Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
Seriously. As an engineer and engineering leader, I cannot maintain focus to code, sit in meetings, and a variety of other tasks for more than 2-3 hours without a break. It is good to get up, move around, catch up on the news, etc. Taking appropriate breaks and conducting self care gives my mind an opportunity to decompress, allowing me to come back to work more focused and productive. Very long sessions (5+ hours) without a break tend to run into a wall - I may still be doing work, but the quality drops precipitously. Sometimes, I can raise my productivity by distracting myself with home chores (e.g. laundry). Sometimes, I find a quick dip into the news or a catchup on our friend group's discord server productive. This may not be the same for all of us, but studies have repeatedly shown breaks improve productivity for most individuals. Being outside the office, I find it much more convenient to take a productive break without having other coworkers distracting me. Looking over studies and suggestions, it seems interesting to me that tasks like meditation, power naps, small chores, snacks, listening to music, and interacting with pets are much more easily conducted in the comfort of our homes.
Or you can be in the office and speak to people. I've never been in an office for a professional job where chatting, popping down to the canteen, stepping outside for a bit etc are not completely normal things to do and not frowned upon. For young people without families and pets, having a thriving office where we can take social breaks sometimes is important. Otherwise I literally just sit in my room and want to die. This is why I'm glad my company has 3 days compulsory.
Not only creative work, but manual work too. It's been over 100 years that Frederick Taylor showed regular breaks reduces fatigue and increases productivity. [1]
Taylor would, correctly, have knowledge workers filling out very detailed timesheets of their daily activities in order to optimize overall efficiency.
Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.
Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.
Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.
As margins slim in our industry, which they will, would you rather have management understand the true costs of things or would you rather have over-hiring followed by mass firing?
I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.
This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.
Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.
This if course needs to:
1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and
2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.
Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.
Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.
They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.
Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.
That’s very industry-dependent. I worked in a tech company that acquired a creative production company, and the tech leadership attempted to impose a metrics-based approach to what was a traditional creative process. That process had obvious signs of waste, including a high failure rate, excess travel expenses, etc., when compared to averages.
The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.
A semi-relevant anecdote: over the Christmas break (which was > 2 weeks for me), I was pouring 12-14 hours a day into my personal hobby project and didn’t feel tired or bored at all. I literally couldn’t stop working on it.
Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.
Managing 50+ remote workers taught me that results matter, not hours. It's all about the output. Work asynchronously, focus on the end goal, and as long as it's legal and ethical, the 'how' and 'when' are often irrelevant. Traditional managers struggle with this mindset, often due to their own managers outdated approaches.
The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
I started managing a team with the “no meetings, let people do good work” philosophy and I can just say that I’m glad I was given the space as a new manager to find my feet, because I didn’t find that it worked well when taken to an extreme.
Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.
The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.
Everyone replying seems to be assuming this time is all for standups and status meetings, but in practice it’s probably about half an hour a week for status updates for us to. The rest of the time is a mix of reserved time for synchronous technical collaboration (e.g. reserved time for pairing, time to talk about technical architecture at a higher level and for people to opt in to presenting some of their work for feedback)
My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.
For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.
The important thing is to identify what the outputs (of meetings etc) should _be_ and then work backwards from that to how to accomplish the task _remotely_ and _asynchronously_.
They are doing far better now than with fewer meetings, and they’ve consistently agreed that the additional meetings are valuable, so yeah, I think they are.
I'd blow my brains out if I has to sit through 6 hours of useless meetings a week.
I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.
I started work in a new company December 2023 and they did exactly what you said and boy, am I feeling great about this workplace! I do focus on my work, I achieve results, I make sure they are visible (some documentation and internal knowledge base management are involved but I don't detest it; it becomes the way to gauge my performance and I am not against it) and everyone is happy.
It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.
>Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).
Depends on your definition of meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that public school teaching, working in a nursing home, working as a social worker is meaningful, but I wouldn’t find any of those to be interesting.
Working on a startup pursuing your topic / field of interest might do the trick.
There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.
Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.
> or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.
I think there are lots of jobs that are meaningful in a macro sense, but tedious in a micro sense. Most teachers I know like having the identity of a teacher, feel like they are meaningfully contributing to society, but really don't enjoy 90% of the actual work they do.
The only thing I've ever had issues with doing it remote is writing compliance policy, operational guidelines, and organizational standards. My boss wanted them re-written once every year into a different format and it destroyed my soul. What we had worked fine and didn't need to be re-written in my opinion.
I think any given job is neither interesting nor boring- it the attitude that makes it so. For example I am the person who don't like doing the stuff if I know how to do it - it boring for me, while my colleague is happily dingo stuff that is clean while skipping obscured tasks. Following this you cannot give someone interesting task, you can only guide person to choose the right perspective
> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two :
- working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money
- working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO.
Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies.
Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
Sometimes the optimal solution involves failure and cancelation. Im not saying the cancelations you experienced were correct, but unless you have a crystal ball, some strategy change and failure is expected. Of course that isn't an excuse for frivolous strategy, but the line is finer than most ICs understand.
There is a lot of boring and low "meaning" work that needs to be done. To give a trite example, washing your dishes and keeping your house clean. Or brushing your teeth and flossing. Or making revenue dashboards tracking income and making sure that data reporting is accurate.
Doing the dishes is boring but it's offset by the satisfaction you feel from having a clean kitchen. Some tasks are both boring and make you feel useless after because all you're left with is a report that will rot in a middle management storage cabinet. I think a few 19th century German philosophers wrote about that extensively :)
I am not sure, but I have always pursued this kind of work by default and aggressively. Of course there will always be ups and downs, but when it stops feeling interesting, meaningful, and challenging for a prolonged period of time, I generally move on (or switch teams/projects!). But while it remains overall interesting and meaningful, I stay and hold on to it for as long as I possibly can. This has meant that I haven't job-hopped very much to climb the salary ladder, but have been very engaged and interested in every position. It's been a worthwhile tradeoff.
I would also raise the point that actually having relationships with your colleagues and team can make work a lot more meaningful and make you more motivated. It is impossible to do that if you don't meet them. The idea that corporate work can be motivating at all when you exist in a vaccuum in your bedroom is idiotic. Almost no work is ineherently interesting.
I’ve worked in an office for over 25 years. I’ve never chatted with anyone at the water cooler (those, these days it is a water dispenser machine that can dispense cold or hot still water or sparkling water). I assume this water cooler chat thing must be from farther back in time.
Water cooler chat doesn’t need to involve a literal water cooler. It’s an expression for the casual chit-chat that occurs when you encounter someone in the hallway.
I've chatted with a co-worker about all kinds of interesting topics related to our with the last few days. We both work on GPU related stuff, he's been optimizing compute shaders and finding out new and interesting things. The conversations are not conversations I've never seen in chat. He could make a formal presentation but that's not really the point. The point is, as I sat down into the seat next to him, it was obvious to say "Good morning, what's up" and have him tell me.
This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.
This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.
This is just the truth. And the responses I get when pointing this out are either along the lines of “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” and “technically you can have those same conversations in the slack #random if you wanted.”
Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
> Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).
> “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”
This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.
While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.
Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.
Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.
Great response. Also not everyone is working on exciting GPU related projects.
Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.
Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.
Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in. I've never had that experience. People are always somewhat intersting and like to actually talk. There are some off days but it's never like that. And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working. I've had people never turn their cameras on. And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable. The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
For every positive that I can possibly read about in office work. Not one can combat my horrible situation of working next to a colleague with post nasal drip. Imagine every 60s hearing the sound of phlegm being sucked through a throat.
I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.
That's an insanely specific situation that could be remedied by getting your seat moved. Loads of offices have hot desks these days anyway. What I'm talking about - young people having no chance to build a network of peers because the end of their university years were ruined by COVID and now they are expected to work from home without interacting with humans ever, leading to severely negative mental health outcomes - is ubiquitous to all remote working situations. the only solution to it is some level of compulsory office attendance. it is only since i move to an office with 3 days semi-compulsory that I have started to talk to people regularly again and regained the ability to work efficiently and not want to die.
Yes, your story is an isolated and minor anecdote and my story is a massive social ill that I am furious that older people want to overlook and then wonder why younger peoples mental health and productivity is getting constantly worse. So I don't appreciate you bringing up your anecdote as if it has any relevance to what I'm saying.
p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.
You're lack of appreciation maybe related to your fury.
Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.
In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!
Nah mate, you pulled that one out of nowhere. It's pretty widely understood our mental health issues are due to lonliness and social isolation and social media (fake virtual socialising) mate.
There is a distinction to be made between loneliness and solitude though.
One can feel hopelessly lonely in a crowd, one can also find great solace in solitude.
In fact, another great cause of mental health issues is the apparently growing inability for people to stay still, instead constantly vying for interaction (and often resorting to that quick virtual dopamine hit loop, sometimes even when face to face)
There's balance to be had, both ways, but not everyone have the same needs.
I'm very aware you can be lonely in a crowd and find solace in solitude. I've done both. I'm talking about my real-life experience here not a hypothetical. Working 100% remotely as a young person trying to find your place in the world is crushingly lonely. Choosing sometimes to spend my weekend just doing my solo hobbies while other people are going out, without giving into fomo, is solace in solitude.
I agree, not everyone has the same needs. But I think on average the majority of people would benefit from or would be able to handle a mandatory hybrid situation. If a few fully remote jobs remained that may satisfy the few unusual people who are actually that disturbed by social interaction, or live in such odd locations that it's not possible for them, that would be great. And I am absolutely sure those opportunities will remain. But I think it is bad for humans to aim for a mainly remote working world, both for our mental health and for the dynamism of our collaborative work. I really believe that people who genuinely thrive significantly better in 100% remote vs a couple days in the office are less than 10% of the population. We are social animals and we increase our risk of dementia the less we socialise, it's just our biology.
1) I'm not a robot. Humans exist in physical space and it is necessary for our mental health to see other people in person. We cannot get our social battery filled by virtual interaction alone. 2) Otther people don't participate in these things very often when I try to suggest them. People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces. Therefore, the solution is the office.
1) heavily depends on the person (you seem the extraverted type who seem to suffer the most; for instance I can go weeks without much f2f interaction and not be disturbed by it).
And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...
Don't worry I moved to a company where people have to come in 2-3 times a week and the culture is great and I'm not depressed any more. It works much better than any other setup I've tried.
My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.
> My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme.
I like that and the description that follows because it shows how much the whole thing is neither monochromatic nor even linear. Even when talking inside an {ex,in}troversion model there are all sorts of subtle mechanisms and processes at play, and that's not even beginning to talk about other aspects, from varying shades of ADHD, Asperger, or autistic traits, to delayed sleep disorder syndrome.
> Humans exist in physical space and it is necessary for our mental health to see other people in person.
It does not follow that the deep social interaction that is beneficial to mental health has to happen at work.
One can WFH and see people outside of work. Some people enjoy deep social ties with coworkers, others prefer keeping work at a distance from their personal life.
> People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces.
That is incorrect. Some people do, some others don't.
They don’t think about what it’s like for young people to onboard.
You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.
It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.
Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.
Yeah asking questions on slack or sth feels so much more like you're imposing on people than just saying sth out loud or shadowing someone a bit organically in person.
> Bro what sort of dystopiian offices have you been working in.
There are loads of places like this. The irony is that in such context people enjoy the watercooler talk as an escape from the hellscape that is their 9-5 shitty job, doing everything they can instead of their job to make their experience less miserable.
> I've never had that experience.
Lucky you.
> And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working.
This has happened all the time for me (could be zoom, could be Slack). From scheduled informal chats with teammates to regular chats with close people to members of non-work or work channels of interest to random ones via Donut with yet unknown people, it's lively and on everyone's own terms.
> I've had people never turn their cameras on.
Ever since I have been remote they all did. If they don't it's either one of the odd low bandwidth situation and they save it for an acceptable audio experience, they're on the move - and open about it, with either an apology about possible noise when speaking thus unmuted or setting expectations about their ability to talk or follow - and audio only "phone mode" is more practical, or they're at home and privacy respecting of their SO or otherwise guest.
> And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable.
I am genuinely empathetic to your situation and am glad to hear from a nearby comment that it has resolved - at least to an extent - and you found an environment where you can be happier.
I say so because I realised long ago that people can come from all ways of life and be wildly different in their needs, and having been through similar suffering for something in the order of three decades - only from a symmetrical end - I can relate.
And I say "end" and not "side" because it's a continuum, there are no sides, there's no team A vs team B, and it's not a zero sum game.
> The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
By and large "pro WFH people" are not arguing that everyone-and-their-dog must WFH, instead that WFH does make sense and is a true net positive for many, and that the recent pro-office-for-everyone discourse that it is inherently more productive because humans is at best loaded with prejudice that fails to take into account a good chunk of actual humans, some raising their voice, others staying silent, and at worst has hidden agenda.
The pendulum was mostly stuck one way for aeons, then it progressively moved with the rise of the Internet, and swung full-force with COVID. Now it's swinging back hard the other way. Change is hard, old habits die harder, but I'm hopeful that someday we'll find balance, but for that we need understanding of each other.
I enjoy water cooler conversation because it is refreshing and revitalising for me to have social interaction breaks throughout my workday, not because I want to do anything but my job all the time. People are not productive all day and that's fine. Also all jobs are work and are not really that fun. I don't enjoy working that much even if it's a good job. So I'd rather have other people and things to focus on sometimes. When I'm at home I feel like all I have to think about is work, and my breaks involve doomscrolling on my phone, or trying to force myself to take a short lonely walk for my mental health.
I have had shitty office experiences don't get me wrong, but since becoming a software engineering professional, I find that I am in enough demand to actually choose a decent place to work. Since entering this field, I had one horrifying remote job where I never learnt what my colleagues looked like and felt miserable and demotivated all the time, and I've worked two other places where I've been more in the office. When working in the office, I've never had horrible experiences like I did when I worked shitty non-professional jobs. Being a software engineer is cushy as hell and I find it weird how some people complain about their tech workplaces as if they're not some of the chillest places to work in person that you could possibly be lucky enough to work in.
Thank you for your empathy for my past situation. However, the problem when pro-wfh people say "we want you to have a choice" is that my shitty remote job was technically hybrid. I could go into the office. People even tried to organise a single office day a week. And because it wasn't mandatory, half the time I tried going in the place was a ghost town. I don't want that, ever. So yeah I LOVE that my job has (semi)MANDATORY days otherwise there would be so many colleagues of mine I would never have met and I am great friends with them (By semi mandatory I mean we have a 3 day target average. So you're not penalised for missing a week or sth its just the mode of your weeks should be 3 days. Which is a great system)
Basically, for me to have a choice to live the way I want there HAS to be companies with MANDATORY office days. And the pro-wfh people demonise that SO MUCH.
> Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.
Our Ruby guild is ~6 ppl and counting. We are all remote, and not a single one is in the same geo.
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
That doesn't work for me. I want a conversation, not an announcement. My experience in chat is I post something "BTW ... " and it's crickets. Quite often no response. I feel unappreciated and like I wasted everyone's time. (maybe I did? but my experience at all previous work-from-office companies was I was well liked)
Even if there is a response it may be hours later which is not what I'm looking for. It's the conversation that sparks ideas and understanding for me.
My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.
90-minute lunches, extended ping-pong table visits, "attending" meetings one doesn't contribute to are various ways to waste time at the office, but no one is eager to banish those. It appears it's only a problem when people slack at home; on the flip-side, no one is offering bonuses for those when they work until 7 or 8 pm because WFH can blur division between work and not-work life.
"Productivity" is just the flimsy fig leaf for RTO, a bunch of people have openly admitted that it's all about the "energy" they get from being around many people at the office, even of those people are slacking. It's not surprisingly that such personalities are overrepresented in leadership roles.
Yes, but even 20+ years ago when I worked for a large Silicon Valley company: most of the people I interacted with were in different buildings so it was easier to email them than to go find them. Then we acquired a team in another country. When I went remote in 1999 one of the reasons I could justify that was that when I drove to the office every day I usually spent each day communicating by email and phone with colleagues.
Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom. If workers are screwing around when there is work that needs to be done, that is indicative of an environment that doesn't provide the proper failsafes.
That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.
I feel like you are wearing some very strong rose colored glasses; I personally think it’s naive to believe that remote workers are always highly engaged. People optimize their work productivity around different personal goals.. and I have worked with many who seem to try to do as little work as possible to not get fired. Which often involves a lot of loathing and procrastination.
It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.
> Work avoidance typically stems from fear of failure, not boredom.
For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.
Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.
Or it's just boring work. I'm employed as software engineer with no reports as a team of 4 engineers. The project has entered maintenance mode and we just investigate bugs, chase teams we're dependent on, confirm a change works on 4 different versions.. my productivity has tanked.
I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.
People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.
It’s not completely wrong though. To be clear, I think basically any role can be meaningful to someone, depending on their views and upbringing.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
>>As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
The payment is a pretty big part of it. If you offered people the option to be paid the same amount for doing nothing, how many people do you think would stay doing their exact same current job vs leaving and perusing a hobby?
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Mark Twain
This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.
I enjoy software development. I would develop with or without a paycheck. The pay is a bid to make me give a shit about what my employer wants me to develop, a bid they need to keep higher than every other person who has money but no ability to make the things they want.
TBF, I think the balance shifts when you're at home.
At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.
This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.
Usually my employers haven’t let me buy as much equity as I’ve wanted to, they severely constrain the employee equity pool allocation and dole it out as occasional rewards and reserve most for non-worker investors and owners or executive roles.
For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc
Maybe you should consider working for publicly listed companies then, there is no mechanism where they can limit how much equity you own.
The one customer owned cooperative I have worked for did limit equity to one share per shareholder, in addition to being the most pathologically corporate and political company I have ever worked for or known off. Maybe worker owned cooperatives work better.
I don't need to work at public companies to buy their equity. I work in earlier stages to gain access to pre-growth equity.
I would certainly not want to work at a non-worker-owned cooperative. That's not an incentive alignment for me as a worker, and it's a hierarchy placed above workers. Customer-owned coops are only meant to be good for the customer, it’s standard hierarchical wage labor bs for workers.
Not that worker-owned ones are able to avoid politics though - all social relations have varying degrees of success and conflict.
If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.
The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.
If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is
Offshoring has been a thing for a few decades now. So has the technology that facilitates remote work. So I don't think this is some new push for offshoring.
In fairness, there does seem to be a lot of concern amongst the management class around keeping their jobs if they don't get back into the office.
Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.
My two cents on that last bit: I have a team of people working in the US, more than half of them from India, and another team actually in India. Culturally there's a fair amount of overlap, but the real ball buster is the timezone difference. There's no way to both get regular face time and have everyone work normal hours.
On the other hands this is interesting for sys/cloud admins/ops workers.
With colleagues in different timezones you can say goodbye to on-call shifts and being woken up in the middle of the night for issues. An indian or euro colleague can do maintenance stuff on infra used by US developers and customers and the US ones can do the same for indian/euro facing ones. All this without the fatigue and risk of mistakes that comes with working very late into the night or early in the morning.
I've worked in a team with indian, euro and us workers and we could find a way to get meetings because indian people do not usually know how to say No. So they tend to stay later than us euro guys and we would have most of our meetings in a short window in early evening (India) / afternoon (Europe) / morning (USA). Actually that was a good thing because it meant most of our calls would be concentrated in that same time window so you could focus on actual work the rest of the day instead of having calls spread out over a full day of work and lots of interruptions / context switches.
Counterpoint, we have a team where 1 person is in India. 100% of our oncall issues happen during US hours. This person is not on the oncall rotation because of the timzone issue.
I'm in one of these offshoring countries (South Africa). All I've seen lately is a ton of remote jobs are now limiting themselves to remote within the country or region, not even timezone-aligned. Hard to find EU/UK remote work that doesn't lock me out. I see the same with US-only remote work.
The result is also that local salaries have started going down again, in spite of the high inflation. There's no pressure anymore to pay better, when the foreign companies with real money aren't buying your employees anymore.
Not saying it's all completely dead and no companies are hiring abroad to here, but right this second, the remote dream seems to be shrinking. If anything the offshoring will be more traditional with setting up office in the locale and paying local salaries.
> If remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention.
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently.
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time
Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.
As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit.
Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
A hard disagree on "companies that need them more than they need the company". A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing. But this is the culture we're in, paying the friends of the board millions regardless of their performance, because the board knows they get their backs rubbed as well.
Which always made me think it was odd South America didn't get more attention. I worked for Auth0 for a long time and they were started by a guy in Argentina and one in the US - the lack of time difference came up as a major benefit despite the geographical separation.
Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives.
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
> Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead
Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.
> For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support
Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...
Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
> Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems.
Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.
> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.
The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants.
As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago.
Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one.
And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year.
Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
>I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though.
Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.
Maybe you are living in IT centers like Amsterdam or Berlin, but anywhere in south or east Europe 100k USD annual salary is almost unreachable for local employment.
Best talents are not paid at the similar level globally. Even tech giants like Google have different salary for same levels in different countries inside EU. You can get x2 if you move from Warsaw to Dublin or x3 if you move to Zurich.
> Maybe you are living in IT centers like Amsterdam or Berlin, but anywhere in south or east Europe 100k USD annual salary is almost unreachable for local employment.
100K is indeed very high for S or E Europe, but in my experience there are very very few people who actually get that kind of money. Any of those are absolutely on the top end of a bell curve. Also I'm quite certain that the quantity of those kind of workers vs remote workers in USA is less than 1%.
> and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.
I don't think this can be true. An employer has to follow labor laws pertaining to the country of residence of their employees. Typically some sort of legal entity has to be established in those countries.
Not necessarily. You can sign a contract and push all legal stuff to the employee. Employee creates an LLC or other entity and selling consultancy services to the US client. No labor law attached to this relationship.
B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments.
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
It's common practice afaik, there's no secret there. I used to work for one and they are small peanuts.
Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.
That's not an example of company executives personally profiting or being invested in the company's real estate though. The comment to which I replied implied that executives personally profited from the real estate.
> This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments
I don't know the big companies. But a lot of smaller firms I used to install software systems own their own buildings (basically, a big residential house or a small warehouse). The company owner owns the building, the actual company leases the building to the owner.
A company owning its own building is common. The parent comment said "This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments" which doesn't sound like a business owning its own building.
> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips.
What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.
>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
> But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".
Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.
It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.
No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.
People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position.
So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?)
I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to.
Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears.
Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away.
Why not? Companies will eventually sort into ones where likeminded people are together. Some will be more friendly to remote than others. If I want to work in person with people, I’ll join a company that agrees. If someone wants to be remote, they might have to join a different company.
Because firms that are on-site-only don't scale unless they pay top of the line money to move people. Access to a remote workforce is a force multiplier that will be more relevant the more time we go forward.
Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working on-site is borderline morally evil.
It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.
A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"
I love remote work but I don't know if I'd call it morally evil to have people on site. There's something to be said for being in the same physical space as your peers and the social bonds that form, etc.
But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.
"Net negative" is a more neutral way to put it. The way it's stated, if there is no productivity benefit and the employee doesn't like going to the office, then it's a loss for the employee and no gain for the employer. Overall a net loss in utility, no weightings needed in that example.
I see stories of people who have worked remote at a company for a year or so, and still have yet to see the faces of any of their coworkers. I get that dev work has a disproportionate amount of basement dwellers, but man, that is still so crazy to me.
For what it's worth I can have interesting, fulfilling relationships and friendships with people I only know online, both in and out of a work setting. But it is fun to hang out in person.
Assuming that there are no differences in productivity, working remotely is borderline morally evil. It's unhealthier (loneliness, lack of work/life separation, physical inactivity), it's bad for the environment (climate control of a 100-people office is less energy intensive than that of 100 individual homes), and its costs are imposed on the worker rather than the business.
To be clear, I don't honestly believe the previous paragraph. I'm just using it to illustrate how one can pull out a "just so" story to argue the exact opposite that you're doing. I believe your argument is flawed in that makes a universal condemnation supported by generalisations based on local specifics.
I work in a company which, for all intents and purposes, allows its employees to be almost fully remote and yet a significant number of us actively choose to come to the office (partly motivated by things like free brunches from office management). The overwhelming majority of workers come to the office on foot, on public transport, by bike, or by electric scooter, and a tiny few come by motorbike. How is that "borderline morally evil"?
I agree with your example paragraph. I think it is only beneficial for highly motivated senior engineers with families to work remotely. As a junior who doesn't know what I'm doing half of the time and feels demotivated without support, and as a single young person without a family that got cut off from building a community because of COVID, when I have worked mainly remotely I've been severely depressed. Not seeing people or leaving my house for most of the week makes me want to die not work harder.
Well said. When I share a similar perspective some people seem to assume I'm extremely extroverted, or don't have friends or hobbies outside of work. I'm not very extroverted and I do have a full life outside of work. I still prefer a decent office to WFH, which makes me feel extremely isolated after awhile.
Yeah, I'm not extremely extroverted either which is an issue because trying to make sure I reach the minimum amount of socialising I need to not tank my mental health is quite hard for me when I'm expected to do it 100% by myself. When you have a life at the office, you have a certain amount of passive social interaction and I think that's actually easier for people who are a bit shy. I certainly have a few friends left from uni and hobbies outside work, but trying to make new friends without any settings where you meet every day is quite hard imo. And I do not have as many friends as I would like so it feels hopeless for me. Or it did until I joined a sociable workplace with compulsory office time and other young people.
GP implicitly assumed a large portion of cost is commute by car beside the general time/happiness cost.
For one, one would need to look into how many car commutes are avoidable to more precisely quantify the species-level irrationality of fossil-powered forced cramming of office towers inside cities day-in-and-out.
I work on-site, and #1 and #2 of your argument do not apply to me. You forgot to define preconditions. You are finger-pointing at those which work on-site and have a relatively high distance between home and work. I walk to my workplace, which is healthy and does not produce any CO2. And I am not loosing sleep, because I walk 10 minutes. Just because you dont like a thing doesn't mean you thought it through.
Not quite, you're going to be paying rent for example regardless, you may have to invest in some office furniture which is usually subsidized but if not then consider the savings you would make through the year overall, perhaps transportation costs, lunches etc. Things add up fiscally. Ignoring the lifestyle benefits.
In many places on Earth one would need to pay a substantially higher rent/price to get an extra room to use as an office. And in a family situation one would ideally need two extra rooms...
You don't have work anymore as a constraint, but it's not the only constraint to where people live.
If you are single and want to live alone, you can certainly optimize the hell out of housing costs. But of course, each single constraint you remove will probably let you reduce your costs by a bit.
Working remote need not be conflated with wanting to live in the suburbs. Indeed part of the reason I negotiated remote was because I live downtown, and the office is way out in the burbs.
This is nominally true but when I was looking for a place to rent I needed to be sure it had a space for remote work, which made it more expensive. I tried working from a desk in a wide part of my hallway or in my room (shared with my spouse) and it really didn't work. If you have young kids a separate room is pretty much a must, and ideally, a separate structure (like a small backyard office).
Yeah, I guess this aspect is underappreciated here on HN: most "hackers" also hack in their spare time, so probably already have a desk (maybe even a separate room) where they have good working conditions at home.
It's generally more expensive to buy/rent a smaller place in a metro area near the office and commute there than it is to buy/rent a place with a home office in a more reasonably priced area.
When all expenses are considered, working in-office can (and often does) cost the employee way more money than remote.
You forget that the same 'investors' that own the companies, also own the buildings and all the companies that finance, build and service the buildings as well as the whole 'economy' fueled by employees commuting and lunching etc.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
I think it's going to be both different for different people and different for different types of jobs. maybe making web apps is not affected at all by work from home where as some other jobs, say game dev, where you'd like to tweak something and hand the controller to your partner to test immediately "does it feel better than the last tweak from 15 seconds ago?" is more affected by work from home? In an extreme example, I suspect people practicing to put on a live play together can't each do their role at home over video chat. Or back to games, I suspect adjust local-multiplayer gameplay is not something you can do without actually having multiple people in the same physical location.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
How is industry productivity not relevant to the point being made? It’s quite possible for there to be a direct correlation between work productivity and industry productivity.
You are also discounting many other benefits of remote work. While yes someone may be doing laundry when they should be filling out expense reports, they are also not spending time on a lengthy commute. As a result they are also spending less time at the gas station and for car maintenance bills. I’ll admit I do personal chores on the company’s dime, but the time and resources I save by working remote make up for it at the very least.
I guess your boss doesn't really care if you managed to do laundry during work hours. You personally might care since you saved yourself some time, but that is a very personal thing. OTOH, if family is at home, it is also very easy for them to grab you for something seemingly important. With the "right" demanding wife, your boss always looses.
With the wrong demanding coworker or (especially) midwit middle manager who wants to talk about sportsball or politics, your entire company loses, not sure what your (rather sexist) point is tbh.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
By focusing on the word "wife" and calling it sexism you miss the point of the comment entirely. I agree with your side of the conversation but nitpicking words and throwing in an attack doesn't help the conversation.
I absolutely did not miss the point of the comment entirely, and responded to it fully, pointing out that distractions are just likely to happen in the office as at home, given the wrong set of coworkers.
> The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.
To put it pithily: it uses proxies of both dependent and independent variables, which increases the noise of both, in a study to determine signal-to-noise ratio.
Which proxies do you think are bad / why? The moment you go more coarse than documenting every single worker's perfect timesheet and working out their direct individual output, you're introducing some kind of proxy. What you wrote applies to every economics statistical analysis so far.
> The researchers examined productivity trends in 43 industries — including chemical manufacturing, retail trade, and accommodation and food services — and assigned a “teleworkability” score based on the occupational mix of each industry and the share of jobs that can be done remotely.
They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.
Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.
Actually, this does not apply to good economics papers. Good economics papers have much stronger ways to identify both the independent and dependent variables using microdata from public and private sources.
Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch.
Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.
I thought this would be obvious, but making up some assumptions about industry-level adoption of remote work based on the composition of employees and then seeing if those industries broke from their pre-pandemic trends requires companies to mechanically adopt WFH policies regardless of whether they are good or not (somewhat reasonable during the peak of covid, but not really for much long after, and also requires the timing of those shocks to line up) and then also needs that shock to be so big that you can see it at the industry level, separate from the general covid shock, and then also risks finding incorrect impacts because covid unsurprisingly had industry-specific effects.
Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.
This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.
As a Tech PM, I can say,remote work definitely increases productivity. I noticed, employees tend to work more when diligently when they were allowed to work remotely.
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
I know I am more productive for sure. I started working remotely in 2017, but I wasn't allowed to jump right into it. I had an agreement with my manager and I started doing one day remote a week, then two, and eventually built up to fully remote, and eventually even working remotely from all over the world. But it wasn't overnight, I had to build that trust.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
This is the problem; for “focus” work, perhaps. But as a TPM, you know that not all work is “focus work”, and the “collaborative work” suffers when done remotely. You also know that even “focus” work doesn’t make up even one whole job that someone can do without any “collaboration”.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
Depends, did you get a sweet tax deal for locating your HQ with the implicit understanding that putting the HQ there would drive tax revenue back to the city? Did you tell your friends and top investors of this decision and did they purchase real estate in the area with the implicit understanding that they'd be landlords for your new HQ?
Work from home is a cost savings companies so it would seem they'd be motivated to downsize office space, but this isn't what's happening. In a world where costs are always the highest priority, I'm not buying the culture/work ethic argument.
I recently went RTO in a major metro, the post tax hit was between 10-15k USD, I was fortunate to already own a home near enough to my office. The majority of which comes from parking, and lunch.
Pre-pandemic you didn’t really notice these things, but it adds up fast.
Work is not only getting a task done. It also involves helping struggling or new colleagues. How does "learning on the job" even look like with remote work? When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler. This does not happen with remote work and there is nothing to compensate for this.
> When I started as an engineer after university, I learned so much during lunch breaks or at the water cooler.
I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.
If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.
Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.
> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.
I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.
This is not what I want to happen, but I have to think the American tech worker gets screwed in the world where remote work is the norm. If you make the labor market global, there's a lot of really smart Europeans who will work for half or a third of what American devs will. Can anyone refute this line of thinking? I'd love to be wrong.
1. Labor law is local. This adds (on a per-country basis) legal risk and compliance costs, as well as operational costs (e.g., you might need to have specific policies that apply to employees in specific countries).
2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.
3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.
When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.
I work for a small tech company in the US (~25 employees) and a few of them are in Europe. My boss didn't seem to have any issue hiring them and he wears a lot of hats, and we didn't hire them due to cost but to their very specific expertise.
No, sorry. These are all defeated by hiring contractors.
The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.
The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.
Consider this situation: you hire a contractor. They work for you for several years, and then you fire them. The contractor goes to the labor court in their country and files a claim stating that, yes, their contract says that they are an independent contractor, but no, since you've employed them "full-time" for several years continuously, they are a defacto/de jure employee. (Which is a valid argument under the labor laws of certain countries)
What will you do:
- Spend the time and money refuting their claim? (You need to find a good lawyer in that foreign country; lawyers are expensive; and someone on your side needs to spend their time coordinating with them)
- Ignore the claim? (Not a good idea if you ever want to visit that country in the future)
The claim itself might be nonsense; that's immaterial. You're faced with a Hobson's choice if said contractor drags you to court.
(Addendum: this is why I made the point that labor law is local. When you hire a national of a foreign country, in general, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the courts of that country for labor related disputes.
I am not sure if a clause in an employment contract stating that the agreement is governed by U.S. law would be accepted by a local court; and even if it did, in litigation, you'd most likely have to represent yourself before the local court to make that objection.)
You don’t fire contractors, their contract just ends. Additionally, the contract is often with the company, not the individual, so their employees aren’t in any legal sense working “for” you. If an employee wants to litigate, they’re opposing the contracting company, not you.
This comes with some downsides of its own, but generally this circumvents most labor issues. And of course anyone can sue for any reason, but if the argument is that the individual will pester you with lawsuits, can’t anyone do that to anyone else about anything?
Fair enough, yes. If you're contracting with a third-party company that takes up the risk of hiring the employee, that does circumvent these issues.
Re: the lawsuits—yes, the barrier to initiate litigation is low (in most countries); but in my experience, most folks only start litigation when they feel significantly wronged.
Problem is, given the difference in cultures (something you pointed out earlier), an act by the company that is perfectly standard in the U.S. might be interpreted very differently by someone from another country.
We started down this path before COVID, it's just accelerating now.
I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.
[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.
One consideration that helps local workers is the time zone; a remote company may yet choose to hire locally to reduce the time zone span.
Another is communication; companies want to hire people that can communicate fluently in a shared language.
But the best solution is to just become better at your job. The best programmers are all in the US, so it is easier to learn from them and join their ranks. If you are no better than the competition, then a company is justified in hiring in the cheaper labor.
In a vacuum, both of those first two considerations are easily resolved by hiring even more remote workers from an area with low pay (and low cost of living), and who share similar timezones and primary language.
But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.
(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)
If it could smoothen the inequalities between countries (and even within a country) in term of income, real estate/education/healthcare prices, I am all for it.
This topic keeps coming up when remote work is discussed and I think a lot of commenters are showing their age.
Off Shoring is not new. I managed a team of 7 Indains (6 dev, 2 QA) in Hyderabad as contract workers (not company employees) in 2007, 17 years ago! Before zoom, slack, meet, teams.
They were great at what they did, they were cheaper than 8 US employees, but the relationship definitely had pros/cons that are not easily understood.
The biggest pro was actually the timezone, I could ask for fixes/features and when I came into the office in the morning they'd be done. The cons were many, including quality of work and efficiency.
Totally understand offshoring went out of fashion prior to remote work and Covid. I'd be curious to know how management is evaluating that post Covid. I have to imagine many of them didn't learn their lesson, and I also imagine the quality of software engineers outside the US has risen in the meantime.
Does anyone have the link to the study? I'm tired of news articles referencing and summarizing their interpretation of a study, without giving me the option to validate the claims made.
If you own a big office building and companies don't need as much office space then you can't charge as much for rent, and the property loses value. Similar to how online shopping has led to a bunch of malls closing down
Do you mean that the landlord is instructing the employees of it's tenants to RTO so that he can keep his income and property value? How does that work?
"Hello CEO of Awesome Inc, it's me CEO of Rentalz Co. Your people have to return to office so that I can keep collecting the rent".
This is something that gets trotted out every time this topic comes up. It's got little to do with the actual conversation, and it only relevant to some companies.
Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.
If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.
Please tell us how you’re so certain companies that have productivity affecting their $1T net worth are more concerned with their $5b real estate.
Please don’t let it be that a VP is manipulating productivity numbers so that their drop in the bucket action will move the price of their SFH they own.
FAANG are the best case scenario for your argument, with billion dollar real estate portfolios and more RTO-heavy. Just because this study reached a conclusion doesn’t mean that it’s the same conclusion other companies’ reach. Especially when those companies’ have their bottom line at stake, “skin in the game.”
Again, by what plausible incentive do you think non-FAANG companies, with tiny real estate assets, usually leases for a multi-billion company, would impact their productivity for tiny help in the overall real estate market?
I admit I was being a bit flippant. But there's a case to be made from the "same people owning all the companies" argument that the investors in all these tech companies are also invested in commercial real estate returns. So basically it's Larry Fink who wants you back in the office, and hey he owns your co so the board will listen to him (being flippant again here).
Larry Fink and BlackRock don’t own the 6% of Google managed by BlackRock index funds. Nor does Google or other co’s decide to make adverse decisions to their morale and productivity because of a very minority shareholder. What you’re describing is conspiracy theory.
Occam’s razor. These co’s came to the same conclusion co’s like OpenAI did, that in persons benefits outweighed the negatives. Only when the conclusions don’t agree with the preferences people like you have, that the cope, conspiracy, and rationalizing come out. Also, what may be good for the individual, doesn’t mean it’s good for the org.
Not at FAANG - but my company was scaling up and bought a much larger office space right before covid, so a lot of the push does seem to be "We just spent a bunch of money on this and need to justify it to investors, it looks bad when they come in and the office in 90% empty desks"
FAANG as an amorphous blob of business doesn't care about commercial real estate. The very real people that make decisions at and for FAANG absolutely have concerns and interests outside of FAANG'S stock price in the decisions they make.
Be specific. I’ve already pointed out the absurdity of the case people try to make that someone with the intellect of a Google VP is fudging numbers in hopes of moving their SFH price. It’s pretty damning that there are many replies with no specifics, only vague insinuations. Ya, that’s about how well these criticisms have been thought out, of course.
People are different. For some it really increases productivity and wellbeing. For others the opposite. I'm not surprised it is about the same on average as measured by work output.
I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.
Working remote showed me how much I value direct interaction with people. For me, and I spoke to a lot of people for whom it's the same, the sweet spot is a hybrid model. Three days remote, two days on-site. Sometimes the other way round, depends on the tasks for the week.
If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks. That being said, I also will never work 100% on-site again, only if I can walk to work, which given my location, will not happen in the near future.
> If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks.
I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).
I'm completely opposite, so much energy wasted dealing with people. Just give me the requirements, only contact me for technical reasons please. I'm not a social animal, I work to collect my salary to pay bills, full stop. Less contacts means better work quality because I'm not wasting my energy somewhere else.
I will hopefully soon join an on-site only work place with the pre-2015 exception for the plumber visit. Don't really like being at home all the time, what do I talk to my wife about then?
Then again, I do choose jobs where I don't commute 3 hours into SF. More like 30 minutes, preferably by bike rather than car (location:Europe)
I’ve said this before, but if productivity isn’t lost, it’s at the expense of a very overworked manager, in companies that weren’t built remote-first, and don’t operate primarily remotely.
This is a more complex issue than simply measuring work output of one person and comparing it to their work output in different locations.
For my wife, it is objectively false to claim that remote work is better for her teams, in her specific situation.
I really do not understand what could possibly be hard about it for the manager here. People have tickets in some issue tracker, they move them into whatever status they're in, and the manager just sends out some messages to check in on the status if there haven't been new updates in a few days. Yeah, you also have 1-1s, status meetings, performance reviews, etc but these are all things you'd have anyway. My managers have done basically nothing different for me while I was remote and everything seemed to be fine.
And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place? How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group? How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it? And god forbid somewhere have a job that isn’t software engineering…
Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
> And how do you get those tickets into the issue tracker in the first place?
I mean depends on the team but approximately:
1. Discuss high level initiative
2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions
3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)
4. Prioritize work and assign tasks
> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?
Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.
> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?
Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.
> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).
I don't know about productivity but the quality of my work is better, and I am a much more sociable person when I am happy and awake than when I am draggy my ass, still sleepy to an office.
I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.
And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.
And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?
Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?
Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?
And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.
But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.
Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.
(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?
Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.
How could remote work not be more productive? Most of my friends/colleagues get back at least an hour of their lives each day they don't commute, and they all use the "extra" time to do more work. People wanna work. They just don't wanna sit in traffic, walk through parking lots and ride elevators for an hour every day.
I think regardless of where you work there is an upper limit in time you actually are productive during a day and it is way way below 8 hours. Usually I do more in the first 2 hours of my shift than I do during the remaining 6 hours. Others might be more productive at different time of day depending on their own internal clock. We just can't be 100% focused on hour work and uninterrupted for so many hours.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
No I don't want to work if i never see human beings, i have no connection to my team and I'm deeply depressed because I am a young single person who doesn't have a family waiting for me at home
Your coworkers are not your friends and your company is not your family, and if your job is keeping you from having friends and family outside of work then you need to find a new job or place to live.
Your coworkers can 100% be your friends what the hell man. You must be very unpleasant to be around if you refuse to make friends with any of the people you spend most of your waking hours dealing with. The key is making friends with coworkers who are a similar level of seniority to you who you get along with. My job isn't preventing me from having friends or family outside work at all, but I choose not to be miserable and antisocial for the majority of my waking day. Most people make friends at work, school or at sports teams. It's not weird to like making friends at work. I dunno how my job could be preventing me from making friends elsewhere but yeah its hard to spontaneously make friends in other settings when you don't naturally see the same people regularly.
But my main point in the above comment was that I don't have the morale to do shitty work to make a corporation rich unless I have human connection with my team. I don't value any fucking corporation enough to lift a single finger for them. It's only having other humans around me that makes work feel at all bearable to do.
Then your friends should reflect a bit. This study shows that there isn't a positive nor negative effect. If your friends are working additional hours each day when they work from home and they are representative of this study, then they are working more time to be as productive as they used to be.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
I think were at the point in capitalism (late stage corporatism?) that employees are more or less going to capture 'excess productivity' for themselves by doing chores and running errands. Same goes for the office, they will go around and gossip, several long trips to the break room and walks.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
We have a system where we clock in and out. This reduces the situation to "be clocked in when you work and clocked out otherwise" which is easy to handle psychologically.
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
This mirrors the issue I had with work from home to a tee. During the pandemic, as soon as it was safe, I went into a ghost town of an office right up until they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home. I was eventually able to find that coffee shops filled a similar function for me, and now spend a majority of my productive workday at one.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
> they sold the building and made us all permanently work from home
I do think about this. I think my current workplace office has enough people that this isn't likely, but if they did get rid of it, I guess I'd try to find some co-working facility and see how that feels. More likely though, I'd quit and find some other job that does have a local office.
To me this is almost like internal vs external locus of control stuff.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
Due to concepts like 'trust-based working hours' employees learn to monitor how much time they spend working. So when you get more time as an employee, you don't spend it on the company, which doesn't pay you more. Instead, you spend it somewhere else, like on your family.
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
How is productivity measured in the kinds of jobs that can be done from home?
For manufacturing it's easy - just measure the output per day and number of working hours spent.
But how is it done for finance, marketing, software development, creative work and such where the output is either limited (you don't need more financial reporting than last month) or is entirely different in scope and complexity every time?
If productivity could be objectively measured it seems to me it would be easy to determine objectively whether WFH is better or worse, but the discussion seems to be mostly based on personal opinions. Some feel that workers must be slacking off at home, some feel that they get much more done from home.
Boring email jobs where people are on their computer most of the time anyway and meetings are simply status updates, there's no reason why remote work is any worse, and likely just boosts productivity because of the mental health benefits of no commute, better environment, no distractions, etc.
In terms of jobs which require more creativity and collaborative rigor, I imagine remote work is where that element suffers.
These discussions always miss the main point. Remote work gives you the opportunity to decide what suits your life best. It enhances the possibilities a company offers. The main conflict is people trying to convince other people that their way is the right way and vice-versa. Find out what works for you and if you are better off, everyone will be better off around you too including your employer. That is why I mostly ignore these findings. I know what works for me and no study can convince me otherwise. And I know some colleagues like the office more and I'm glad they can go there.
I am fully remote and have been for a long time but I don't trust productivity studies, especially if they just find what everyone wants to hear anyway.
If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.
I can't help but read this as a severely pessimistic take on the capabilities of markets, since we can trace trying to "optimize productivity" back to essentially the earliest things even remotely resembling the modern economy and most of the enormous amount of research, money, and effort that has been poured into this endeavor has been at best occasionally better than chance at consistently improving any kind of "productivity" in the long term through labor practices, unless we directly define the suffering of workers as "productivity."
Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.
To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.
If that were the case, it seems like it wouldnt have taken covid to tip the balance so much, and it would have tipped back much more quickly. I've never worked at a company that would come anywhere being classed as optimizing for productivity, there has always been a huge amount of wasted time and resources.
Yeah, measuring productivity is a complex topic. You probably don't even know the productivity yourself, or by story points or whatever.
But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.
That's a good point. For a business owner that has to decide right now, it's little comfort to know that the market will sort it out. I'd guess that big corps are most affected here. SMB owners probably know exactly what they need.
Real estate is alluded to throughout this thread. I don't really get it. Is the theory that companies do RTO so they can rent out real estate to themselves via a holding? Just looking at profits I don't understand how that would be beneficial. Every dollar that the holding gains comes out of the coffers of the parent company.
It's a shell game to increase property value to pump the nominal asset holdings of the company. "See, this office is in demand and worth $50 mil" (WFH price: $5 mil)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadhttps://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/taking-breaks/ https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-take-better-breaks-at-work-ac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.
Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.
I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.
This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.
Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.
This if course needs to:
1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and
2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.
Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.
Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.
They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.
Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.
The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.
Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.
The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.
The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.
Wow that is a lot. That is (almost) a WHOLE DAY of meetings each week just for syncs.
I can only provide my own anecdotes, but I'm at 0.5-1hr for standup status-report type meetings.
My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.
For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.
Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive.
I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.
It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.
How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).
If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.
There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.
Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.
(Especially building startups. What a slog that is. The fun part is building the product, and that’s a fraction of what you have to do.)
Rip off the band aid and feel some pain.
The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two : - working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money - working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO. Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies. Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.
This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.
Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).
> “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”
This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.
While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.
Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.
Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.
Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.
Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.
I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.
My story is an anecdote, and moving seats was not an option. For this situation I might as well be remote if I'm not next to the team.
p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.
Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.
In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!
There is a distinction to be made between loneliness and solitude though.
One can feel hopelessly lonely in a crowd, one can also find great solace in solitude.
In fact, another great cause of mental health issues is the apparently growing inability for people to stay still, instead constantly vying for interaction (and often resorting to that quick virtual dopamine hit loop, sometimes even when face to face)
There's balance to be had, both ways, but not everyone have the same needs.
I agree, not everyone has the same needs. But I think on average the majority of people would benefit from or would be able to handle a mandatory hybrid situation. If a few fully remote jobs remained that may satisfy the few unusual people who are actually that disturbed by social interaction, or live in such odd locations that it's not possible for them, that would be great. And I am absolutely sure those opportunities will remain. But I think it is bad for humans to aim for a mainly remote working world, both for our mental health and for the dynamism of our collaborative work. I really believe that people who genuinely thrive significantly better in 100% remote vs a couple days in the office are less than 10% of the population. We are social animals and we increase our risk of dementia the less we socialise, it's just our biology.
The meeting model is more like phone calls and, while I adore WFH, not well suited for that.
And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...
My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.
I like that and the description that follows because it shows how much the whole thing is neither monochromatic nor even linear. Even when talking inside an {ex,in}troversion model there are all sorts of subtle mechanisms and processes at play, and that's not even beginning to talk about other aspects, from varying shades of ADHD, Asperger, or autistic traits, to delayed sleep disorder syndrome.
It does not follow that the deep social interaction that is beneficial to mental health has to happen at work.
One can WFH and see people outside of work. Some people enjoy deep social ties with coworkers, others prefer keeping work at a distance from their personal life.
> People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces.
That is incorrect. Some people do, some others don't.
You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.
It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.
Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.
There are loads of places like this. The irony is that in such context people enjoy the watercooler talk as an escape from the hellscape that is their 9-5 shitty job, doing everything they can instead of their job to make their experience less miserable.
> I've never had that experience.
Lucky you.
> And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working.
This has happened all the time for me (could be zoom, could be Slack). From scheduled informal chats with teammates to regular chats with close people to members of non-work or work channels of interest to random ones via Donut with yet unknown people, it's lively and on everyone's own terms.
> I've had people never turn their cameras on.
Ever since I have been remote they all did. If they don't it's either one of the odd low bandwidth situation and they save it for an acceptable audio experience, they're on the move - and open about it, with either an apology about possible noise when speaking thus unmuted or setting expectations about their ability to talk or follow - and audio only "phone mode" is more practical, or they're at home and privacy respecting of their SO or otherwise guest.
> And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable.
I am genuinely empathetic to your situation and am glad to hear from a nearby comment that it has resolved - at least to an extent - and you found an environment where you can be happier.
I say so because I realised long ago that people can come from all ways of life and be wildly different in their needs, and having been through similar suffering for something in the order of three decades - only from a symmetrical end - I can relate.
And I say "end" and not "side" because it's a continuum, there are no sides, there's no team A vs team B, and it's not a zero sum game.
> The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
By and large "pro WFH people" are not arguing that everyone-and-their-dog must WFH, instead that WFH does make sense and is a true net positive for many, and that the recent pro-office-for-everyone discourse that it is inherently more productive because humans is at best loaded with prejudice that fails to take into account a good chunk of actual humans, some raising their voice, others staying silent, and at worst has hidden agenda.
The pendulum was mostly stuck one way for aeons, then it progressively moved with the rise of the Internet, and swung full-force with COVID. Now it's swinging back hard the other way. Change is hard, old habits die harder, but I'm hopeful that someday we'll find balance, but for that we need understanding of each other.
I have had shitty office experiences don't get me wrong, but since becoming a software engineering professional, I find that I am in enough demand to actually choose a decent place to work. Since entering this field, I had one horrifying remote job where I never learnt what my colleagues looked like and felt miserable and demotivated all the time, and I've worked two other places where I've been more in the office. When working in the office, I've never had horrible experiences like I did when I worked shitty non-professional jobs. Being a software engineer is cushy as hell and I find it weird how some people complain about their tech workplaces as if they're not some of the chillest places to work in person that you could possibly be lucky enough to work in.
Thank you for your empathy for my past situation. However, the problem when pro-wfh people say "we want you to have a choice" is that my shitty remote job was technically hybrid. I could go into the office. People even tried to organise a single office day a week. And because it wasn't mandatory, half the time I tried going in the place was a ghost town. I don't want that, ever. So yeah I LOVE that my job has (semi)MANDATORY days otherwise there would be so many colleagues of mine I would never have met and I am great friends with them (By semi mandatory I mean we have a 3 day target average. So you're not penalised for missing a week or sth its just the mode of your weeks should be 3 days. Which is a great system)
Basically, for me to have a choice to live the way I want there HAS to be companies with MANDATORY office days. And the pro-wfh people demonise that SO MUCH.
Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.
So at least for me, it doesn't work.
That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.
It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.
And yet they don't. That is not because they are bored, but because they fear the possible failure.
For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.
Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.
I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.
At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.
This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.
For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc
The one customer owned cooperative I have worked for did limit equity to one share per shareholder, in addition to being the most pathologically corporate and political company I have ever worked for or known off. Maybe worker owned cooperatives work better.
I would certainly not want to work at a non-worker-owned cooperative. That's not an incentive alignment for me as a worker, and it's a hierarchy placed above workers. Customer-owned coops are only meant to be good for the customer, it’s standard hierarchical wage labor bs for workers.
Not that worker-owned ones are able to avoid politics though - all social relations have varying degrees of success and conflict.
If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.
The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.
If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is
so the media is starting to lay the foundation for offshoring of jobs to remote, cheaper locations.
Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.
With colleagues in different timezones you can say goodbye to on-call shifts and being woken up in the middle of the night for issues. An indian or euro colleague can do maintenance stuff on infra used by US developers and customers and the US ones can do the same for indian/euro facing ones. All this without the fatigue and risk of mistakes that comes with working very late into the night or early in the morning.
I've worked in a team with indian, euro and us workers and we could find a way to get meetings because indian people do not usually know how to say No. So they tend to stay later than us euro guys and we would have most of our meetings in a short window in early evening (India) / afternoon (Europe) / morning (USA). Actually that was a good thing because it meant most of our calls would be concentrated in that same time window so you could focus on actual work the rest of the day instead of having calls spread out over a full day of work and lots of interruptions / context switches.
I'm in one of these offshoring countries (South Africa). All I've seen lately is a ton of remote jobs are now limiting themselves to remote within the country or region, not even timezone-aligned. Hard to find EU/UK remote work that doesn't lock me out. I see the same with US-only remote work.
The result is also that local salaries have started going down again, in spite of the high inflation. There's no pressure anymore to pay better, when the foreign companies with real money aren't buying your employees anymore.
Not saying it's all completely dead and no companies are hiring abroad to here, but right this second, the remote dream seems to be shrinking. If anything the offshoring will be more traditional with setting up office in the locale and paying local salaries.
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.
As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
Can you give an example of a headless company that's running fine?
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.
> For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support
Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
You can get best people overseas for a fraction of US costs, and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.
I'm glad this happens so I can use geographic arbitrage: work for US client but live in nice place in Europe with reasonable costs of living.
The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants.
As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago.
Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one.
And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year.
Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.
Best talents are not paid at the similar level globally. Even tech giants like Google have different salary for same levels in different countries inside EU. You can get x2 if you move from Warsaw to Dublin or x3 if you move to Zurich.
100K is indeed very high for S or E Europe, but in my experience there are very very few people who actually get that kind of money. Any of those are absolutely on the top end of a bell curve. Also I'm quite certain that the quantity of those kind of workers vs remote workers in USA is less than 1%.
I don't think this can be true. An employer has to follow labor laws pertaining to the country of residence of their employees. Typically some sort of legal entity has to be established in those countries.
C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?
Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.
> This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips.
What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".
Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.
It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.
No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position.
So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?)
I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to.
Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears.
Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away.
Welcome to capitalism.
I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.
It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.
A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"
But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.
indeed it seems that effective remote only work requires a more coherent team or more formalized processes.
To be clear, I don't honestly believe the previous paragraph. I'm just using it to illustrate how one can pull out a "just so" story to argue the exact opposite that you're doing. I believe your argument is flawed in that makes a universal condemnation supported by generalisations based on local specifics.
I work in a company which, for all intents and purposes, allows its employees to be almost fully remote and yet a significant number of us actively choose to come to the office (partly motivated by things like free brunches from office management). The overwhelming majority of workers come to the office on foot, on public transport, by bike, or by electric scooter, and a tiny few come by motorbike. How is that "borderline morally evil"?
For one, one would need to look into how many car commutes are avoidable to more precisely quantify the species-level irrationality of fossil-powered forced cramming of office towers inside cities day-in-and-out.
I'm sure it's all been done...
- risk of accidents
- sitting longer hours, leading to loss of muscle tone etc
- inhaling particulate from engines and tires
This stuff builds up over time. The decrease in life expectancy is real.
Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.
If you are single and want to live alone, you can certainly optimize the hell out of housing costs. But of course, each single constraint you remove will probably let you reduce your costs by a bit.
When all expenses are considered, working in-office can (and often does) cost the employee way more money than remote.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
This does not seem like a very strong study.
They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.
Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.
Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch.
Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.
Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.
This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
Now that we are forced back into the office, morale is crashing.
I still don't see the reason why you should go to office if you do your work just right.
There are more expenses if you go to office rather than being remote.
Work from home is a cost savings companies so it would seem they'd be motivated to downsize office space, but this isn't what's happening. In a world where costs are always the highest priority, I'm not buying the culture/work ethic argument.
The investor class is furious about remote work, because it affects their real estate pyramid scheme.
Pre-pandemic you didn’t really notice these things, but it adds up fast.
I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.
If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.
Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.
> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.
I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.
Given the breadth of this study, two different conclusions spring to mind:
• productivity is up across the board, regardless of wfh; or
• sending the pen pushers and bean counters home and letting the shop floor people get on with their jobs made both more productive!
2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.
3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.
When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.
The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.
The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.
Consider this situation: you hire a contractor. They work for you for several years, and then you fire them. The contractor goes to the labor court in their country and files a claim stating that, yes, their contract says that they are an independent contractor, but no, since you've employed them "full-time" for several years continuously, they are a defacto/de jure employee. (Which is a valid argument under the labor laws of certain countries)
What will you do:
- Spend the time and money refuting their claim? (You need to find a good lawyer in that foreign country; lawyers are expensive; and someone on your side needs to spend their time coordinating with them)
- Ignore the claim? (Not a good idea if you ever want to visit that country in the future)
The claim itself might be nonsense; that's immaterial. You're faced with a Hobson's choice if said contractor drags you to court.
(Addendum: this is why I made the point that labor law is local. When you hire a national of a foreign country, in general, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the courts of that country for labor related disputes.
I am not sure if a clause in an employment contract stating that the agreement is governed by U.S. law would be accepted by a local court; and even if it did, in litigation, you'd most likely have to represent yourself before the local court to make that objection.)
This comes with some downsides of its own, but generally this circumvents most labor issues. And of course anyone can sue for any reason, but if the argument is that the individual will pester you with lawsuits, can’t anyone do that to anyone else about anything?
Re: the lawsuits—yes, the barrier to initiate litigation is low (in most countries); but in my experience, most folks only start litigation when they feel significantly wronged.
Problem is, given the difference in cultures (something you pointed out earlier), an act by the company that is perfectly standard in the U.S. might be interpreted very differently by someone from another country.
I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.
[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.
Another is communication; companies want to hire people that can communicate fluently in a shared language.
But the best solution is to just become better at your job. The best programmers are all in the US, so it is easier to learn from them and join their ranks. If you are no better than the competition, then a company is justified in hiring in the cheaper labor.
But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.
(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)
Off Shoring is not new. I managed a team of 7 Indains (6 dev, 2 QA) in Hyderabad as contract workers (not company employees) in 2007, 17 years ago! Before zoom, slack, meet, teams.
They were great at what they did, they were cheaper than 8 US employees, but the relationship definitely had pros/cons that are not easily understood.
The biggest pro was actually the timezone, I could ask for fixes/features and when I came into the office in the morning they'd be done. The cons were many, including quality of work and efficiency.
"Hello CEO of Awesome Inc, it's me CEO of Rentalz Co. Your people have to return to office so that I can keep collecting the rent".
CEO of Awesome Inc: "No."
CEO of Rentalz Co.: "shucks!"
Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.
If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.
Please don’t let it be that a VP is manipulating productivity numbers so that their drop in the bucket action will move the price of their SFH they own.
Again, by what plausible incentive do you think non-FAANG companies, with tiny real estate assets, usually leases for a multi-billion company, would impact their productivity for tiny help in the overall real estate market?
Occam’s razor. These co’s came to the same conclusion co’s like OpenAI did, that in persons benefits outweighed the negatives. Only when the conclusions don’t agree with the preferences people like you have, that the cope, conspiracy, and rationalizing come out. Also, what may be good for the individual, doesn’t mean it’s good for the org.
I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.
If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks. That being said, I also will never work 100% on-site again, only if I can walk to work, which given my location, will not happen in the near future.
I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).
Then again, I do choose jobs where I don't commute 3 hours into SF. More like 30 minutes, preferably by bike rather than car (location:Europe)
This is a more complex issue than simply measuring work output of one person and comparing it to their work output in different locations.
For my wife, it is objectively false to claim that remote work is better for her teams, in her specific situation.
Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
I mean depends on the team but approximately:
1. Discuss high level initiative
2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions
3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)
4. Prioritize work and assign tasks
> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?
Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.
> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?
Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.
> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).
Note that when economists are talking about productivity, it's specific. It's units of output per hour worked (quantitative, not qualitative). https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/what-is-pro...
IMO it's also totally fine to use that freed up time to just get a break from... anything. No need to be after self-improvement all the time.
I think that should be enough for any company.
I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.
And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.
And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?
Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?
Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?
And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.
But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.
Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.
(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?
Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.
Mouse wigglers, anyone?)
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
But my main point in the above comment was that I don't have the morale to do shitty work to make a corporation rich unless I have human connection with my team. I don't value any fucking corporation enough to lift a single finger for them. It's only having other humans around me that makes work feel at all bearable to do.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
I do think about this. I think my current workplace office has enough people that this isn't likely, but if they did get rid of it, I guess I'd try to find some co-working facility and see how that feels. More likely though, I'd quit and find some other job that does have a local office.
I live 10 minutes from my office, and there are much, much fewer distractions there. Anecdotal of course, but it's one way to answer your question.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
For manufacturing it's easy - just measure the output per day and number of working hours spent. But how is it done for finance, marketing, software development, creative work and such where the output is either limited (you don't need more financial reporting than last month) or is entirely different in scope and complexity every time?
If productivity could be objectively measured it seems to me it would be easy to determine objectively whether WFH is better or worse, but the discussion seems to be mostly based on personal opinions. Some feel that workers must be slacking off at home, some feel that they get much more done from home.
Boring email jobs where people are on their computer most of the time anyway and meetings are simply status updates, there's no reason why remote work is any worse, and likely just boosts productivity because of the mental health benefits of no commute, better environment, no distractions, etc.
In terms of jobs which require more creativity and collaborative rigor, I imagine remote work is where that element suffers.
If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.
Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.
To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.
But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.
Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.