here, and it's the WFH people being unreasonable, afterall, the workplace policy explicitly says to come into the office, at exact times, with exact places for you to go and do your work, and that's a policy that's been the default since the modern incarnation of "employment" and office work came to be.
So you can't just quit and go work somewhere else that matches your "culture", because the policies in place at most of these companies aren't crafted to fit, synergize or otherwise work with the companies culture. Their largely born out of legal liabilities and ongoing service contracts and legal agreements and leases and stuff that would be expensive to break.
Doesn't mean it can't be done, but they take one look at all that and start to panic as that is such a huge fundamental shift in organization, because the worst shift of all for going WFH for existing offices is that fear that middle management has that their employees can't be trusted, because they haven't trusted them or treated them with respect or really treated them as anything other than a disposable cog in the machine. Sure, plenty of places do care, and are transitioning/embracing WFH great. But we're talking about corporate America here and the trend setters and large employers that tend to set the pace and policy of the rest of the corporate world. There is no empathy when the bottom line is threatened for many of these institutions, and while they may even agree the end result would be superior to the previous way, they all too often view the cost of transition too high to be worth it, or at least, too high to be able to sell it too investors.
I am glad the discussion is happening though, that alone is such huge progress that me in 2019 wouldn't have expected in the next few years.
Kind of, though. If a single person wants to attend a meeting remotely, that forces everyone to talk to them remotely, which may be seen as the worst of both worlds by people at the office: commute to the office, and get bad quality (often worse than everyone remote) remote meetings.
Well, not really that much of a problem. We're an in-office company and it's working quite well. We just select for people who want to work like that. It's been pretty good.
If an office has only ever hired people to work in the office, a the people who worked for them remotely during the pandemic would be people who chose a job where they would be in an office. It's reasonable to expect they would prefer that environment and not mind returning (even if a few were converted to WFH preference by the experience). But any new hires chose WFH roles on purpose, and the conditions are being changed on them.
I worked for a company in 2017-8 where my whole team was remote, but then they decided to open offices and hire people to do the same work on-location. They flew me out to train them, and it was a disaster. My manager said, "I don't know what your problem is. All these other people work fine in an office."
I told her, "All these other people applied for an office job. They self-selected based on this requirement. I never, EVER would have. I do not work well in an office. I know this about myself, thus did not apply for an office job. Your temporary demand that I visit an office for two weeks is going exactly as I expected it would. I hate it, and it hates me."
Let's not forget that the opposite is also true. Most of us were hired to work in the office (before COVID), but after COVID most (?) companies kept going in various forms of hybrid work. My team never went back to the office. I didn't sign up to work from an empty office and take every meeting on zoom, but that's what I got.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad remote work is more popular now because it allowed me to move close to family. But had I decided to stay in the city I lived for the last 6 years, I would have to leave a company I love and look for a new job because I absolutely hate remote work.
It's probably largely industry-dependent, and probably split along several demographic lines besides, but only a handful (<10%ish) of my coworkers worked for the company before the pandemic.
The question is if any of the supposed benefits of office work exist, there's really no data I've seen . Remote has plenty of easily measurable benefits like no office costs, no commute, no office distractions, easier to recruit, salary arbitrage geographically, etc.
Remote work requires that Zoom calls and chat are used for almost everything, even if only 10% of people are not present.
Prior to coronavirus this was not how any of the companies that I dealt with worked (small companies with <5 offices). Some meetings were remote, but most were in the break room with real faces.
As a result, I left software development during the pandemic to pursue a life with more social interaction.
The cerebral element was balanced out for me before, then it wasn't.
(I say this as a 100% remote worker who's very glad of having had the opportunity to move close to family without losing my job)
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
As if.
WFH people might not care about the physical location of their coworkers, but they certainly care about what their teammates can or cannot do. Every team process needs to be tailored to remote workers.
If you join an in person team and then request to WFH you are basically expecting everyone to adapt to your way. "But hey don't worry, you can still sit the zoom meeting from the office if you want". How generous.
> There’s a very “my freedoms trump your freedoms” mindset to this.
Pot, meet kettle.
1. If most work in office and one is constant WFH, they will almost always feel more distant and excluded.
2. Some folks want to work from home, but when they do, their performance and quality will tank, like immediately. But they arent necessarily self aware enough to see its not working.
I think a place like this (Hacker News) is chock full of self-motivated higher achievers that are generally well suited for independant work from home and can overcome some of the negatives. But the reality is, there are LOADS of folks, especially in tech that arent that way, like at all.
If it can't be measured, maybe it's not real.
Also some jobs have ebs and flows of work and not everything is measured in binary pass/fail ways. And there are times when you need someone to engage even when it’s not traditionally busy.
I have had my remote employees tell me things when a "fire"/break-fix event starts and we call to engage during business hours often when that employee has been online all day to that point but now needs to be in a position to suddenly collaborate or share their screen.
"Power just went out"
"I am in the car"
"Internet is out" (we pay for their internet AND a mifi)
"My kids is sick"
Never gotten any of that from someone in office, worst case I have to grab them from the breakroom or they are clear cut out with a sick kid or helping their wife. Or they walk up unprompted and say they have to leave to deal with wife or kids. Those examples where a small sample and werent that, they werent unprompted my kid is sick i need to take the day they were said once something was assigned or they are asked to engage.
Peers have had similar where their direct reports are awol and they start getting texts from constituents saying “have you seen or heard from so and so, it’s been hours”
Again, I have some that are NEVER a problem and even more productive in the office. I totally support that. But since COVID I would say thats only been about 25% of my direct reports. It’s certainly not the majority. Some have, unfortunately, been let go as a result. Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work.
My point of the original comment is to point out that the folks here may have a bit of bias as it tends to have very highly motivated folks that may even be more productive when given a wide berth. I do that too with the folks that can manage it. But on the whole those are not the majority and arguably even exceptions to the rule and its those that are abusing this that are causing it to become policies to return to the office. One of my takeaways from COVID is that many adults dont have the self-discipline or self-motivation to be fully remote 100% or even 40%. Again not everyone but many/most.
Well, I'd say it's good. Remote work also requires commitment and responsibility. If the excuses are feeble and are always the same then, well...
> Unfortunately Executive leadership is seeing this in the non-tech divisions too and are now mandating less remote work.
Yeah, see above. It is important to reinforce that remote is not a "free for all".
Sure, everybody goes in an errand once in a while, but productivity/meeting attendance etc is needed
I wish people wouldn’t be on the take with stuff like this. I wish more were dedicated to their craft as lifelong learning too. But it is what it is.
Of course it is symmetrical. While designing a complex system, I prefer talking to colleagues in person over a whiteboard. Even if 3 of us are in the same room and 2 remote, my company forces everyone to log in and chat via Zoom. Separately from our individual laptops. We are not allowed to dial in from a conference room where we can use a whiteboard.
Another child offered the point of view that hybrid models are the worst of both worlds, which I agree with. Is the solution to go either or, and let workers pick companies based on the model they uphold? To me that seems like the way to go.
Over dial-up. In the 90s. Using CVS.
We know how to run efficient distributed organizations.
This is a problem primarily with executives who came of age in a marginally digitized world unable to navigate the new fully digital reality.
It is the final form of the pointy-haired boomer boss who looks around his physical desk whenever asked to find an icon “on his desktop.”
Among concerns with remote work, this one seems pretty far down the list.
Not to mention the legal ramifications. If your company IP is so critical that the legal consequences are not enough, you probably have other controls in place and it isn’t just sitting on an employee’s laptop.
Which is a real thing. The CEO I cofounded a small business with always had these level of "can they destroy our business" questions for me about foreign contractors he wanted to hire. I always said the same thing - "we have common-sense controls in place for our size, but at the end of the day, you have to trust the people you hire to be successful."
He never did stop the paranoia though.
This is literally a non-issue if your IT department is modestly competent
"They could sell it to hackers in Thailand" or he could get robbed on SF streets while going to the office to please some dum-dum manager.
This is a fear that remote work would somehow not provide value, not a fact. The perhaps unconscious choice of adjectives - "reliable" seems particularly indicative of a fear. If one isn't in a high security requirement field where things like usb ports are locked down even in office, why is there worry about data exposure with remote vs in office work?
This is a bit silly.
Kind of like saying Netflix imprisons our bodies on the couch for hours on end, and even charges us $20/month!
The reality is we’re getting compensated in exchange (monetarily in the case of a job, and with entertainment for the Netflix example).
For anyone who feels like their soul is captured or imprisoned at work, it’s time to start looking around for a new job or a new career that you’ll enjoy more than whatever you’re currently doing.
I’ve been trying to do this for years. Was getting close, but then the pandemic happened followed by layoffs, followed by a ton of other shit and now I’m not sure it’s possible. Especially regarding a “new career”.
It's not a one and done so some work and get paid, it is a takes-your-soul.
You can compare to say shoveling snow -- when you do a job to shovel somebody's walk, they aren't going to prevent you from shoveling the next door's walk too, but if you develop biomes research for one company in the morning, you generally can't go develop biomes research for another company in the afternoon
It does not matter if the job is done or not, some people (quite a few) are not in this to be efficient, prestige is part of the pay.
I am not saying that WFH is perfect, there are issues, but in most cases it is overall superior than mandatory office work.
> but in most cases it is overall superior than mandatory office work.
This is literally just "I like it more", but worded as a data oriented insight.
- Leaking roofs
- Stinky coworkers
- Shitty food
- Flickering lights
- Constant interruptions from people just saying "hi"
- Unproductive commutes
- No background noise of children in people's microphone.
- No exhausting hour long zoom calls. For me, online meeting is much more exhausting than in person.
- Watercooler discussion
- Parties
- Social circle
There's a segment of ICs around 30-36 years old who had a difficult time with lockdowns and only now starting to get their lives back together.[1] It's also a question whether or not WFH is a Title I accommodation. I'm sure there's plenty of disability and labor lawyers that can make the argument office settings are unnecessary and psychologically harmful.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29940404
And yes, for me WFH is much better, so much better that I'll never again work in an office if I can avoid it.
I think that I am about just as productive, but happier because of the increased freedom.
I think that people will vote with their feet on this subject, the toothpaste is out, this is not for everyone, but I don't think that a dozen of CEOs and VCs can decide for us all.
“I like it more” is a valid point period. Disguising “I like it more” in attempt to declare something objectively better is just biased nonsense.
> And yes, for me WFH is much better, so much better that I'll never again work in an office if I can avoid it.
Great! I’m glad you found this out about yourself. You’ll meet me in the middle in acknowledging that this is a feeling you hold about yourself and not a universal truth, surely.
> but I don't think that a dozen of CEOs and VCs can decide for us all.
You’re talking about something unrelated to my post. No individual person can declare their opinion as universal truth. The person I responded to did so, and I’m pointing out they’re as biased (and ridiculous) as the CEOs you’re disagreeing with.
Given the global nature of labor, as well as the ability to envision new ways of working the only barrier to these changes are entrenched powers
The only viable and ethical pathway I see going forward is re-organizing globally as cooperatives and union workplaces. I see no other way to rebalance our economic system to prioritize the growth of everybody.
However, this has always been the most existential, largest fight in human history, and that means that individuals as laborers need to actively collectivize
The fact that there’s often a large difference between them is certainly a problem and needs to be accounted for.
Haven’t capitalists forced their system, to be the default pathway for all of us via regulatory capture?
I am literally forming a cooperative right now, and it is insanely hard to find legal experts, lawyers, funding, or anything that would be trivially easy in a capitalistic fashion.
The legal structure of the US at least, does not understand the concept of non-stock organizations. Why? Because there is a demand for legal control that is not diffuse such that the government through private networks can control the way in which capital is allocated and work is done.
One cannot dam a river by leaving a few meters open because someone likes to fish there. Either he gives it up, or the entire town continues to flood.
In part, this is because it’s too challenging to value and measure each person’s output, especially in orgs with a lot of different roles. It’s just easier to say, “well the market for a designer is X so let’s pay some % of that”.
The problem with that, often, is that folks don’t actually know how much output they might expect from a lot of roles. Is this designer performing? This PM? Unless you have a real breadth of experience in these roles (almost nobody does), you look to other metrics like “are my teams unblocked”, “did this product ship”, “do these slides seem reasonable”, etc. IMO those are also imperfect because a great team, a great project, etc. can sometimes easily mask someone’s meagre contributions.
I think some employees knowingly exploit this knowledge gap. I don’t think it’s common, but it happens. We’ve seen people post their own examples of doing that here on HN.
So, given they often lack experience evaluating output, some managers want to see their high-priced employees at work to even understand what they’re buying. You can call that onerous micromanaging, if you want. A less cynical take could be “managers want other signals to understand how their team members contribute.”
That’s my 2 cents, at least.
You want my time? Pay hourly.
If not, you're selling your time - not your output.
Either I’m taking crazy pills or this is a silly debate :)
If I worked less than that, I'd get paid less.
Some contracts had provisions for overtime, in which case I could be paid more for more hours of work.
That's selling my time. I'd still get paid the same for the same number of hours, regardless of my output.
With good or great output, there was a small chance I'd get a promotion, or a pay rise in the next round of performance reviews (which in my experience are nothing of the sort). With bad output, there was a small chance I'd get fired. In either case, my pay was never tied to my output. I'd still get paid for the hours I worked, regardless of how well I performed.
> you’re paid to fulfill a role
See above. You're usually getting paid to fulfill a role for a certain amount of time. If "number of hours you've fulfilled your role" is how you measure your output, then I 100% agree this is a silly debate.
That is not what I consider output though. A factory is paid per output. If they produce 100 cars, they get paid 100 * price of 1 car. If they produce 90 cars, they get paid 10% less, and so on.
For example, this is a good link: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/salary-vs-ho...
Your job may require you work 40h, but that’s more of a employment requirement, such as “you’re a boat captain and need to be on the bridge for X hours in normal workdays, but get paid a monthly salary regardless.” That doesn’t mean you’re paid for your time any more than a dress code clause means you’re being paid for your fashion :)
But again all moot in our industry in most cases! Really gets important in cases such as fast food, where they’ll promote people to salaried “manager” positions paying $40K/y that have no set working hours, but their responsibilities require them to work well over 40h/week
EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!
That's what a salaried position seems to mean in the US from what I can gather. Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view, so maybe your definition is relevant.
I don't think that's a universal definition of salary, though. I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it's in the books.
That's still different from an hourly wage where the pay is calculated directly per hour and varies with the exact number of hours worked and recorded.
The pay also doesn't directly vary based on actual useful output. Whether I work one day's worth of hours effectively or half as effectively doesn't affect how much I'm paid. So, I'm really directly selling my time, not my output. (The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached.)
That, to me, seems to be approximately what some of the other comments in this thread mean when they're saying you're selling your time, not your output. Whether they're talking about the US or not.
Of course if you have a set amount of real output you're expected to produce within a day or a week and it's entirely your problem if you don't manage to produce that in a set number of hours, you're in some sense paid for your output. Your quantifiable useful output probably doesn't directly map to bucks paid, though; most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.
I assume that even in the US, you'd still be expected to be present for a set number of hours even if you managed to produce the expected output in less. In that sense you'd also be selling your time, not output.
So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality.
Yes, in the US. I questioned whether that's a universal definition.
I'm not being paid hourly. I get paid the same monthly salary regardless of how many working days or hours exactly there happen to be in a particular month. A February that happens to have the fewest possible work days pays the same as a 31-day month that happens to have the highest possible number of working days.
The number of hours per working day is set in the contract, but it's flextime so I might work one hour less than that one day and one hour more on another. Paid overtime is also a thing, but either way, I'm entitled to compensation in either form if I work more than X hours a day.
"Salaried position" may have a specific meaning in the US but that doesn't mean that's exactly what salary universally means. I think that particular phrase is just language specific to the US and some other similar jurisdictions.
"Hourly" and "no compensation for overtime" aren't the only two logical possibilities.
And either way, since real output from most knowledge work isn't directly quantifiable anyway, I'd say people are at least to an extent paid for their time rather than directly for their output. That was the original claim, and I think whoever pointed that out was right about it being part of the problem.
> Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.
Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
> Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything! I am honestly curious about how different labor laws exist around the world. But I don't think this distinction is rare. Germany, for example, has one of the most regulated and regarded-as-worker-friendly payroll systems in the world. But even Germany still makes a distinction between the fixed pay scale and außer tarif employees, which almost universally has an expectation of vertrauensarbeitszeit ("trust-based working hours" i.e. non-hourly work)
I would be surprised if there is a modern country that does not make this distinction between hourly and non-hourly pay in some way.
The overall framework concerning working time comes from labour law. That would include the maximum of regular working hours per day (8 hours max per day or 40 per week in the legislation, can be less by contract or agreement). The law also includes provisions for flexible working time which allows the actual daily working time to vary the way I described, i.e. +n hours here and -n hours there, instead of being a constant X hours a day. Flextime arrangements are the norm in white collar work.
Overtime (exceeding regular hours without being compensated with reduced hours at another time) is also possible but must be explicitly agreed upon and paid for. That requirement also comes from the legislation.
Some of the details concerning overtime compensation and the implementation of flextime arrangement come from a collective labour agreement. The collective agreement does not and cannot supersede legislation but it can specify some of the details that the law leaves open.
My employment contract specifies the (regular) number of hours per day and defers to the collective agreement for most other details such as the specifics of flextime.
There is a distinction between hourly and monthly pay, as in my example about the varying number of working days per month; hourly would mean that I'm literally paid X euros per hour multiplied by Y recorded hours of working time. My contract is still essentially time-based, so it may be more on the "hourly" side of the divide the way you see it, but it's considered a salary, not an hourly wage. I'm still effectively selling my time.
Some roles are indeed exempt from legislation that concerns working time. That would include e.g. independent leadership roles, so if you're a director of an organization or a branch, the legislation does not apply. Your working hours aren't limited and you're not legally entitled to compensation for exceeding any specific number of hours. Other exemptions made on the legislation level include e.g. teachers, researchers, clergy, and some public sector and government roles. Some of those may still have regulations set in a collective labour agreement specific to the sector, but practically, if you're e.g. a professor, you probably end up working more than 40 hours a week and the concepts of comp time or paid overtime don't exist.
The exemptions do not include e.g. most engineers or most other white-collar work. Some people in those roles do end up doing unpaid and unaccounted for overtime in practice but that's despite the regulation, not in accordance with it.
IANAL and I don't really have the time to verify which parts of the rules exactly come from legislation and which ones come from a collective agreement, but that's the overall picture. It's been the same way in every white collar job I've had outside of the academia.
This is in Finland.
> I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything!
Ok, sorry. I read it as more of insistence or questioning than curiosity.
I'm beginning to wonder the same. I don't really understand the "job market" in the US or the regulations around it. Every time I hear or read something about it I get even more confused.
> I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week.
That's the kind of employment contract I'm familiar with.
> If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point.
That's one possibility. To take time in lieu. Another is to be paid overtime. They're both different ways of dealing with the same situation.
> The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached
Precisely the point I made prior as well. We seem to have a similar understanding of this.
> most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.
Indeed. That's the point I raised in my first comment on this thread.
> So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality.
There's always an expectancy of output in any work relation. That said, if your pay is more tied to "doing work" for a certain amount of time, you're getting paid for that. Normally your output or some approximation of it will be used to determine better pay, or even whether you get to keep the job. Even if you get fired though, you're normally still given a notice period - and get paid for showing up during that.
That's still selling your time, with an expectation of output.
That’s why the original comment nails it in the first two paragraphs. It may not be intended this way, but effectively people are paid for their time much moreso than their output.
My contract explicitly states that any week in which I perform any work, I’m to be paid a prorated weekly amount.
Managers do not care what hours I put in if my tickets + other duties are performed — and typically, I managed to get away with 35-37 hours. Some weeks were more like 50. Again, the role was duty based, not hourly.
Every salaried job I’ve had has been output, not time.
This is incorrect in the United States. Most WFH employees are under exempt status, and so by definition from US department of labor, they are explicity _not_ paid for their time. I'm on mobile so I can't find the link easy on the DOL website, but on desktop it is easy to find.
I have a Linkedin profile, connections to SWEs that I have previously worked with in my country and who have since moved to the US/EU. Plenty of those connections posted gushing words about our time together in the same engineering team on the recommendations section of my Linkedin profile.
I have a huge Nota bene at the top of my profile telling recruiters that I'm only interested in fully remote positions and that I'm not interested in leaving my country no matter what.
I work for a telecom company here and over the years I have worked with all sorts of stacks/technologies ranging from reverse engineering, embedded C, crypto.. and even more recently rewriting a (small) production tool from C++ to Rust. My salary over the last 10 years has gotten to an impressive ~ $40_000 per annum, and that's before taxes.
It's a safe/stable job and I have family to take care of that I can not leave, so the prospect of landing a fully remote job writing js for a mouth watering TC of $200_000+ makes me salivate.
But every advertized "fully remote" job out there comes with a huge asterisk: "it's fully remote but you have to be in a country where our company has offices, or you'll have to settle for being a contractor getting paid half that and dealing with taxes in your country and time zones that ungodly, or better yet, get paid in stable shitcoins!".
So whenever I see the people with mouth watering TCs rewriting the same crappy code bases in $new_hyped_js_framework on HN/Reddit complain about hybrid work schedules or fully remote but once in 6 months you have to hop on a flight to be at the bi-annual work barbecue... I wonder when a truly full remote positions will be available, because there are a lot of us out there with incredible skills/YoE working for peanuts because we can't leave our disabled loved ones behind to be in the US/EU... or when a non-shitty-LLM will be good enough to turn english sentences into viable business logic. Now, _that_ will make me too appreciate my shitty salary instead of being envious of you guys' TCs.
In my view, the biggest crime of a manager is disconnecting my incentives from my work as an IC. If I create more value, it should be a manager's top priority to create the positive feedback loop of incentives. Because why else am I doing more, then? It should seem like common sense, but every manager I've had has not been remotely interested in creating that positive feedback loop. Instead "that salary is too far out of the band for this role and wouldn't be fair to everyone else, and you have to do X,Y,and Z to qualify for this other role, and your last self-review was too honest so I'm going to use it to negotiate against you..." I've even had a manager complain about my salary being too close to his salary, as if there was some requirement for his ego that I make less than him!
Every raise or promotion I've ever had has devolved into some form of "you're giving me this or I'm going to leave", and then 9/10 times they reluctantly fork it over. There is no good faith, only power. And power is getting what you want after calling all the bluffs. Managers are adversarial, and their role is to get you to do as much as possible for as little as possible, while at the same time swallowing their pride when their bluffs are called. I hate that it is like this, because it could be a lot better. But nobody seems to know how to manage.
Don't get me wrong, I get the position that managers are in. The upper management demands they get certain results, and if they don't do it, they get replaced. But it's still a failure of the manager for not communicating effectively how creating positive feedback loops with your top performers will make everybody money. Of course this depends on the upper management to actually pick valuable things to work on...
For example, Managers get to pick salaries for their reports. Every manager now says every one of their reports is a top performer and especially those who kiss their backsides. Okay, shit, rewind. Company creates a massive set of detailed metrics with which they can measure every employee and team. Metrics are incomplete, get gamed, morale decreases. Okay, shit, rewind. Etc. Etc.
I get that, sometimes being around the wife and kids can be grating 24/7. Thankfully I'm not one of them.
Then there are bosses who simply want the control.
Last contract I had I was required to go into an office 3 days a week. All of my meetings were on chat and video. None were in person. They just wanted adult daycare.
I wish we could just do hybrid in office days Monday through Wednesday and then remote Thursday and Friday. No one does this and it drives me nuts.
The trend over the long term however are fully remote companies based in co working offices. My wife works for a fortune 500 that is pushing towards remote first because that means eliminating expensive office rent.
Companies that have spent a lot of money on flashy offices or outright own their real estate will be more resistant to this simply because of sunk cost. However not having to pay rent or a mortgage speaks to shareholders.
Outside of FAANG and a few select finance companies, ove the long term if companies can avoid rent they'll do so and I don't blame them.