Before the pandemic I used to goto work and not do shit. Wake up early on one or two days and do my work.
It’s the same exact routine except now I have to pretend in the office when I could just be napping and doing better work later.
:shrugs:
I’ll find a way around whatever bullshit the suits come up with.
-- WHAT? They need to apply for that?
Don't get me wrong: I like to drive "somewhere" on the weekend or visit family and friends, but for that, an older car would be fine enough. Heck, I could even persue my dream of a convertible. I just own a decent car to have a reliable way to get to work. Every. Day.
Things might change for me moving forward.
IBM expects >80% of their employees to be spending at least 3 days per week in the office post-pandemic. Parents will be allowed to continue to WFH until schools re-open in September. And they're labeling THIS as a "hybrid model".
a) I'm interrupted at home. Communicate, talk to your kids and rest of the family (works from ages 4 and up, before then you need to agree for a partner/caretaker to handle kids) and let them know there are times they can't interrupt you but the key here is: offer times where they can! You can't expect to be left alone 8 hours a day in a row in this new arrangement.
b) I can't work without pressure. Communicate, talk to your teammates and have a virtual room where you just work, without talking unless there's a question. There's also focusmate.com if you are afraid of your coworkers. Also, create a routine for yourself. Be unafraid of asking for help.
c) I don't have friends or family. Will an office really change that? I know that the friends I made working at an office I still have, and that I've made friends working remotely too. As well as having the friends I made when young.
Finally, many workplaces are not enabling workers to be successful remotely, becuase they don't know how to or they don't want to. You need to encourage async, reduce (not increase!) meetings, and offer more freedom to accommodate for the above.
It's easier to think of Google as good when you face your coworkers, but when they are behind avatars and just text, it's easier to fall for the propaganda of the NYT et.al
1. Alphabet Workers Union exists.
2. ???
3. Google is forced to return all its workers to in person work during a global pandemic.
The reason Google is bringing people back is to have a united culture, which they need because the NYT is naughty? Not following here.
"But they don't have to pay for office space". Sure, but you're totally discounting the amount of power that they gain by having control of your physical body. I get to tell you where to be, when to be there, and what to do. I have cameras and badges to verify you're there. You're also physically close so you're buying a house with a mortgage, putting your kids in school. If I fire you your only choice is something within a 100mi radius. I'm a member of local business groups so there's a good chance I know where you're going and maybe even play golf with the companies CEO. You better not burn any bridges on your way out or I might shake my head and make a face when I mention your name on the back nine.
I guarantee you that some people will be allowed to work from home. Others won't. Right now they're busily working to determine which ones those will be where it's best for them. The outcome will be you'll always get the worst deal. The ones that are fungible and I can cut costs to the bone? Sure work from home. The ones that I need a little more leverage with? You're coming into the office. I'll even buy a foosball table and put some snacks in the kitchen if it makes you feel better.
I don't really give a shit if you go across town. They take my people, I take yours. The point is your ours and we trade you as we see fit. Think I'm being dramatic. Think again https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
You must live somewhere with the highest cost of living.
Working on software that intentionally isolates and manipulates people
And now you don't even get to work from your overpriced home.
I'm sure there won't be a retention problem,
It’s also not in the least different from pre-pandemic, and there wasn’t much of a retention problem then, either, as far as I know.
There’s also plenty of offices in places that don’t have the very highest cost of living, and Google committed to expanding those as well.
Managing salaried employees by optimizing their productivity as hourly labourers is essentially abuse.
The secret is to always maintain an opportunity funnel and a pipeline of potential job opportunities that you can convert into interviews or jobs within a few weeks.
Over time (1) and (3) could see compensation easily halve as supply of developers becomes more easily globalized
Our administration needs to pass legislation to prevent companies from forcing people back into offices. This is rediculous.
offices are fine (though not required). travelling for > 15-20 mins to and from work is what sucks the most.
we need local office hubs. work around your local community for your employer near your home.
There’s also the issue many people have of not being able to do deep work in a busy open plan office.
Presumably the increasing availability of vaccines factors into it, lots of new information between Nov 1. and the last few weeks.
Fourteen days a year seems pretty limited--weren't Googler's working from home more often than that before the pandemic?
Same, my team has gone way through the roof in productivity, delivering more than ever. At some point we actually ran out of stories to do even with more work and had to come up with more.
As a note, over than half the team already WFH'd at least 1 day a week in normal conditions, and there was sufficient team trust that everyone would do the right thing, nobody minded if you ran out for errands or lunch unannounced - people would quickly check if any meetings were scheduled usually before running out, items were completed ahead of schedule. I've been doing a 30m-1h nap in the middle of the day and that's helped a lot too.
I've also managed to not catch a cold or flu for the first time ever.
My previous daily commute was min 1-2hrs each way in completely stopped traffic on a standing room only bus/train with multiple transfers and involved waking up even earlier than that to not be refused entry to an overfilled bus.
I've seen a teammate or two be playing actual games (ranked apex legends in this case) during meetings but honestly, they were still responding, answered questions, and that meeting could have been a slack thread but some other teams are not nearly as competent at reading README.md.
Sadly, from what I have seen most people with a good work life balance want to stay remote while people with few other life interests want absolutely go back to work.
I predict that in a couple years this will be part of the culture of each company. You will chose a company based on your desire to become close friends with your colleagues or live a great life outside the office.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2019/07/20/deja...
EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.
The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.
If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
I didn't bring in the machine, but it was a nice work environment.
We have many offices in offices in different timezones, and remote-only helped cross office collaboration.
Also, the company is open floor plan, which is well-known to be productivity minimizing.
On top of that, we’re pathologically meeting-heavy (“Don’t write it down or send an email. Schedule a meeting instead.” is part of new-hire training.)
If I weren’t under NDA, and I had business school contacts, I’d try to write this up as a case study.
My philosophy on it is that management is key. If butts-in-seats gives management the illusion of productivity then they will likely find out they are dead wrong. You can practically objectively measure productivity with remote work. Collaboration is more challenging and therefore surfaces many efficiencies you can make in your process.
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/covid-19/us-remote-work-su...
I will grant you that multi-person video meetings are subpar. Which is a blessing, because now we have smaller meetings.
There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.
(Fully) Vaccinated people spending time together seems safe enough though, so the choice to work in office is probably fine (whereas requiring it is premature).
I remember my interviews with Google & Facebook as a new grad & they felt far more grueling than as a senior engineer (that & 10 years ago they were still asking those brain teasers like find the voltage between two points of an infinite lattice circuit).
At this stage in my career, I've found the interview questions are all about how to design large pieces of software with the coding aspect being a smaller piece of the pie to make sure I'm not BS'ing.
It's a numbers game overall.
For example, maybe you got in before you had a kid? Also, you don't necessarily need to study that much to pass the interview.
At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.
And I don't want to hang "with friends at work" I go to "work" that has to be specified clearly and that I expect to deliver with purely professional merit driven collaboration and not friendships and gangs.
I have friends or would love to have friends out of the place where I work. I want strict compartmentalisation between work and personal life. As the company would not want my personal friends to be hanging around the workplace for confidentiality and what not - by the same token, I don't workplace "friends" hanging out with me after office hours.
I could also surmise that in a knowledge economy, high bandwith and low latency connections are very importance, and that in-person communication are much higher bandwith and lower latency than remote.
You should consider that among the things less conducive to team productivity and mental health are "the guy in the room" types who exhibit the same lack of interest in normal social interaction with their colleagues you are claiming here under the incorrect label "professionalism".
Both of these are common scenarios at Google, though.
If any serious work is being done in a company, it does not look like that. Why do people keep pedalling this lie? A big problem in engineering is a lot of the work is done by engineers in private and the supervisors don't get to see it or experience it. So they think it happens by magic and that maybe the laughing execs actually contributed to it.
Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people employed in offices who literally do come in all day and don't do any work. Working from home means you actually have to have some work to do. What we're seeing is a load of people realising they have no work to do.
Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.
Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
I assume it's a bit easier if you are more senior and have a few company changes on your resume, but for someone for whom its their first or second job in the industry, it can be overwhelming. I think that's why often fully remote companies pre-pandemic seemed to be more focussed on hiring seniors.
Likely some of these problems can be mitigated as we learn how to deal with them, but this is one reason why I think post-pandemic most software houses will have to adopt a policy of encouraging some on-site work.
Also keep in mind that it may be slower than with direct in person mentoring but there can also be the opposite of in person mentoring and then being locked in the same office can become extremely stressful.
I also run a small team with new hires on one day and I'm seeing great productivity and teamwork.
We are going back to the office eventually but I don't think the on-site requirements will be as strict as in the past. In the medium term I see us moving towards a more flexible model beyond just the flexible allocation of desks (which imho. is a horrible thing, pretending to be office workspace and serving neither then needs of people there nor the companies output).
My employer has always (started in 2007) been fully remote; we've never had office space ANYWHERE. It's a small team building a relatively niche product, and we're pretty successful, but what you say is true:
Getting new people up to speed is hard. And hiring "baby developers" is just not something we've done. All our hires are midcareer or later. I feel like a fresh dev needs the office environment to get traction early in their career, and we just can't provide that.
There have been plenty of companies where I thought we might have achieved more with an office.
Yes, I understand you can always improve your processes but there does feel like there are fundamental limitations with remote work.
In my experience part remote works much better, if not better than fully remote / fully office based. It's nice have a few days a week for in person meetings then some quiet time to get stuck into work at home.
I mean they must realise this is a pretty unpopular decision so why not share their justification.
Otherwise it's just an appeal to authority - "Ours not to reason why.."
But that still assumes the executives making these decisions prioritize employee well-being and work productivity. No amount of correctly collected, analyzed and understood data on WFH productivity will help if the change isn't driven by concerns about productivity. In that case, this data is just irrelevant. I believe this is the concern GP is expressing - that the goals of the management are not well aligned with the goals of the employee (which is obvious), and the well-being of the company (which is plausible).
--
[0] - I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt here to Google, at least in areas where it matters. I'm not usually giving it to a typical company, Internet or otherwise: just because you have data, doesn't mean you have the right data, have analyzed it correctly, or even employ anyone who could analyze it correctly (or employ decision makers who could understand and vet the conclusion of the people doing the analysis). In my experience, these failures are very common.
[1] - I have my doubts where it comes to their product decisions.
I'd disagree at least a little here. Google has been surveying their staff about what they want to do after the pandemic is over, see this twitter thread where Google published some of it's data: https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeatgoogle/status/1308529118531...
People are split on what they want. Maybe people could be better trained to wfh, but some of us just prefer an office. While I am likely more productive at home (even with 3 kids there) I see that knowledge sharing with a large team is just harder (missing that hallway conversation, or seeing someone at a whiteboard and just learning random things).
The vast majority prefer not to come to the office everyday. Google says you can only work from home slightly more than 1 day per month.
If they took the survey into account, it would have been the opposite - you're only required to come into the office 14 days per year.
Me, I want to go back to the office. Like hanging out with my work friends.
And is it the same for everyone? Like for HR, sales, marketing?
and all of these companies are now asking their employees back to the office full time in a week or so.
i am sure that if productivity hadn't dropped during WFH then there wouldn't be such a big issue. but when the whole company stops producing, then it's pretty clear what needs to be done...
It is also likely that we are talking about a young demographics which lacks the maturity needed to work remotely efficiently through self-control (I've been that kind 15 years ago for my first remote experience which was a disaster, but my second remote experience was opposite, extremely positive for myself and my output). I didn't pay attention to it when I started writing, but the fact that you mention "gamedev" is a good hint at this.
Sales and marketing seem to work as usual though, just from homes. Obviously game sales skyrocketed over past year, so it is hard to reliably grade their performance.
One production team that started transition to remote work before pandemic reported no significant slowdown. They hired bunch of highly skilled multi-disciplinary contractors all over the world and let go most of their regular staff, but it is fairly small team so I don't think this approach can scale.
When I see the OP comment which claims WFH is the only way and any other way to is just "backward thinking" in a very self-aggrandizing manner, I just remind myself that internet is safe haven for the type of people, whom I will rarely meet in real life.
I suspect that my employer will have us back in the office before the end of the year after a year of remote working. Although I actually sort of prefer the office myself, the whole "physically colocated" thing is especially comical in my situation (which I think is common in most big corporations) - none of the people I actually work with are in the same office, or even the same time zone, as me. So I'll drive a half hour each way to essentially be a remote worker anyway, and I definitely won't be the only one.
The cynic in me thinks that this back to office push is out of fear that it's far, far easier for remote workers to organize outside the view of the company. They are terrified and want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible.
depends on how replacible you really are.
if productivity stayed the same, no-one would have said anything.
Does it require 5 days a week? Maybe not. Is every person who believes remote work has long term negative impacts some middle manager from the 90s? No.
I don’t mind coming into your office now and again (there’s a special dimension to IRL connections), but the reason I don’t want to work there full time is that it’s crap for knowledge work. I outspend you by 10x per head in my home office, and everything there is to my exact specification. The whole field of modern office design should be a discredited pseudoscience; management is addicted to it because of the real estate crisis though.
This is also kind of terrible, because a lot of people use FAANG as their North star for every policy decision.
“Well Google use primary colours in their logo, Brian”
Most people can't work remotely and productively because they are not trained to do so. E.g. You are in your office (inside your home) and your wife, your dog or child enters it demanding you do some kind of non important issue right now, distracting you from your work.You need to be trained to not them let them distract you. The people living in your house need to be trained as well on what to do.
The training for working in the(external) Office started at school, from a time fiber optics telecommunications were unheard for common mortals.
Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision.
The companies that will solve this issue at big scale in the future are those that solve it because the they have to in order to survive(against established companies). It will be a startup that faces all the risks involved, not an established company like Google or Facebook.
It will not be companies that could pay millions for people living in ultra expensive places and are already making big bucks doing that. They don't need to change because the system already works for them.
I could do a day here or there for team-building activities or major meetings, but that's pretty much the extent I'd be willing to do.
Granted, this is based on having a 40-minutes train commute (each way, so 80 minutes/day), but unless I could have a 10 minute walk or bike commute I don't think my opinion would materially change, and that's pretty unlikely where I live due to downtown property/rent prices (Tokyo).
former engineers - that is, they no longer want to be an engineer, but chose the management path. It's quite likely that engineering work is merely a stepping stone for someone like that who intends to advance their career in the management track. I would expect an over-representation of extroverts in this category.
Introverted engineers remain engineers because they like the work, and are only forced out when the pay no longer match their output (but can not move up any more due to the engineering track being "ceiling" compared to the management track).
Somehow this sounds to me like: "Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."
Source: I am an employee
Read any article from the likes of HBR from 2019 and it's apparent that much, much research shows that offices, and open offices in particular are toxic for productivity - and that the 'water cooler' collaboration effect has been vastly overstated.
Sometimes in an open office you could go several hours without getting anything done at all because someone had decided to hold an impromptu meeting by your desk. And irony of all ironies - you put your headphones in at a loud enough volume to drown out the noise and then get tapped on the shoulder for 'distracting' people.
Fast forward a year and a half and the 'water cooler' myth seems to be accepted as fact, and none of the business press seems to mention at all the harmful effects of open offices on productivity. It's not like good ideas ever came from those interactions - they tended to produce the half baked ideas, and definitely didn't produce the x-functional alignment it actually takes to get anything done in most orgs.
The switching cost of interruption - or even the fear that you could at any moment be interrupted - is a complete inhibitor to deep work. My only hope is that when people are inevitably forced back into the office, people will be able to be more productive because of 40% fewer people being in them.
Personally, I'm at a small data company, and we're opening a new office for people where WFH is a burden (NYC apartments and all), but is so far voluntary. In fact, I think there are only seats for less than 1/3 of the company. I've been really impressed with how smoothly everyone shifted to all zoom all the time mode, and honestly, my small conference room meetings have been more productive the last year.
Amazon updates remote work guidance, plans to ‘return to an office-centric culture as our baseline’
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-updates-remote-work-gui...
oof.
> ...we are giving employees the opportunity to elect a Work Mode—whether they’d prefer to work mostly at home or in the office...
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is...
They also have a 17-year lease on space in 4 World Trade Center.
Disclaimer: I work there.
It’s the same as “if you don’t like it here and don’t mind not having a roof over your head, you’re free to quit and go work somewhere else with better conditions”. It’s not as dramatic in SE because we’re in demand but it’s still not trivial to do everywhere. And it’s even worse for less in demand jobs.
Or most likely, employees who will accept to commute for the salary that Google offers.
Going back to in office 100% is a thing of the past unless you are a team that has to be there - making hardware etc.
For ex I cant imagine the Pixel team working 100% remote.
I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
The entire concept of workplaces, how they are run, and what people do is created by the normal person and for the normal person. This is completely irrespective and often counter to what produces the best outcome. It is about the social needs of these people, not the needs of the product.
I like work from home and get to focus more effectively than the open office. I’m pretty deep on the introvert side of the scale and this pandemic has been too isolating for even me. Which is to say I don’t think work from home should be removed because most everyone is socially needy now. I’m looking forward to being with friends again. But I do not want to go back to working in the office. I’m hoping my work has max one required office day for meetings a week, but not more, and hopefully less.
It takes a lot of practice to get good at effective emails in place of face to face conversations.
I actually tended to email my immediate boss my questions. With my eyesight issues or whatever, I seemed incapable of figuring out how to show up at her cubicle with good timing like other people routinely did.
When I and two other people on my team were moved to a newly created troubleshooting team but kept the same technical lead, my work life hardly changed. I continued mostly emailing my questions and getting what I needed.
My two coworkers who had been dependent on being able to talk with her face to face were blowing a gasket now that their desks were too far from hers to conveniently slip into her cubicle like they were used to doing.
I can handle remote work. I've spent a lot of time doing things online for a lot of years.
But I'm not surprised that it's been a tough work year for most people and productivity seems to have generally been down. Working remotely takes a different skill set and many people simply don't have it, even people who work at a computer all day.
Remember, this is a company that has had senior executives have extremely real and credible sexual misconduct allegations made against them only to see them sent off with million dollar golden parachutes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
You will not win a legal battle against Google, period.
It is allowing some offices to have people who want to come back early, come back.
It is sticking by its commitment of allowing WFH until September and looking at hybrid models for after.
Personally, a hybrid model seems ideal to me. I dislike remote full time.
That’s the real news for me. After the pandemic is over Google will go back to a full-onsite team.
And then there’s the middle manager aspect.
Google made these offices with the idea to make people feel like the office is “home”. Snacks, food, bring your dog, etc all screams “why go home when you have everything here?”
The cynic in me believes that is exactly their aim, to keep people at the office longer and middle manage.
That said, I do believe that a lot of people have a hard time not working in an office. These people should still have the choice, though, and these offices should not feel like home. Because it isn’t.
But this is still something that many companies will take advantage of; it simply costs less to not rent an office. Yes, they should also pay for part of the rent and internet bills for the employee, but it would still cost less than renting a huge building. Especially in Silicon Valley.
I’ve heard this theory as maximizing the odds of such a lucky conversation. Increasing the innovation “surface area” by having more people having more chance encounters.
There’s probably other reasons to it too, but there’s also reason to believe that same type of innovation doesn’t happen as readily online.
It’s the same theory why industries tend to cluster in certain areas; not just access to a pool of ready-trained employees but also a thriving innovation scene due to the proximity of all those experienced, motivated people.
I was put in a row of desks literally next to the open kitchen/conversation area. My day had constant distractions and I had no control over how I wanted my work environment to be.
Working from home, I'm incredibly comfortable AND productive. The noise level, lighting, etc are all how I choose them. I dont have this tension around other people getting to decide for me how I want to work.
If you work in a FAANG type of office environment, the above probably doesn't apply to you. Your office is professionally designed and cost many millions of dollars. You are given high quality equipment to make you comfortable. Your office has amenities that make being there easier.
My house is nice, and is custom-tailored to me. The amenities are exactly the amenities I want and use. The equipment is exactly what I want, not equipment that a distant person contracted out to a firm to mass produce for a general office.
I understand that not every person is in a situation like this, but if you're working at a FAANG you should be making enough money to set up your living situation nicely.
People should have the -option- to come into an office. Working at home gets lonely. But there is no reason that a FAANG is necessarily better or even good at providing an optimal work environment.
It makes sure that people who are aligned with new ways of working have less reasons to work there. It also sends a strong signal the PHBs have taken over.
Thanks for letting me know, so I know not to apply.
It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible. To gain back some of the life we otherwise would spend on commute. Work is for work, not for socializing, or having fun, or playing Xbox and table tennis. I mean, sure, these are nice perks, but we are being paid for the work we do, not for the fun we have. And working without being distracted by some colleagues loud music in the headphones, or the chit chat of others, or the "sorry, quick question" of some manager, improves my quality of work tremendously.
For the latter, there are times when you need to think about working, and when you're doing that, being in the office with a group of people and a whiteboard is invaluable. But at some point, you know what you need to do, you just need to get into a flow and do it. And that is near impossible in modern offices. That is especially important for engineers, but it also applies to accountants and designers and carpenters and any productive labor that isn't management.
Introvert/extrovert doesn't come into play, all productive labor needs to get into states of deep focus.
Maybe if engineers all had doors that closed, but for some damn reason we haven't had those since the 1960s.
I'm certain that there will be an outpouring of hundreds of reasons why people cannot move, and I'm sure all of those reasons have merit. But it doesn't change the fact that long commutes are a huge detriment to work/life balance.
I commute 2x 40-50 minutes plus if I work at the office I have a forced 1h break, so around a little bit less than three hours of life have been given back to me during remote work. I understand your sentiment and I share it completely. I am now able to run errands, exercise, nap, clean the house, play video games, or work in my garage during this found again time. I often feel shy to admit that the pandemic-induced shift to remote work has given me back a lot. My boss lives a 5 minutes walk away and will never ever understand what it means to have to commute every day.
I don't know how others feel, but I am not outgoing enough to use the foosball and pingpong tables that are common in development studios, I feel so judged; so those are (for me) not perks at all.
I try not to build too much of an us-vs-them philosophy into either the site design or the marketing message, but I hope to soon have an XHR-type feature where the hiring manager instantly sees the effect that each piece of job metadata (remote work-ability, interview format, etc.) has on their prospective candidate pool as they enter the job info.
I think this could send a useful signal upstream to the industry at large.
You can see all of the filterable attributes by directly visiting https://sievejobs.com/job-seeker
And I'd love to hear any feedback that anyone might have.
I've started going back into the office now for brainstorming because just being able to talk without latency and without only one person being able to talk at once the difference is just night and day, not to mention the casual non-meeting non-slack chats where ideas are born.
I think remote work is now something people will demand but I can't be the only person who's noticed the difference especially in creativity focused work and believe the end game within 2 years will be the people in the office will work on the interesting stuff and remote will work on fixing bugs. Which of course will trickle on to impact salary unfortunately.
Please don't talk for all of us. If you're miserable in the office that's fine, but it's noones duty to support your preferences. This is why we have this amazing free market - everyone can work at a company that respects their preferences.
In the same way working 60-80hrs a week will start being more productive at the start but eventually burn most people out, at least for me and people like me, not hanging out with others will do the same thing.
It's a balance for me. Too little direct interaction, short breaks, sharing lunches, having non-work related conversations, will end up decreasing my over all productivity.
You're welcome to WFH but I personally hope you're in the minority because if no one but me goes to the office then it's just as bad as WFH for me.
Also I feel for the people who's work was supporting workers in, y'know, work. I no longer live there, but even a crappy day in London for me was brightened by the countless interactions with people, the guy in the magazine shop, a new hipster pop up cafe, the street vendors selling exciting new food. Will they work from home?
I think one of the major challenges for an organisation is how to get peak performance from a diverse team (in terms of life circumstances and personality) and still maintain one culture and a ‘team mind’ where everyone is safe and content with their work.
I’m not a WFH evangelist really: remote is just another modality, with its own costs and benefits. It just doesn’t seem to get a fair hearing in a lot of places.
This is my exact complaint, even in the Marine Corps. All of our senior leadership are charismatic extroverts. They are trying to adapt "distributed command & control" because they recognize that large management nodes are easy to spot and kill. But they still insist on all forms of concentrated workspaces, in-person meetings, video teleconferences, etc... We have the technology, but it will never be fully embraced because it is fundamentally anathema to the character of our decision-makers.
Personally I tend toward introvert (it's not black and white) and have experience with working from home before the pandemic. For someone who's starting working from home it's easy to fall into a pattern of self-isolation which will have a negative psychological effect on them. I'm convinced that most people need at least a couple of days per week of social office time for their own sanity.
"spending time with family" - no, I'm single and alone and so are most of my co-workers
"living in a nicer / cheaper location" - no, my office is nicer than my home and same for most of my co-workers.
Your situation and needs are different than mine apparently.
"A couple" can mean anything from two to full week. I can assure you that at least for some people one day is enough.
Typically, as a contract consultant, working onsite would have me provided a 13" cheap crap-top (my personal laptop has 32gb of RAM and 2tb of SSD in a RAID config), and then stick me in the worst "half-cubicle/half-storage/supply closet" that none of their employees would ever sit in.
Even then, there would be a non-stop stream of people dropping by, and/or "shoulder-taps".
And I am a weird introvert/extrovert - so I love in-person meetings, whiteboarding and training/speaking sessions. But I also love the quiet, uninterrupted time in a decent work environment to actually... "get stuff done".
As for "The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.", one might want to ponder _why_ the extroverts got into a position where they're calling the shots. Mastering the art of human interaction is important, even for introverts.
While extroverts are overrepresented in management, I think a bigger issue is that people who overvalue physical proximity as a tool for establishing/maintaining control (both of formal subordinates and otherwise) are overrepresented in management. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be cargo culting Management By Walking Around (if you aren’t cargo-culting, you can probably adapt it to a remote environment) or to have developed and lean heavily on communication techniques (non-verbal, especially) that work better for dominating meetings in=person.
Honestly, I think introverts who have spent time crafting a particular set of tools for surviving as managers are at least as dangerous here here as extroverts.
For a knowledge worker where they need to concentrate there needs to be a quiet distraction free environment without interruptions. If this is at home in a separate low-traffic room or in an office with few people and a door that can be closed , both will work well. However I don't think many people's environments are like that in either place.
So to me there's no difference between working at home or the office, if you're going to have people interrupting you, high levels of background noise, and other visual/scheduling distractions.
LOL, thanks for the laugh! :-)
For you maybe. For some of us, the office is like a monastery compared to home and is the only place where deep work is even close to possible. As we return to normal, I hope more employers embrace a hybrid approach that allows everyone to thrive.
And yet in my home it's accurate. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Where I work, it's like a library. Quiet, serene, productive, but tense.
At home it's noisy, disjointed, non-productive [hey look, I'm on HN!], and full of disruptions [slack, 5+ zoom meetings per day, kids screaming [Brother keeps hitting me!!!], and wife trying to live her life [TV, music, etc...]. But it's relaxed.
I prefer working from home, I feel like it's better, but there is a lot that can be improved.
And thus a veneer of legitimacy curtails the otherwise dragging distraction of guilt.
Most of the world is not like that. For example[1], avg apartment size in Bangalore 1260 sqft and in Mumbai is 700 sqft. Most of the knowledge workers live in dense cities around the world and it is not feasible for them to move to the US suburbia.
[1] https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/residential...
And it looks exactly like other non-productive things at work: in my morning standup i can say: " i got pulled into a meeting about 'random irrelevant issue' so thats my day"
'Home distraction' are considered slacking
I've been remote for ~5 years now, and making friends as an adult, esp. in a new city or location, isn't easy.
But you're right, when you're remote you have to make an effort to build social bridges yourself. That's impossible, or at least greatly strained, during COVID.
I will humbly raise my hand and admit to this.
As someone who has so far really enjoyed the lifestyle benefits of WFH but has struggled with this, what advice/tips/strategies/recommendations can you or other senior remote engineers provide on how to improve this specific aspect?
My life improved so much since working from a co-working. I looked for a place that shared my work/life style and I've made friends, we share lunch, we've gone on trips, we usually share a friday drink, etc. And since everyone works on different things and/or companies it's quite interesting as well to get some other input that's not just work colleagues.
I also looked for a place 2min from my house so I still have most of the benefits of WFH
That said, self motivation and lack of external pressure can be a problem. When I feel I have a hard time to focus on something my last resort is the pomodoro timer. I sit down, set a timer at 25 minutes and force myself to no break focus during that time. Once the first period is over it's usually no problem to keep going since I've gotten into something by then.
Aside from the obvious (wear headphones, keep work area away from common areas) something else we did was set a boundary limit. If I was in the bedroom, that was now the “office” and was to be treated as such. This one is more personal but I tended to get too annoyed at the interruptions at first without realizing that I needed to make more effort to help and not be (to put it bluntly) a dick about it. My girlfriend started getting in the habit of tidying up or doing crafts during her downtime instead of coming to me after we discussed the huge amount of distraction it caused.
Ultimately though the living situation is what made it hard. We were in San Diego, in a cramped two bedroom apartment that had no privacy. We moved and bought a house where I now have a large upstairs loft area as my office. That is absolutely not the answer to everything but I think some of the issue is just most people not being prepared or having the right accommodations.
My advice sucks but if you have any specifics I can try to help out and answer more. It’s hard but hang in there if you feel it’s just a rough spot.
It's "our time starts at 5pm, dinner, and the rest of the evening".
Lunchtime walks together works for me too.
2 a light outside the door or a sock on the door let’s people know you cannot be disturbed
3 don’t forget to open the door when you can legitimately be disturbed
4 calmly and clearly state that you are at work while door is locked/light is on/sock is on the door. Compare to partner being at work/school and you being unable to barge in
5 meditate because this won’t be resolved over night
Like you it took threatening to leave (renting an office space and working from there. She was not fond of throwing out $1200/mo) for my wife to take it seriously. I have been working remotely for almost a decade now but over the last 3 years my wife stopped taking it seriously. The pandemic seems to have driven the fact home (esp when our little one would disturb her while she was working)
You must realize working remotely is not common and with any new lifestyle change there will be adaption periods. Some people longer than others. The ultimatum usually gets their attention but not always the way you would like (my wife refuses to enter the office now, which is also not what I want but baby steps)
In other words, respect your own boundaries first. That goes a long way towards helping other people recognize the same boundaries.
You may want to come to an agreement on questions like:
- What is work time? How will my partner know?
- Are there any scheduled breaks?
- Are there any moments during work time when it is ok to come disturb?
- What is an acceptable urgent reason to disturb work time?
- ...
... says the person who is still disorganised about this after an entire year of covid-19.
Or perhaps because I've spent a month over the last quarter effectively under house arrest to comply with local quarantine laws?
It is hardly as clear to me as your post makes it out to be that the din of an office, packed with people sitting at the now industry standard four foot desk with no separation of any kind between them, is quieter than my home.
I'm not sure that's how I'd put it but the alone-ness is a real problem for many people but I don't see how some new startup is going to solve that problem.
I’ve been putting real effort into this: I dumped social media years ago, so now I just message someone individually if I want to talk to them. I’ve really focused on 1-on-1 friendships versus “group friends”. I don’t have the same friends as all my friends, and that’s ok (and makes for more interesting parties).
The problem is that this type of engagement detracts from your available attention share, so social media actively discourages it. Instead they want you to be a lonely voice shouting into the void hoping someone will notice you. That’s not a great life.
Most people who lack the motivation to work without external pressure are in it only because they need to do even the most menial "bullshit job" to survive: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
> Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work
It's hard to have time for making friends when you waste 8 hours of your day on work, another half to whole hour on lunch break, another one and a half on commuting and eight hours on sleep - that leaves only six "free" hours a day of which then go one hour for eating (breakfast+dinner), one hour for personal hygiene (shower, toilet visits), half an hour to an hour for house work (cleaning, maintenance)... suddenly you're left with only three "leisure" hours, and that assumes a decent work commute in the first place. Weekends are often enough used for recovering from a stressful work week and shopping groceries.
Add in kids to the mix and it's no surprise that for many people, work is the only place they can reasonably form social connections during the week.
We need to get rid of excessive commutes, we need to get rid of the 8 hour work day in favor of a 5-6 hour work day, and especially we need to get rid of "bullshit jobs" that add additional mental stress.
These are supposedly hard working, intelligent, highly motivated and highly educated and highly paid staff.
Yet they can’t even give them a few days a month to work from home. 14 days a year is totally incongruous.
Of course they do understand that 'daddy' is working and don't call out for me when on meetings but no special training needed in my opinion.
Gives both the "short commute" benefit of work-from-home, as well as the "maintaining a clear separation between home and work" benefit of on-location-work.
And for me personally (as an introvert), it was fantastic to have people around that I could talk to socially, but who weren't directly involved in my work and who weren't going to make demands of me. Totally removed the feelings of isolation, and formed a bunch of new friendships that didn't rest on obligations to my employer.
FWIW, before the pandemic started, I was not enthusiastic at all about WFH, for various reasons but mostly because I live in a small one room apartment (quite usual here in the inner city in Tokyo). Now, after addressing basic issues to improve the ergonomics of my home office, most of the downsides are gone, and those that remain are outweighed by the prospect of commuting again. Of course, this could easily change if I moved closer to the office (or switched jobs to be physically closer), but considering rent close to the typical business hubs here, that's unattractive financially.
As for isolation: personally, I do a lot of pair programming (whether in the office or remotely), so I don't actually feel isolated at all. If would describe myself as mildly introvert, so YMMV, but I feel like I need to disconnect from people after a day of remote work no more or less than after a regular day at the office.
i wonder if people who feel this way aren't getting socializing done outside of work, and is using work as a form of socialization?
I used to work remotely for a different continent + 9 hours diff timezone and that was as painful as it can get: different hours for meetings, not knowing anything about my coworkers was really exhausting
But with the ability to go back to the office only when I need to and focus on my work much better at home, I don't think I'd ever want to go back anytime soon
Makes me realize that butts-in-seats vs. commute distance are equally valid, but somewhat separate considerations.
I know WFH has been fine, even positive, for some people. For a lot of us it has been a disaster and it seems that Google determined that it is a net negative.
NormaL WFH under normal conditions looks very different for most, and in many aspects.
This happened without much time to prepare for one thing (e.g. suboptimal desk/office setup), and while everyone else was stuck at home with you, for another.
Don’t try to compare WFH during COVID with WFH when kids are back in school/daycare, and we’re not locked down at home trying to stay healthy.
Or in other words; negative drivers to productivity are not related as closely to locale as previously thought.
The fact that Google's offices are often referred to as "campuses" rather than "offices" drives that point home as well.
This. I find it an odd term to use for what is essentially a workplace.
The modern meaning of "Campus" seems to have drifted from a location with multiple facilities where one could actually live, to office with table tennis and free meal facilities.
I don't quite understand why you'd expect them to be on the forefront of WFH.
As someone working at Google, there was never any surprise Google did not announce a permanent WFH solution, since it has not been part of the company culture nor did they put out any expectations you would be able to WFH permanently.
so why exactly shouldn't that be possible!? It's not like the work/output decreased (for the most part). The only legitimate way for compensation to drop should be due to competition - allowing remote should also mean allowing more people to apply for a position, and thus, higher supply of potential workers. This _should_ naturally lower compensation, but not immediately.
Personally, I'm still expecting to see a much higher percentage of time spent working from home at this time next year compared to the beginning of 2020.
On the other hand, for many of us who do have significant non work passions (rock climbing for me) as well as social circles around these activities appreciate remote work because it allows us to structure our lives in a way where such activities coexist with work more easily.
The interesting thing is that for work centered people, remote work has reduced social connections, while for more interdisciplinary folks it can do the opposite.
I have personally worked 100% remote for 7 years now, but before that I lived and worked in San Fransisco. I never attended a Friday night work happy hour because every Friday night I would be in the car driving 4 hours to go climbing in Yosemite.
Now, I can work remotely from a town with great outdoor access and spend my Friday nights hanging around with local friends instead instead of in the car.
Remote work has allowed me to have a more balanced life filled with more things I want to do and less I don't. Have the years of video meetings made my professional career less productive? Perhaps, but I have still worked on plenty of cool projects with plenty of great folks along the way. Some of them have even become close friends. And even if it has suffered, its been worth it!
Remote work basically doesn't change anything for the activities I'd like to do. Mine are centered around major cities, require large amounts of tools and space, or have to be done during the day. Remote isn't a huge factor except for the space being expensive in major cities part. If I have a day-time activity I want to do, remote work does jack shit for that. If I want to go skiing 7-times a week then I'm SOL because work hours are work hours and they overlap with the hours that resorts are open. Until the work you do becomes async by nature - not just remote - a lot of alternative lifestyles are not available. I'm sure the same is true for you as well with climbing. You can get lights and go during the night but I'm sure you'd prefer to climb during the day if you had a choice.
To give you some background, we are an IT shop for an Energy co. so there is a big chunk of our people who have to be at work, physically just because of the nature of the work. As others have alluded, we weren't set up with remote in mind.
I would love to hear how being 100% you've built a network, bonds etc with your colleagues. We have a bunch of new people who dont have the rapport with us or finding it difficult to connect ( a few lunches or coffees, or hang out in the common area could help build )
I should also mentioned the 3 off / 2 in office is something of a peace offering to the non IT part of the business. Most of us know we can be fully remote.
Not just that, many of those normal outlets have been heavily restricted or even not allowed for the past year. I expect if that wasn't the case, people wouldn't put so much of their unhappiness on the work part of being at home all the time.
I just want to walk, read something interesting and eat.
There’s various ways to create tunnels for remote services to talk to local devices, but it adds latency and complexity to an already complex workflow.
I thought I had to be in an office for this as well then discovered this entire room in my apartment full of mostly unassembled food.
Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.
I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
On your days at home, you can be just as productive as a day in the office without spending a full eight hours locked in your home office space.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
My post-vaccine plan is to have a "mulmen day" where I set the expectation with my teammates and stakeholders that I am in the office and a "float" day where I come in to align with someone else's day who I need to work with face-to-face for whatever reason. If everyone works this way then we can meet most scheduling needs. If we expand this to two float days a week then it is trivial.
There's no reason for the whole team to be colocated on the same day on a regular basis. Those kind of team-wide meetings never benefit from whiteboarding or any other in-person process. In fact the limitations of remote work make that kind of collaboration better because you have to actually prepare your thoughts and material.
Even pre-covid getting calendar time required a week of notice. Office hours were once-a-week and required at least 24 hours notice. Personally my office hours are on Wednesday. If someone books a session I come in, if not I don't. Nothing changes.
In Covid times I have had the most productive period of my career while my team grew by 50%. I have no problem getting coworker time ad-hoc, even remote. Communication is not difficult. We got better at using tooling to write documents and draw diagrams. We don't use whiteboard analogies.
I honestly see no downside to the remote work and a long list of personal, professional and environmental benefits.
If it's all the same days that'd be great but doesn't seem like it's work for everyone. I know certain days/times where I can't have meetings at home because the space is otherwise occupied and I need to keep quiet etc.
When everyone is fully remote, you should always reach them quickly by dropping a chat, but when they are offline they tend to be stuck in meetings
managing a small product engineering team. I have to say WFH has a considerable impact on productivity. Coding is actually fine, but the problems are:
1. Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
2. Personal relationships are difficult to grow, especially for newbies. Usually those things got grown via coffee chats, launch meets, ad-hoc talks, but those are all gone. You know, a lot of cases, whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot. I don't have a word to describe it precisely, maybe "lower team coherency".
3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Those are things may not be easily tracked from data, but really harmful in the long run. I cannot imagine how to manage effectively after another year of WFH.
Over the last year I've actually started to connect with my team. We have weekly video chats and spend hours socializing. As an older engineer with bad hearing, video chats are far better than crowding around a big table in a cavernous, modern office.
My only complaint is the environment I have to work in. Silicon Valley real estate is sub-par and high priced. I've been looking for a new apartment with a spare bedroom for months but the only units available are far away or run-down. If I knew I could WFH forever, I'd have left already. Here I am, waiting, because I have no idea when I'll be required to go back to work.
Everyone in my team does literally just that on Slack. If I can say something, I can type something. If I can close my laptop in the office, I can close my laptop at home just the same. Or close Slack. Or just sign out of the company's workspace.
I've worked full remote for almost a decade now. It was hard at first, until I realized there were solutions to the problems I encountered and it would take conscious effort on my part to get it done.
It's definitely possible for remote developers to achieve at least as much productivity as in person devs. But it's also understandable if people/companies don't want to make that effort.
I think this is very subjective. When I carpooled to an office my personal life lost commute time and arriving early or leaving late to coordinate with rides or buses. Gained an extra 8h a week when I went remote.
The personal relationship stuff is tricky, and I think junior folks, and especially fresh grads, got hit pretty hard here. On the flip side, I joined a new team around the time we all went remote last year (with several people I'd never met or heard of before), and it turned out just fine. I wouldn't say I'm buddies with all the new people, but I think we all feel comfortable with and respect each other. I joined in more of a technical leadership role, though, so I can totally get that someone who has to also deal with receiving mentorship could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost.
The work-life balance thing I find very puzzling. Many people (especially in the bay area) have gotten 1-2 hours per day of commute time back from utter waste (though I guess you folks at Google have the buses). Sure, things get blurred when you work at a desk in your bedroom, or at your kitchen table. But this is something that you as a manager need to be on top of by setting an example for the team. Keep reasonable hours, and disconnect outside those hours. Don't hold your team members to deadlines that require them to work excessive hours. When you sign off at 5 or 6pm with your "gotta go, chat tomorrow", make it clear that you expect the rest of the team to sign off pretty soon as well.
Having said that, I do know people in my org that work too much. But they're the kind of people who weren't great at balance back when we were in offices, either.
You can only blame yourself for that. When I'm done working for the day, I log out, lock my screen and walk out of the room. And if the time to go happens in the middle of a chat, then so be it. My boss can tell me he's gotta go, and I can tell him I've gotta go, and that's exactly what we do. There is no blurring of work and life because I don't blur them.
1. All you need to do a remote whiteboard is a microphone and a mouse. This is a great opportunity to create new softwares that actually help collaboration and improve the design process rather than being stuck forever with a pen and a paper.
2. What you call "personal relationship" is, at the end of the day, employee relationship and politic to be promoted. You are in a long term position of power on your employee, which allows you to impose your point of view. Stop pretending to be benevolent. Most new hires do what you tell them to do, it doesn't change with work from home.
3. I think that's just because you are not a good manager (sorry), or your own managers are bad. If you actually cared, you would respect people time and have clear rules that show it. You can send a "have a good afternoon" at 6PM, no one would find that awkward
Then, they’re forced to write their designs down, people read them, and there is a larger meeting to discuss (which usually is only needed for big course corrections).
1. This is your strongest point. I've missed the whiteboard a bit. But you just need to find other ways to sketch out your ideas. Even a google doc, which is pretty primitive as these kinds of things go, it pretty easy to use instead.
2. Personal relationships require investment and deliberate choice. Schedule some open mic time. Keep a zoom room open where teammates can interact but with the expectation that they needn't be 100% engaged. This is a substitute for talking over the cube walls or the random break room interactions. Also spend time in non-work conversations via slack or talk a bit about non-work stuff before or after normal meetings. You'd do this in the office as you walked to or from a meeting room. It isn't as easy to just accidentally build these social relationships. Working remote you need to build the habits that support them.
3. Keep your work space and your personal space separate. Set some time boundaries. Encourage your team to put a cap on their daily work. Remind them. You have to learn set and stick to healthy boundaries. Too much time on the job leads to productivity drop in the long run. Keep your team productive and happy by helping them be aware of the issue. As a manager, watch out for perverse incentives driving overwork.
There are zillion little moments of ad hoc communication that happen face to face. Now that their absence has helped you discover that they are valuable, ask yourself when they occurred and how they worked to your advantage. Once you have some idea what you're missing, then you can start to engineer a replacement. As a leader, it's important that you model these behaviors for your team.
I was kind of hoping the remote work experience would help folks make that sort of inside baseball less important. There are real equity concerns to consider, but practically speaking, you end up with narrower and less open decision-making processes in general.
It's definitely a complicated subject, but maybe some folks are partly missing some privilege that they need to learn to let go.
When we were in the office it was rare to speak with anyone who wasn't on your floor, whereas now it's no harder to work with someone in Stockholm or Berlin than it is in London.
Doing Zoom calls before was always a massive pain as we have an open office (like almost everyone nowadays) and there weren't enough private spaces.
That’s a heck of a sales pitch for Jamboard.
What's stopping someone from just... grabbing a whiteboard? They ain't expensive. Yeah, maybe not everyone can write to it, but everyone should be able to read from it. Designate someone as the writer and you're good to go.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
What about "Sorry, just broke for $MEAL, let's put it on the calendar for tomorrow"?
I, for one, hated the densification and tight working environments, but I didn't have the "data" to make a hill of beans difference.
Obviously the office is a part of the culture, and most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. But to me, that doesn't explain why you can't offer a remote option for the employees who want it.
A charitable explanation might be what we've heard from execs: we don't want to rush to go remote, we'd like to dip our toes in and slowly explore broader options. Thus the hybrid 3/2 model. A less charitable explanation might be that Google has spent a lot of money on real estate. Or simply that leadership is out of touch and can't relate to the reasons why employees might want to be remote. I imagine it's a mix of both types of explanations.
Giving it up would mean changing the culture and the value prop of working there. I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t want to do that.
Kinda seems odd too because the only metric that you would think matters (stock price) would have heavy consideration (~90% growth since March 2020).
I don’t work their anymore
The 3-in-office/2-at-home week referenced would work well in this regard.
That was Google. No longer.
Xoogler (2012-2019)
Do you have any data to back this up? Also, what about other factors like accuracy, ambiguity and efficiency? Sending one single email to the entire company can be more accurate, less ambiguous and much more efficient than communicating it to each person one to one or relying on Chinese whispers.
I've also worked in teams of engineers that did occasionally burst into laughter while gathered in rooms doing productive work.
I've seen engineers who did no work. I've seen managers who worked extremely hard.
It's all shades of grey.
You seem to be falling into the HN trap of “serious work = what I do” “not serious work = what I don’t do.”
I can assure you that group of people can provide value to customers/clients while looking like the people in that photo.
Having whiteboards around, I will see people talking about certain things or explaining some new system, and it's easy to jump in. Maybe these could be considered impromptu meetings, but they still have been great for me.
I'm not a developer, but I don't work with a group of people located in the same building, so all projects are de facto pretty remote heavy.
and "with manager approval" remote isn't really new. there were already people working remotely before the pandemic.
It's a trick.
For the general population? No way. Most studies put the number of introverts somewhere between 20-40%.
Extroverts are loud and they are the majority, too.
As someone on this forum put it, the only evolutionary advantage to being an introvert is that you're insurance in case all the bunched up introverts die in a natural disaster, while you're away sitting alone in your far away corner.
For many, when they have a question or an item to discuss, that moves to top of mind and the first impulse is to go interrupt whatever the person is doing to satisfy it. This is made even worse when these types of employees are in management positions because saying “not now” isn’t an option. I used to work with a guy who would regularly have unimportant questions come up and if we didn’t have an immediate answer he would say “let’s go ask X.” I’d usually say, “let’s bring it up in our next meeting or ask in an email, I don’t want to interrupt what he’s doing.” He’d say “who cares, let’s go bother him!” Zero consideration for other people’s time. That experience permanently scarred me I think.
To this day I pretty much never call anyone at work without an appointment or at least pinging them asking when they have a few minutes to chat. I realize most here probably get that but I think the average workplace has a few people like that and it only takes one or two on a team to make a massive impact on productivity.
Sunk cost fallacies etc
That's exactly how it would happen, and it would happen very quickly. There are talented software engineers all over the US and the world, SV does not have the only ones.
> for a maximum of 14 days remote per year
I don’t know how to make ‘14 days in a row’ out of that :)
I came to the office very early (say 7ish), which gave me a couple hours to really focus on things, before my colleagues started meandering in.
It may be an unpopular opinion on this site, but I don't think the human mind is especially well-suited to remote work. We're social creatures by nature and our brains evolved to interact in the meatspace, rather than via a zoom call.
At least in an office there is the geographic similarity and discussions that can come out of that, e.g. weather, housing market, sports teams, etc. But half my staff is in Mexico City, India, or the UK. We're swamped with work -- this post is me procrastinating -- and a huge number of them are contractors, vendors, and customers, who we're explicitly told not to get too close to.
And if I'm making friends online, there are far, far better forums for that, e.g. Discord, Reddit, etc.
In my experience at work, I've seen the opposite. The people most distracted get the least done and it's obvious to everyone on the team. Plus obviously you do need to pay attention to some distractions. Going too far in one direction is not good. I think, however, most people lean more towards distractions than focus.
The point is choice. There are door-open and door-closed times of every day. In an open office, there is no choice, it's door-open always, and that sucks.
This is definately a significant factor, many of us literally dont have a door to lock
Myself, I am looking forward to a return to the office, 3/5 days a week, despite me having a long commute and driving giving me back pain: because this last year and a bit has not been pleasant at all.
They want employees in their cells.
Zuck has been buying up commercial space in SF a few weeks into this pandemic.
When you're a minimum wage McDonalds worker, you can get written up for being 5 minutes late. But if you make $350k a year, being asked to come into a physical office to perform work is similar to jail. Okay. I guess the similarity is that they both serve meals :)
The pandemic has been a great stress test for finding the limitations and gaps; like figuring out the remaining use cases for VPN and MNP exceptions, and accelerating the use of data center-hosted VMs instead of desk workstations.
None of this had any bearing on the company culture however, which was and is very office-centric. It’s been clear from the beginning that WFH was temporary.
Deciding to switch a solo peak hour journey from a SUV to bus might help a little, but the bus will still be driving empty outside the peak times & routes. Working from home takes a passenger out of the peak times entirely, and with a reduction in peak time travel then demand-responsive transport becomes more attractive than huge buses blindly following rigid routes, and eventually maybe we can dream that sustainable transport like walking and cycling might be deserve a safe place on the street.
To the executives and bean counters, yes, it obviously is. But from the overall perspective of society and mental health, hell no, it is absolutely horrifying to put people through that.
It’s hard to get to know folks when sitting on a big zoom call, but I find working one on one works well for developing a bond.
Once you spend many hours over many months working closely with someone, a bond develops and there is plenty of opportunity to get to know them along the way.
In fact, you can do this just over slack - spend enough time hanging in a chat and people’s personalities are bound to come out.
To be fair, you may be less likely to make a very close friend with a remote employee. But a friendly, productive working relationship is certainly easy to develop, and that’s all that’s necessary for most teams to function well.
This strategy probably wouldn’t work with big teams where folks float in and out, or for roles where you have to meet new people all the time.
Heh.. I can sympathize. I find voice chat with a decent head set makes it SOO much easier to hear/understand people. And it basically eliminates multiple people speaking at once - the 'muddle' that turned into used to drive me crazy.
If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.
Is it their work conditions? IT limitations? Family? Just the fact that everything sucks?
the drop in productivity was huge and forced some of them to start letting people go.
Mitigation until such time employers acknowledge decades of empirical evidence that open offices and cube farms sabotage productivity, health, morale. (Never.)
The fact that we work on the same thing gives me more reasons to talk. I can't ask random people at a co-working space to help me debug an issue or to brainstorm a solution. They aren't familiar with my project the way co-workers would be. They also are not NDAed to look at what I'm working on
Also I work on console games. I can't hand the person on the chat the controller and say "how does this feel?"
For me, I've worked in full remote and full in office jobs. I favor a mix personally. Maybe 2-3 days in office and the rest remote.
Although now that I'm working for a company with 15min commute, that became less of an issue.
> everyone can
No. Most people don't have good options. It's a little ironic to say the OP needs more empathy and then go on to make an argument that's almost breathtakingly disconnected from reality.
How am I disconnected from reality?
And yes- I would like to see a total ban on gas guzzling cars in my lifetime. I would like to see cities built around walkability, and ban all types of cars entirely in the city center. Etc. But it's a step by step process.
I agree with you remarks on asymc works. but it's going to take new ways to look at how we work
Start work at 6:00 and head out at 15:00. Hardly doable when in office, but if you work remotely close to lifts.. ;)
Now imagine if your office moved to a tiny, faraway town with no food, nightlife, or dancing. Does remote work seem more appealing?
There are always things cannot be easily rationalized via formal processes.
The info density difference also seem to be compensated by everyone being more open and comfortable (not packed in noisy office for the day)
There's definitely less random chats, it's more formal and less intense, but also broader and the hurdle is lower.
I think for companies above some size it's not better or worse, just different.
Why should my requests get better prioritization just because I happen to work on the same floor as a person in a key position?
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
Maybe also by waiting to start the meeting we're enabling it all too?
I find it all too much to keep track of, so perhaps simplifying it to "meeting starts at X, be there or be square" is all that's needed and behaviour will adjust accordingly?
Food for thought.
I've seen some comments that WFH and it's variations (full remote vs partial) are a skill like anything else and need to be developed. I'm not strictly speaking a fan of it all really, but that's just me, and I think the "more productive vs less productive" debate is actually a ruse and that the real argument we're all getting into is "this makes me feel better vs this makes me feel worse" which you simply can't logic your way out of, so I get that it truly does suit some people.
I think I just need to take the mindset that it's a skill I need to develop a little further and some of my gripes with it will ease or melt away.
Seems like, at least in my neck of the woods, 2 days WFH is becoming a standard benefit touted by companies to attract candidates now.
Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.
All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.
I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
That's exactly how I feel.
I guess FB must have seen the same thing, hence full remote for senior engineers. It's odd that Google haven't experienced this issue.
They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.
The weird thing is I watched it before going to college and now I am working for several years it still feels super-relevant to the modern workplace.
I would probably refuse some a new position if there was the expectation of constant pair programming, but I'm curious if others have different experiences.
If anything I empathize with OP because I had the exact same issue with my partner where she'd come to show me tiktoks while I was working but when I said I did not want to be disturbed she stopped. Sure she teased me about being too serious but I just don't see how a healthy relationship could have something like this escalate...
Sometimes you end up in a job with no good transit routes from where you can afford to live, so you have to drive hours a day. Search the web for stories about "supercommuters".
Compared to any of that, a 30 min bike ride is downright lovely.
I've seen this argument before, and I don't understand how working from home changes this honestly.
Why not just start your day with a bike ride for leisure? Unbound by the location of your office you can now cycle to any arbitrary location. If you struggle to do it without a reason, perhaps cycle to a bakery or store and pickup some fresh food for the day.
For me, it's a motivation issue. I had to go to work and had to cycle/walk there. Now, going out in the morning is optional. If I stayed up too late or if the weather is bad (it's almost always bad in Scotland) I'll make an excuse and not go out. After doing it a few times, I broke my morning habit and it's extremely difficult to force myself to go out.
I know it doesn't really make sense but that just adds to frustration. I hate that I cannot force myself to do daily exercise and it makes me feel like shit, creating a sort of feedback loop. I don't go out and do exercise because I feel like shit and I feel more shit because I don't exercise.
There are many comments here about missing their commutes as they could meditate/reflect on things, etc. One can quite easily do this with meditation or walking/running/biking for ~30 mins. However it takes discipline to carve out that 30 mins and leave it specifically for meditation or whatever.
With the pandemic I've been enjoying being at home so much. If they force me to go back to commute I will look for another job.
Commute time doesn't have to be wasted time.
Your suggestion works for exactly one type of person, who has enough resources to outbid others for housing and either lives alone or has a non-working spouse.
That said I'd never ever have a 1+ hour commutes, 30 minutes is plenty but I have noticed a difference in inspiration this year and I put it down to this.
People think that the things they do at the office (beyond work) are impossible to replace in "real life". They are, office is the actual virtual life
The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important.
I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GOOG#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWs...
One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress.
The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity.
> I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city.
Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams).
The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs.
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[0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context.
[1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
No cummute is saving me a workday of time a week. When I was home 1830ish the usual errand places are closed where I live.
I don't even remember how I did errands while commuting. I guess I didn't.
Sure, being in the same space is a different kind of connection, the question is which part of that connection is needed for work. I 'd personally rather share a cowork space with my friends rather than whoever the company chooses for me, and i think that's going to be a trend in places that house lots of remote workers. There are in fact cities being redesigned around remote workers like Madeira. I think the actual problem that people complain about is not the lack of physical bodies at work, but the lack of physical bodies in general. That needs to change if people are going to work remote in large percentages, people will need to either find more friendly neighbors or just start talking to their neighbors , like people did a few decades ago.
And then we haven't even began to scratch the surface of ways to connect with coworkers. I find that sharing a gaming environment (like e.g. secondlife) gives a sense of presence, space, and connection and takes away that lingering anxiety of "where is everybody?" that I get when i work at home. Slack also does that to a small extent.
Ultimately, remote work is objectively giving people more options, and that is a measure of progress, so I see the transition as inevitable. I think people are being held back by the current designs of modern big cities, which have been entirely shaped around the home-work routine. In fact, large parts of the rewards of "real life" (e.g. making new friends) has been moved to the office for purely logistical reasons (other places of congregation stopped existing). This isn't inevitable, remote workers will develop new habits in a few years. Historically it's the cities that changed to adapt to work conditions, not the other way around , and now a critical mass of workers is ready for the change (In fact, the switch to remote was possible years earlier, COVID just accelerated it).
Their spouses who may have worked outside the home, were home.
If they had not worked from home previously, chances are - they didn't have a dedicated office space - or even equipment.
Add to that the constant low-level stress of being in a pandemic with constant media impressions, massive social change events/activities (at least for those in North America with BLM and the moronic exit of the Orange-moron), and it isn't a stretch to think that productivity has been down somewhat.
Never did WFH until the pandemic, and will probably continue working from home for some time after things open back up. I have a hard time seeing how my day-to-day will differ significantly post-pandemic.
But a true work from home setup likely involves having a dedicated home office space, with the right setup. Even now, a lot of people don't have that.
I would assume for people with children being able to offload them to public education institutions during work hours will be significant difference.
From my experience (2 days/week WFH before pandemic):
1. People with kids have to babysit (I do not have children, but people who have are noticeably impacted by this)
2. Everything is closed, so casual outing to coffee shop or just grabbing a lunch with colleagues not possible. Some goes for just going to gym for a bit.
3. Before the pandemic, sometimes we did morning in the office filled with debate/design work, then lunch and then go home to bunker down and code. Again, not possible now.
4. Two adults in one room makes meetings annoying (well, basically openspace but without the free food).
5. Team beer is remote now, which I mean, kinda works. I get drunk anyway. But still, suck a bit.
Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, … are (essentially) open plan.
My experience at google was the cube walls not even being tall enough to do anything when you were sitting.
Where I am currently (Spain) there's been different levels of lockdown. The co-working is open, but with a lot of the usual activities heavily restricted.
My last BigCo employer had a lot of WFH (as exceptions and due to acquisitions or site closures, the overall policy was butts in seats, but still). If you actually read the security policies, you saw lots of things that would make co-working de facto a fireable offense.
But I doubt it was ever enforced, and I bet a lot of people did it. I had a proper home office instead.
It’s best to know what the co-working rules are at your employer.
O/T: Apple autocorrect thinks “coworking” should be “cowering” which is probably a worst-case version of my point...
It has been worth every penny - it you are self-employed, I highly recommend doing so. My only regret, is not verifying the HVAC situation first... During summer months, I have a standalone AC unit, with window venting, and it cannot keep-up to our humid/hot days.
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts lose energy. The inverse for time alone.
I’m introverted.
But can be quite social, and even enjoy it. However I absolutely have to have down time after to recharge from it.
Work is hard. Dealing with people is tiring, but I am also skilled at it and it is tremendously fulfilling to help people grow and achieve their personal goals. Some days I really really don't want to have my 1:1s, but that is okay. Being an introvert doesn't mean that I hate interacting with people. It just means that it is somewhat tiring.
honestly im not sure how you can do well as a manager without some tolerance for that kind of thing
Alternatively find a coffee shop, ride there for your morning fix of caffeine.
Sometimes its easier not to share. In a perfect world we'd be more transparent. If its an popular decision, discussion potentially fans the flames of disagreement and ill will. E.g. People take some small point of the rationale and blow it out of proportion for why this is bad etc, why it isn't relevant to them without seeing a bigger picture etc. I think we've all seen this. Sometimes its simpler and more efficient to say less.
I don't agree with this premise. It's quite easy to share "we have data that suggests that this is the case", even if you don't divulge fully what that data is.
A decision where it's clear that some analysis has gone into it (even if you disagree with the outcome) is always going to be more accepted than a decision that seems completely arbitrary / driven by politics.
It seems that developers / ICs are asked to justify everything they do with data - making decisions from the gut is the privilege of the executive.
And there is quite a bit of data on it, most of which is widely shared internally.
Everyone who has made it up the ladder knows this and it's the single aspect that differentiates people who routinely get overlooked for promotions from the individuals who steadily rise through the ranks
A lot of politics gets much harder in remote work, and this is what these people are best at.
It's not productivity, it's politics that is much harder to do when remote working.
That assumption has been thoroughly refuted by Google's reaction to James Damore's internal memo.
The social contact you have at work often feels forced and artificial - you can choose your friends, your colleagues not so much.
I did choose them, luckily I got to audition them from around 300 people I've been forced to interact with through over my career during the past 10 years. Not only do I get to know their characters well because I can decide if I like them or not and find out if they're trustworthy through working together I also get the extra benefit of being recommended for jobs through them.
How on earth am I supposed to do that though clubs? Presumably you mean sports clubs because no sure much else than that exists for adults, what if I want to make friends with people who are not interested in sports?
But in my city Meetup.com has a huge amount of clubs and groups for basically anything, and I'm in Barcelona so the city isn't even that big and it's not all English-speaking (which I guess may be more likely to use Meetup).
There are sometimes local Facebook groups for stuff as well, I went on day-trips to various places like that.
I know my colleagues who are into tabletop games and D&D go to those groups, I personally just went to language exchanges and hiking/tourism groups. There are even groups for local video gamers etc. as I guess it's nice being able to meet in person too.
For music specifically there are local scenes. If you go to local places consistently, you'll see some of the same faces. Etc.
I like programming, but I would find it very boring to only be friends with people in the same industry as me.
If you have been able to draw the line and log off at 5pm, good for you, but that's not the experience for a lot of people.
But I'm not working extra hours every day, and given the time I save on commuting and lunch hour and being able to do various chores during the day - I think it's still a significant win.
That's a personal issue though. It seems backwards to insist on an in-person work environment because someone doesn't have the personal discipline to log off at 5pm on their own.
WFH may be good for introverts with good social skills. It's awful for shy extraverts (which is a less-than-ideal combination to begin with).
If you can't speak to people unless they're forced to, that doesn't mean that you need to make it so that everyone else is forced to because otherwise you're uncomfortable.
My bus ride is very valuable to me for this reason.
Try as I might, on the WFH days I virtually always wind up doing this same block of study after 10pm which is my free time.
I also get interrupted just as much regardless of whether I'm at home or in the office, so that's kind of a moot point in my particular case.
I was doing 90 minutes each way, four days a week, before; I'm currently not worried about going back to three days a week, although I'm a little curious if I'll feel differently once it happens.
I don't think about work outside of work, which includes commuting. I may have an epiphany while showering or talking a walk, but in the car I listen to music or podcasts. That is Me Time, not Employer Time.
You might not be thinking about work, but your brain is.
Maybe I care about this more because I'm a designer so, creativity is what I'm judged on.
This is definitely true after work sometimes, but a commute is not necessary for this. Walking helps similarly and is healthier, too. For me personally, I tune everything out and listen to music most of the time while commuting, or simply meditate (specifically not dwelling on any thoughts).
"Maybe I care about this more because I'm a designer so, creativity is what I'm judged on."
I'm not sure if you intended this, but this could be read that you're implying that programming is not a creative profession. Which is wholly false.
Part of tackling hard problems is coming up with creative solutions. One absolutely needs creativity and vision to architect larger applications and coordinated services.
I've met accountants that are more creative than some jazz musicians, but the creative work they do is much more abstract and not as intrinsically understandable as a musician that's improvising on a tune.
I also don't see this as an issue. If you want to meet people, that's a great way to do so. I've done it across America and in Korea, and I have made many friends from it.
They also need to keep an eye on developers and need to feel thigs out, the relationship, their management status known and so forth.
That's very hard to do remotely and they feel their status diminished to that of the "resources" they manage.
If you are going out binge drinking with your co-workers, you're doing it wrong because it blurries the lines between professional and personal life in my humble opinion.
Very few deep friendships develop at work, at best they will be acquaintances you see once in a while.
So by all means, be nice and cooperative but keep your distance.
But what you're saying is legitimate, and it bothers me the amount of people acting like it doesn't matter. American society already isolates people. Work is a big (maybe the biggest) avenue to develop friendships as an adult, just like school is when you're a kid. Not everybody gets married and then their life becomes about their 2 kids and any social interaction outside of that is incidental.
Maybe in USA, but my experience in multiple (>5) workspaces in Poland as 28 years old spftware engineer, is that people over 40 are maybe 5% of devs/tech leads.
Maybe I'm being naïve, but I don't see how "toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics" would result from these casual friendships. If anything, I'm more likely to hold myself accountable to my team members when I know them better personally.
You're going to spend nearly 1/3 of your waking hours with these people. You don't need to be best friends forever, but working somewhere that you don't at least have some friendly interaction and culture sounds utterly miserable.
> Socialising at work is when you develop unconscious and conscious biases and it is a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere and disruption of team dynamics.
There is more to life than team dynamics. Metrics won't keep you warm at night. Perhaps I'm forgetting the HN demographic...
Why are you assuming remote == unfriendly? That's silly.
What people are pushing back against isn't being friendly or developing a good working relationship with your peers. People are pushing back against "Not mandatory but you will be judged for not attending" after work happy hours, or extra-curricular work events where you are expected to attend during your free time. Things that seek to place your coworkers as your friends, and take away from time you could spend with your family and outside-of-work friends.
This parasitic work culture seeks to make the workplace replace your family and friends and it's all centered around the office.
> There is more to life than team dynamics.
There is more to life than work, period.
What about them? I assume they will be welcome to go back to the office one the whole pandemic thing becomes less of an issue.
I'm morbidly fascinated by the polarisation that drives some online conversations. Admittedly I have probably fuelled some of that with my question, I'll try to do better in future. However, it was intended to point out that there are shades of grey here (as evident in the comments) while the post I replied to seemed very black-and-white to me.
I wonder if a better question might be something like: what does a healthy, productive future of work look like now that covid has demonstrated that some people will very much want to continue working entirely remote, while some people very much do not?
For what it's worth, I completely agree and sympathise with all the issues people raise here. None of remote, in-office, or hybrid are perfect. They all have problems.
It seems that covid has given us the opportunity to at least try to improve things, even though clearly the answers are difficult to find.
Slight tangent: I was saddened to read recently that Basecap has permanently closed their Chicago HQ [0]. I've held up this place as a model for how I'd want to build an office space should my unicorn/cash-cow finally hatch. No, it's not perfect, but I loved the fact they explicitly tried, and they explicitly recognised it might be seen by some as a waste of company funds, particularly when they also did things like deliver fruit & veg to employee's homes rather than workplace as an incentive to go home rather than stay late in that expensive office space [1].
I think there are major underlying structural issues that discourage companies from solving issues relating to worker happiness. Extortionate rent and service charges have produced homogenous high-streets, and they're homogenising the business districts too. The labels over the door of each building might be different, but the attitude inside is the same. Worker happiness is grist to the mill, productivity and the bottom line reign. I think we could do better.
FWIW, at one of the FAANGs I worked that, HR shared data (promo rate etc) between HQ vs remote offices. But those were still remote offices and not remote employees who could work from anywhere.
A career at one company might span 5 years rather than a lifetime, and that's plenty of time to be affected.
One form of interaction benefits one type of employee. A second form of interaction benefits a second type of employee. Both benefit the company. Which form is best?
1) quick clarification for a technical question - easier to turn back and ask your colleague
2) design minutiae which you remember after a 30/60min meeting is over - very easy to grab your coworkers in hallways or by watercooler and nail down
3) coming across interesting conversations among your colleagues by just being in proximity - not possible when you have to schedule a 30min chat for that
4) reading body language to know whether your colleague is stressed or relaxed or happy or sad - helps tailor your response which improves the communication
I haven't even delved into the timezone issue yet, which matters a lot even between colleagues on East vs West coast (let alone Europe or Asia). Meetings before 8:30am PT? PT people would still be waking up or dropping kids to school. 9-10am PT? Time for people in ET to have their lunch. 12-1pm PT? Lunch time for PT people. After 2:30pm PT? ET guys are already out for the day.