Yeah, sorry, but until there is good data on this that does a good job of differentiating along types, roles, and contexts, this just sounds like an opinion worth as much as the next one.
The point I'm making is that lack of data to the downsides of remote does not exonerate remote working from being less productive than in person.
Just like lack of data for the harmful effects of smoking in the 1940s should not have allowed people to blindly say "There's no proof it's bad for me, therefore it's not bad for me."
No one says it exonerates it, but why do you think you or anyone can make an informed claim that remote workers are less productive in any or all cases?
I think the crux of the issue is that for all of human history, being in the same room as the person you're trying to accomplish a difficult endeavor with has always worked. We landed on the moon just fine with people going into an office.
Who knows? We could have landed on the moon even earlier with remote work (assuming the tech was there of course) but the overwhelming evidence is that being in the same room has worked good enough in the past. (replace moon with James Web Telescope for a more time appropriate analogy).
I don't have hard data to support that one is better than the other. I can only draw on my past experiences, history, and first principles.
Of course, remote work can work and has worked. Just look at open source. But if I were to start a company that had to do really difficult hardware engineering, I would probably choose not to be remote. If I were to start a company that had to do really difficult software engineering, I would think about it. Why do I place such a high importance on quick communication for a hardware startup but discount that importance for a software startup?
Anyways, like many things in life there likely is not a true better option. It depends on many things. I will add that one argument I absolutely hate is when people complain about commutes. That is a separate problem that American cities have been reaping and one that we are actively sowing
Are you equating the lack of data around home working, something notoriously difficult to quantify, as developer productivity is very hard (or impossible) to measure, to cancer?
The jury is literally not still out in any way shape or form.
Smoking causes cancer. that is harmful. period. The only controversy that is left is whether political power should be exercised to protect people from themselves. Which in the U.S. at least tends not to be a tenable direction.
Unless you're specifically commenting on the "unless you have data" part. Which ironically, tobacco and other chemical companies usually have reams of, but keep hidden, and fight the discovery and unsealing of tooth and nail.
Furthermore, no one wants to fund the side of the science that slits the goose that lays the golden egg's throat.
So more correctly stated is "Everything is hot air. Data doesn't matter as long as it never sees the light of day. When it does, have more money than the other guy to control the narrative."
In an increasingly disconnected world, I couldn't agree more. Everything now is automated: car service, groceries, shopping. Activities that used to be social are no longer social: working in person, meeting in person, socializing in general.
We need to get back to building communities, making eye contact, seeing people, engaging in random conversations, getting to know your neighbors. And this includes working in person (albeit not necessarily every day).
Community building won't be achieved by putting a bunch of highly paid, extremely bright people holed up inside office space in downtown SF from dusk to dawn. Working in person in such conditions creates dormitory suburbs, traffic jams, and makes the tech community even more insular.
If the goal is to go back to building communities, then I would be delighted to agree whenever OpenAI leases a building in downtown Tulsa.
>We need to get back to building communities, making eye contact, seeing people, engaging in random conversations, getting to know your neighbors. And this includes working in person (albeit not necessarily every day).
Spare me the absurdly saccharine sentimentality.
To take the generally good idea of interaction and building your community, and extend it to cover being herded by the self-serving desires of megacorps seeking in-person office drones is grotesque.
I'd happily support people interacting more and forming new relationships, but in a personal, voluntary sense that doesn't involve being crammed into a giant box with others that you didn't pick, hectored by HR scum, and made to work with people who aren't your natural friends on productivity theater or simply things you could have also just done from home, where you choose who you spend time with.
Adults are increasingly not connected through social orgs ("Bowling Alone"). Work was often the last place left that grown adults make new friends. We may be entering an age were the concept of an "irl friend" is old-fashioned.
The tech industry's mistake was all collectively setting up shop in a small handful of trendy, dense, expensive cities and not investing in housing, transit, or otherwise doing anything to improve the collective quality of life of those cities.
The repercussion of that mistake is remote work.
I don't think he's wrong on principle - remote work is less dynamic and impactful than physical teams. But it's the "...and it has to be in San Francisco" part that reminds me of how out-of-touch these guys are. Are in-person meetings better? Yes. Are they worth commuting 3 hours every day through a city that hates you? No.
"The tech industry's mistake was all collectively setting up shop in a small handful of trendy, dense, expensive cities and not investing in housing, transit, or otherwise doing anything to improve the collective quality of life of those cities."
Hat tip to you, Legitster. Louder for the expensive seats upfront.
Say what you will of the robber barons of old, but if you tour the cities of the midwest you will see testaments all over of how they at least tried to improve the livability during their time. They built affordable housing, libraries, bus depots, schools, etc out of their or their company's profits just so they could attract people to, like, Bloomington Illinois.
I wish I could upvote you twice. If my job was a 15 minute drive away or a 15 minute metro ride away, of course I would happily go to the office.
But what we get is a 1 hour commute each way, to have to find a place to sit in some sort of dynamic desk arrangement, in an open office setting that is noisy at the very least. And those meetings that are so much better in person? Good luck booking a meeting room. Where is the focus and increased productivity?
Come on man. How can you can you call them disconnected? One chap is funding a blimp company, another is building jet packs and flying cars. They know what people need.
Opinions like this drive me bonkers. The mass movement to remote work wasn't an "experiment" we all "opted into", it was a necessity driven by a global pandemic. Putting the narrative on equal plane as "choosing avocado toast" makes my blood boil. We went remote because we had to. We fled cities because we had to. It was our civic duty to "flatten the curve" and save lives. My hat for a bit of nuance and grace.
That's because certain types of CEO feel a need to feel relevant by getting media exposure. They are not the majority. They are a small minority. But these certain types, whenever they feel just a little bit irrelevant, they run to a microphone and start blabbering the most inflammatory statements that they can think of. And then they get the attention they crave.
Even if this CEO's opinion was precisely the one that he expressed, it makes no sense at all to express it. Why would he potentially damage his company's standing by making unnecessarily inflammatory statements? What is the benefit for OpenAI from this?
His full quote: "I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,"
To give him credit, he was saying something a bit more nuanced it just got chopped up by the headline.
Here's the full quote. The article is pretty fluffy.
> “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”
I'm biased, but I don't really agree with him. To me, an experiment collects data methodically and comes to a conclusion based solely on the outcome. I suspect he's just stating his own biases as though they were facts—unless there's some rigorous study I've not seen.
My bias is not only that I work better outside of an office, but that I was involved in a fully-remote startup a few years ago that was the most creative and productive environment I've ever worked in, so I have trouble believing those qualities are related to whether a company is distributed or not, and tend to think failures to achieve them at a high level in a remote environment is usually due to other factors.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadJust like lack of data for the harmful effects of smoking in the 1940s should not have allowed people to blindly say "There's no proof it's bad for me, therefore it's not bad for me."
Who knows? We could have landed on the moon even earlier with remote work (assuming the tech was there of course) but the overwhelming evidence is that being in the same room has worked good enough in the past. (replace moon with James Web Telescope for a more time appropriate analogy).
I don't have hard data to support that one is better than the other. I can only draw on my past experiences, history, and first principles.
Of course, remote work can work and has worked. Just look at open source. But if I were to start a company that had to do really difficult hardware engineering, I would probably choose not to be remote. If I were to start a company that had to do really difficult software engineering, I would think about it. Why do I place such a high importance on quick communication for a hardware startup but discount that importance for a software startup?
Anyways, like many things in life there likely is not a true better option. It depends on many things. I will add that one argument I absolutely hate is when people complain about commutes. That is a separate problem that American cities have been reaping and one that we are actively sowing
Edit: Just to address the implication head on... The claim you are making is that it's so obvious everyone but shills will admit it.
But this is itself not true. It's a divisive topic among every demographic who harbors an opinion on the matter.
The jury is definitely still out and the story in the end is unlikely to be monolithic, but different along several dimensions.
The jury is literally not still out in any way shape or form.
Smoking causes cancer. that is harmful. period. The only controversy that is left is whether political power should be exercised to protect people from themselves. Which in the U.S. at least tends not to be a tenable direction.
Unless you're specifically commenting on the "unless you have data" part. Which ironically, tobacco and other chemical companies usually have reams of, but keep hidden, and fight the discovery and unsealing of tooth and nail.
Furthermore, no one wants to fund the side of the science that slits the goose that lays the golden egg's throat.
So more correctly stated is "Everything is hot air. Data doesn't matter as long as it never sees the light of day. When it does, have more money than the other guy to control the narrative."
We need to get back to building communities, making eye contact, seeing people, engaging in random conversations, getting to know your neighbors. And this includes working in person (albeit not necessarily every day).
If the goal is to go back to building communities, then I would be delighted to agree whenever OpenAI leases a building in downtown Tulsa.
Spare me the absurdly saccharine sentimentality.
To take the generally good idea of interaction and building your community, and extend it to cover being herded by the self-serving desires of megacorps seeking in-person office drones is grotesque.
I'd happily support people interacting more and forming new relationships, but in a personal, voluntary sense that doesn't involve being crammed into a giant box with others that you didn't pick, hectored by HR scum, and made to work with people who aren't your natural friends on productivity theater or simply things you could have also just done from home, where you choose who you spend time with.
Can you imagine someone stating the implication with a straight face?
"The way to build communities is to force everyone into an office building for 8 hours a day"
The repercussion of that mistake is remote work.
I don't think he's wrong on principle - remote work is less dynamic and impactful than physical teams. But it's the "...and it has to be in San Francisco" part that reminds me of how out-of-touch these guys are. Are in-person meetings better? Yes. Are they worth commuting 3 hours every day through a city that hates you? No.
Hat tip to you, Legitster. Louder for the expensive seats upfront.
But what we get is a 1 hour commute each way, to have to find a place to sit in some sort of dynamic desk arrangement, in an open office setting that is noisy at the very least. And those meetings that are so much better in person? Good luck booking a meeting room. Where is the focus and increased productivity?
Even if this CEO's opinion was precisely the one that he expressed, it makes no sense at all to express it. Why would he potentially damage his company's standing by making unnecessarily inflammatory statements? What is the benefit for OpenAI from this?
To give him credit, he was saying something a bit more nuanced it just got chopped up by the headline.
> “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”
I'm biased, but I don't really agree with him. To me, an experiment collects data methodically and comes to a conclusion based solely on the outcome. I suspect he's just stating his own biases as though they were facts—unless there's some rigorous study I've not seen.
My bias is not only that I work better outside of an office, but that I was involved in a fully-remote startup a few years ago that was the most creative and productive environment I've ever worked in, so I have trouble believing those qualities are related to whether a company is distributed or not, and tend to think failures to achieve them at a high level in a remote environment is usually due to other factors.