so the media is starting to lay the foundation for offshoring of jobs to remote, cheaper locations.
Historically, offshoring's biggest struggle has been finding a cultural alignment with those still working in the onshore office. But when everyone is remote there is no such barrier. That is, in the grand scheme of things, something new.
I'm in one of these offshoring countries (South Africa). All I've seen lately is a ton of remote jobs are now limiting themselves to remote within the country or region, not even timezone-aligned. Hard to find EU/UK remote work that doesn't lock me out. I see the same with US-only remote work.
The result is also that local salaries have started going down again, in spite of the high inflation. There's no pressure anymore to pay better, when the foreign companies with real money aren't buying your employees anymore.
Not saying it's all completely dead and no companies are hiring abroad to here, but right this second, the remote dream seems to be shrinking. If anything the offshoring will be more traditional with setting up office in the locale and paying local salaries.
With colleagues in different timezones you can say goodbye to on-call shifts and being woken up in the middle of the night for issues. An indian or euro colleague can do maintenance stuff on infra used by US developers and customers and the US ones can do the same for indian/euro facing ones. All this without the fatigue and risk of mistakes that comes with working very late into the night or early in the morning.
I've worked in a team with indian, euro and us workers and we could find a way to get meetings because indian people do not usually know how to say No. So they tend to stay later than us euro guys and we would have most of our meetings in a short window in early evening (India) / afternoon (Europe) / morning (USA). Actually that was a good thing because it meant most of our calls would be concentrated in that same time window so you could focus on actual work the rest of the day instead of having calls spread out over a full day of work and lots of interruptions / context switches.
Off Shoring is not new. I managed a team of 7 Indains (6 dev, 2 QA) in Hyderabad as contract workers (not company employees) in 2007, 17 years ago! Before zoom, slack, meet, teams.
They were great at what they did, they were cheaper than 8 US employees, but the relationship definitely had pros/cons that are not easily understood.
The biggest pro was actually the timezone, I could ask for fixes/features and when I came into the office in the morning they'd be done. The cons were many, including quality of work and efficiency.
2. Taxation regimes. These too vary by country, and add compliance and operational costs.
3. Other laws (both U.S. and foreign) that make hiring foreign nationals complex in certain situations, e.g., ITAR.
When considered together, these costs and operational obstacles can be significant.
The real issues are, ironically, the collaborative barriers. Different cultures have different standards of work, a different working culture, and honestly different time zones.
The “24 hour dev shop” is a risk, but work moving overseas is only a problem at the commodified software level, like a SaaS b2b where a shit tool with one little innovation saves five minutes can scale to millions in savings.
Another is communication; companies want to hire people that can communicate fluently in a shared language.
But the best solution is to just become better at your job. The best programmers are all in the US, so it is easier to learn from them and join their ranks. If you are no better than the competition, then a company is justified in hiring in the cheaper labor.
But still: As you say, the best way to defend against this is to simply be the best.
(The second best way is to become very fluent in technical use of the correct second language and learn to sleep on a different schedule, so that foreign workers can be closer to peers. Americans have been good at working weird shifts, and our society historically supports that to a fair extent, but the language thing is something that we have not generally been very good at.)
I think language, accents[0], time zones, and culture are the main things providing any resistance to this happening even quicker than it should.
[0]We once had a person on our team from India, sharp guy but his accent was extremely difficult to parse over audio. We ended up doing most communication over email and chat.
Anyway working from home does increase productivity for the individual, improves the economy due to more disposable income, benefits the mental health of those with an inner voice, and stimulates family life.
But it's also incredibly obvious and intuitive. It relies on the right company values, the right processes and the right incentives. But when done right, this will always hold true IMO.
even when hybrid work is implemented, you require a strong communication culture. this is not a given for all companies, however. when you sit with your team across the desk, simple things like asking about a small detail takes orders of magnitude less time and effort than the digital alternative.
regardless of your opinions on taking breaks with your colleagues, i found off-work conversations happen much less often when everyone is doing remote. i am not arguing that everyone hates their coworkers (or maybe mine hated me and only stood to talk to me when in person), but despite post-pandemic era, this pattern still seems to hold up.
i would love to hear how others have done things differently in this context. the point remains that there are some things that need to be in place before you could fully make the most of remote-only teams.
If you live far enough away from your employee (20km+) you are entitled to an added monthly bonus to your salary - depending on your estimated commute time.
It mostly has to do with ADHD (without the H really), but it's a valid effect.
I think part of this is that when someone wants something, they have a little time to compose their thoughts.
Some more discussion over here on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028862
Can we just acknowledge the complete an utter failure of managegment around this debate (I am management, btw) such that we can't settle this one fair and square.
We all have expectations and results from individuals. It doesn't take a Fed study to answer the question around an employees productivity. Either it's better, the same, or worse.
I'm all for remote and hybrid work. Manage by results and what's the issue? Super strange. Get together every so often to catchup, do the human thing.
I've had anecdotal evidence of firms falling behind because so many talented employees tell them where to go when flexibility isn't an option.
Hold the line.
(I'm also management and very much pro-remote.)
The manager shouldn't be a control freak about being in the office 5 days a week ... and the managed shouldn't be a whiny baby when asked to come do some human stuff ... somewhere in the middle is the promised land and it should't be that hard to find.
Having said that ... I had an experience with a colleague recently that reminded that not much of this is based on reason.
This does not seem like a very strong study.
Just as a really obvious example: tech stocks soared due to the pandemic; was this because WFH was good for tech companies, or was this due to other factors (wfh means people need to buy more tech, low interest rates pumped up all stocks, etc)? I obviously have my own opinion here, but this study design is not strong enough to disentangle any of this.
This study really is total garbage in the vein of "well, our data sucks, but we want to say something" and should not be taken seriously by proponents or detractors of WFH.
IMO it's also totally fine to use that freed up time to just get a break from... anything. No need to be after self-improvement all the time.
I think that for most people, commuting time is neither work time nor personal time: For most workers, it is just unpaid downtime that is (or at least was) necessary for work.
And especially for those who commute by driving: It's not really a good time to improve their skills, in particular because notetaking and sketching out problems and whatnot is kind of out of the question while performing the primary task of driving. It really is mostly just downtime and it can't (safely) be much more than that.
And now that many folks no longer have such an every-day downtime commute: Why should they use that new-found time to further their skillset, instead of do anything else that they might wish to do?
Is it wrong that they take some of that new time to prepare and cook a healthy, fresh, and delicious meal for lunch instead of packing a lunch or going out (or visiting the cafeteria or, in some workplaces, the breakroom's Wheel of Death)? Is it wrong that they spend the extra hour or two (or three, or whatever) that they've gained in a day with their families, or to enjoy nature by themselves, to goof around, or exercise, or work on a hobby (or a dumb game, or a good game) or to get ahead on housework, or to finally get a chance at a healthy amount of sleep?
Why is it even remarkable that when a person finds that they have an extra hour or two every day, that they don't immediately use that time for education and career-oriented self-improvement to directly boost their workplace productivity?
And I'm not saying that career-oriented skills should never be improved on one's own time, or that doing so is in any way an undesirable thing, either. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with doing that with one's own free time, either. And many do, as many always have.
But I am saying that I think the subset of folks who chose to use some of their personal free time educationally before the plague are likely to closely resemble the same subset of people who choose to use their time that way after the plague. And certainly, some do use their new time for more of that.
Subtracting a commute from a day doesn't necessarily change one's personal proclivities at all, I don't think, but it may enable some of them to actually be possible.
(This prompts another question. If some people who are predisposed to spend their free time learning are spending more of that time learning, and individually becoming more productive, then: Why is productivity still averaging flat?
Remote work can also allow for more opportunities for active slacking while on the clock for those who are predisposed for slack, for one example of a way in which the average can be brought down.
Mouse wigglers, anyone?)
I think that should be enough for any company.
They never actually measured the amount of work hours being done remotely. They never measured the number of employees working remotely. They just had some guy make up "remote-ability" numbers for each sector and then carefully pretended to be doing science. Meanwhile all these sectors have seen unrelated changes to operating environment that have not been controlled for. It's BS on BS on BS.
Overall I am not even convinced their remote work metric would correlate with hours worked remotely.
Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch.
Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.
Consider this situation: you hire a contractor. They work for you for several years, and then you fire them. The contractor goes to the labor court in their country and files a claim stating that, yes, their contract says that they are an independent contractor, but no, since you've employed them "full-time" for several years continuously, they are a defacto/de jure employee. (Which is a valid argument under the labor laws of certain countries)
What will you do:
- Spend the time and money refuting their claim? (You need to find a good lawyer in that foreign country; lawyers are expensive; and someone on your side needs to spend their time coordinating with them)
- Ignore the claim? (Not a good idea if you ever want to visit that country in the future)
The claim itself might be nonsense; that's immaterial. You're faced with a Hobson's choice if said contractor drags you to court.
(Addendum: this is why I made the point that labor law is local. When you hire a national of a foreign country, in general, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the courts of that country for labor related disputes.
I am not sure if a clause in an employment contract stating that the agreement is governed by U.S. law would be accepted by a local court; and even if it did, in litigation, you'd most likely have to represent yourself before the local court to make that objection.)
This comes with some downsides of its own, but generally this circumvents most labor issues. And of course anyone can sue for any reason, but if the argument is that the individual will pester you with lawsuits, can’t anyone do that to anyone else about anything?
Re: the lawsuits—yes, the barrier to initiate litigation is low (in most countries); but in my experience, most folks only start litigation when they feel significantly wronged.
Problem is, given the difference in cultures (something you pointed out earlier), an act by the company that is perfectly standard in the U.S. might be interpreted very differently by someone from another country.
The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
I could write a long post but I'll cut it short to this paragraph stating that humans differ.
For some commuting is stressful, the offices are noisy and full of distractions and those individuals may thrive in a remote setup. There's people that work in the opposite way. Their house offer many distractions from laundry to videogames. Some people require micro management and constant oversight some tilt in such environments.
Some teams require a lot of meaningful in-person interactions, brainstorming sessions or work chats around the coffee machine. Some teams thrive with good central top/down planning and workload splitting where syncing isn't very important.
At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
As you stated, this is variable.
If you have a short commute, or you like it, or you get some exercise - office is great.
If you hate your commute, if its 3 hours in pollution and traffic - not so much.
Earlier the position was that WFH was not possible. Now we know it is, and I hazard that this change isn't factored in job postings.
Considering what an hour of time means in this era, its not a trivial cost. This means an hour which could be spent just unwinding, studying, on hobbies, procrastinating, whatever.
If you have any drive, or strong interests, thats time you would want to spend on something other than a commute.
Unfortunately a lot of things conflate over time as you become more senior to generally make your commute worse.
For me - my last 2 roles have earlier required start time, with a hard start (morning meeting / standup / L3 support presence), company office locations got a little further, and trains got a little less reliable.
Fortunately I am remote since COVID, but when I was going in / or have to go in now.. I need to bake in 45-60min depending on how much I'm willing to risk being late that day.
For me I'd rather work 11-12 hours/day at home then go into office for 10 hours & spend 1.5-2 hours on the commute. Company is getting 10-20% more time out of me, and I at least save the money & "commute prep time".
In the end I ended up working remote, which is what I preferred, which wasn't surprising given how much the commuting time was worth to me.
Employers reimbursing your travel expenses if they need you to travel to a conference on the other side of the country is already the norm so why shouldn't they reimburse your travel expenses if they want you to travel somewhere in the same geographic area?
The problem becomes now my home is tied to my work place. If the company moves or I change companies, I have move or stress at a new commute. I did move once during a job change, and it didn't last long.
Another compounding issue is that I like to stay at companies for a long time, 10 years. This is frequently becoming difficult for a number of reasons not entirely in my control.
I wonder if others are in the same situation.
That said, time is important to me and I have a 5min commute, 20min if I walk. For that reason I do prefer the office. Better meals and better coffee and nice colleagues.
If employers want to force people into offices, maybe pay them a bonus.
The transition time of arrival and departure is easily 30-45m daily, on my employers dime.
I do 50% and it works for me. End of the day most of the problems associated with this issue are workplace and cultural issues that come to a head with remote/hybrid. The only novel dysfunctions with employees that I see (and I’m an exec with about 900) are people doing things like secretly moving away and abusing medical accommodation. There’s also an issue where people build their life around remote and are disappointed when they miss opportunities, but are unwilling to meet in the middle.
End of the day. The lazy idiots are just as lazy, grinders grind, and smart people continue to be smart.
So basically, waste of time.
Come to think of it, I'm wondering if that's where the split comes in. Upper management sees their productivity go down -- on what's fundamentally an interpersonal endeavour -- while individual contributors see theirs go up -- on what's primarily solitary ones. As a result, there is friction with top-down work-from-office mandates.
Getting your head down and coding on your personal goal is easy remotely.
I think some ICs like that it's harder for people to say to them that they are driving in the wrong direction, even if it's still true.
Managing people is really really hard, but we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly.
It also adds an extra hurdle for those who aren't particularly skilled at management.
I hypothesize, however, that a lot of these decisions at a c-suite level have more to do with other considerations, like property investments, headcount, salaries, or (worst of all) egos.
If your team level management org cannot organically work out the right mix on a team/role basis, then you probably should look at what else they are doing poorly.
I'd argue this shouldn't be a top-down decision - you can just let teams and individuals decide what works best for them, then that can be communicated upwards so the company can plan office space/resource allocation
Finding this many self-motivated conscientious employees is uncommon. Consider yourself lucky. This has never been a winning strategy that I've seen anywhere.
I worked at way too many startups where the CEO was far too involved with day to day minutiae.
> workload splitting where syncing isn't very important
I'm not convinced that remote means syncing is harder. There is a case to be made that: it's easier because it compels teams to have a structure for syncing, and structured syncing may be more efficient than ad hoc. Put another way, you potentially lose the crutch and end up stronger as a result.
This isn't a whimsical theory either- structured business processes are often missing and causing hidden costs and inefficiencies.
Work requires effective communication. Global teams place a premium on that and nurture it if they're successful. The remote work dilemma is non-global teams discovering this well-trodden ground and attempting to reinvent the wheel, with a sprinkling of terrible commercial real estate decisions on top.
(Nothing in this response addresses specific team types that benefit from in person work or the entirely valid in-office preferences of individual workers.)
It’s unfortunate that there’s now very little nuance in American discourse especially, whether that’s in business, politics, economics, or society. Everything is an ideological “cause” worth fighting for, with an inverted bell curve showing lots of people at the extremes, and precious few in the middle.
It doesn’t bode well. I fear America is devolving toward a 1980s Lebanon-style civil war, with everyone fighting against everyone at least at one point or another. The military could step in, but then we’d essentially have martial law which isn’t much better. It may seem silly to bring this up in a thread about remote work, but it’s really a microcosm for how polarized we’ve become.
> The fundamental issue I see in this debate is a lack of sensibility and nuance in human nature.
> The whole matter is debated (understandably in a way) on big numbers and averages.
If statistics is invalid, then how do you propose companies decide, based on a reasonable and empirical estimate of reality, on what work arrangement to implement? Do you believe that it is not expensive and disruptive to introduce as many variations of work setups as there are people in a company? What if the people deciding company policy simply prefer and believe in the advantages of onsite, which they have the freedom and right to believe---so why do people who prefer remote force themselves in such places?
The friction we're seeing now is that we're still recovering from a pandemic that forced everyone remote whether it works for them or not. So this idea of remote vs. office being a core strategic decision as a company grows is fairly new. We are all still learning how to navigate the options.
As Einstein said, you should make every problem as simple as possible, but no more simple.
The problem we're describing cannot be reduced to few simple statistics, it's exactly making the problem simpler than it is.
Not only just the task of measuring productivity of knowledge workers is extremely difficult if not impossible, but getting any statistic across a wide variety of different factors makes it even more pointless.
In fact, the problem shouldn't be approached from a macro, but microscopic level. Start from the basics.
There's knowledge workers that don't do anything from home. There's knowledge workers that won't achieve anything at the office. There's gargantuan projects like operating systems or databases developed fully remotely and asynchronously. There's projects that barely move without lots of synchronous, meaningful in-person interactions and there's environments like early stage startups that desperately need this kind of situation (albeit I'm sure there's many exceptions).
In professional sports it is very well understood that slightly different formulas work differently for different teams and players. Some needs to be fast and lean to be effective. Some need to put up muscle and weight. Many need both. Some need lots of cardio, some need more skills training. And all of that has to interact and mesh together and face different challenges.
Yet you want to complex systems like business projects/teams built around few statistics? Ignoring the wide variety of factors and humans that will end up there?
I'm not saying that building teams like that is an easy task, sometimes you just need to make work whatever team you're given, and you will have to decide a setup and give the right structure incentives to everyone to make it work.
But even if tomorrow a stat told us that there's proof that statistically remote is better for 60% of the teams (or the opposite) that really won't help much.
As a new grad, hell yeah I want to be in the office to interrupt and be interrupted for the learning, interact to know other, hope for serendipitous encounters, have a good time after work, meet a potential partner, yada yada.
As a family person with decade of work history, I see it as losing my balance, a hindrance the interruptions, the banter, the random assignments because you ran into someone in the cafe, having to deny after hours stuff again and again for the kids or appointments, having to take the whole day off for a 2 hour appointment at lunch, blah blah blah.
Not all new grads are the same, neither all seniors. Let people pick. The illusion of loss of productivity has been shattered and there's no going back.
There was a point in time when all you could buy was a black ford model-T. Ford would love to do that. But it can't anymore. Times have changed. Took Ford a long time and many executive shifts to move on and get along with reality.
So will this.
Is it though? My last employer (a FAANG) did publish (questionable) numbers suggesting WFH being more efficient when the lockdowns started. When RTO started they flatly refused to back it up with any numbers whatsoever.
> At the end of the day the decision C-suite have to make when planning projects is not remote vs non-remote and apply blindly rather in forming teams with people that by their own nature or preferences will thrive in the setup that's decided.
I think at the end of the day the C-suite has no idea whether WFH is better or worse. Middle management will come out and blame any lack of progress/productivity on literally anything that's not directly related to their own performance, so WFH is a natural scapegoat for incompetent management.
You can't justify the environmental destruction of working in an office just because you like the aesthetic or it makes you feel better. These are not apples and oranges that can be compared like two sides of an equally unproblematic coin, and it makes me sick that people equivocate and make it seem otherwise.
In my experience these people don't thrive in the office either. For software engineering in particular, these people are not useful employees.
It is not realistic to fire people who don't align with someone's preferred management style.
Office mandates are dumb and it should be left up to individual team leaders.
What the comments also show is that people willingly bring themselves in a situation of 3h of commute and then complain. That's not something you'd ever widely see in Europe imho. 3h is insane. I have < 20 minutes and love the reading time, as I travel by public transport. If I'd have a farther commute I would just move. Baffles me that someone would accept this. Maybe your public transport/zoning is fucked up, not your remote/not remote thing?
I work VERY remote (my employer is in Austin, I live in Michigan), so public transit isn't really an option for that arrangement, but if I'm honest the only real reason I'm doing it is because of Austin housing prices -- I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work, but that lifestyle is unimaginably expensive in all the places where jobs exist. Instead, I have an aging 1940s tract home in a city 2k miles from work.
The housing crisis is also a transit crisis. We built most of our homes and businesses around the cheap automobile and infinite petro-energy, with the predictable result that we can barely afford to live near the places we work.
Unfortunately, it's really difficult to run HR for any company of significant size, that accounts for individual differences.
My personal management style was about treating each employee as an individual, but I was also fortunate to have a small team of high-performing, mature, dedicated professionals. My technique would not work on many of the teams that I see out there, these days.
Taking an average view isn't useful at all, apart from maybe insinuating more people carry out jobs that are suitable for remote working.
Or in some specific countries and company cultures...
Aside from having an actual assistant, is this just hypothetical or do you know someone that prefers being micromanaged?
It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.
It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.
You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.
Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.
This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".
If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.
However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.
Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.
If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.
I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
Not necessarily given the methodology. For example, if remote work allows a worker to do their laundry in parallel where they would be otherwise unable to in an office, their productivity has increased, but the gains would not show up in the study. It observes industry productivity, not work productivity.
Note that when economists are talking about productivity, it's specific. It's units of output per hour worked (quantitative, not qualitative). https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/what-is-pro...
If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.
In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.
Give it a few more years and FANG / fortune 500 will follow suit, likely crashing the CRE industry which would actually serve a number of societal goods...
Isn't this what they did?
It's been a few years since the big shift to WFH and some execs think it's not working and are pushing for return to office.
Don't get me wrong, I think the reality of WFH is a lot more nuanced than the public debate is making it seem, it works for some and not for others.
But if the typical exec was to do what you are proposing, I feel like the visible affects to us would be exactly what we're already seeing.
In some cases, some companies rent an office for 2-3+ years. So let's say, they renewed from 2020-2023.
They were "forced" at first (to do WFH) and money got literally "burned", because the offices were empty, but insurances and all that had to be paid.
Now they had a chance at using more alternative approaches (rent spaces, or smaller offices), yet they want many to come back. There was almost never a saving, because contracts were still running (for many companies, I believe).
In case of complex Troubleshooting, this is definitely an added advantage , as people can focus more and solve these issues comfortably.
The myth of the “guy in a room” is just that — a myth, at best, and a classic antipattern at worst.
Now that we are forced back into the office, morale is crashing.
I honestly got a little nervous when everyone started working from home suddenly. I think everyone that can, should have the option, but some people just don't have the discipline or haven't learned it yet. I know this because another person on my team wanted to emulate my success (pre-COVID) and blew it and proved they couldn't get work done outside the office.
If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.
The employer pays for the time you're engaged in working AND trying to work by commuting. That 10-15h/week would, as you say, show up pretty quickly in reports.
But incentives are tricky. I can imagine companies would add the requirement that you live 10min from work because they only have budget for that much time spent on transportation costs. Like with RTO, that would backfire but I'm sure companies would insist on that instead of remote work.
I've been working 100% remote since 2017 and I'll never willingly change it.
Then again, I do choose jobs where I don't commute 3 hours into SF. More like 30 minutes, preferably by bike rather than car (location:Europe)
If I need to do 100% remote, because I may have a light cold and don't want to spread it, I feel miserable after two weeks. That being said, I also will never work 100% on-site again, only if I can walk to work, which given my location, will not happen in the near future.
I will say - moving from fully onsite to fully remote was a bit of a shock for me, and initially I felt the same. Overtime I replaced the in office "social" time with out of the office social time (going rock climbing with friends, joining a sports league, etc).
Often with people that are doing something new to them, they might have a "mental barrier" of doing something new, because there are a lot of things to take into account, and discussing with somebody experienced in person helps more that having a video call.
Also making some architectural decisions might take a lot of time if there are multiple potential solutions, each with pros and cons (ex. which message broker / http client / log & metric aggregator / sql database to pick). Being in the same room, a few senior developers and possibly the infrastructure guy makes it easier.
When working on already launched projects, the architecture is already in place and doing maintenance or adding new features does not need a lot of communication/synchronization between team members, so doing that remotely is not an issue. However it might be if you are not familiar with the project, or don't have experience, or you have associates in the team and you need good performance from them.
I don't know if it's the same when working on simpler projects.
I guess it depends. If the most “complex IT projects” out there can work without ever meeting in person so can your team.
Also if you are a begginer, I would recommend to search for work in office if it works for you.
I dislike commuting more than half an hour, however I would like the team to be together if it's something challenging.
I know it is hard to commute long time, especially if you have other responsibilities, but that does't change my opinion on what is the best for the team.
Please don’t let it be that a VP is manipulating productivity numbers so that their drop in the bucket action will move the price of their SFH they own.
Basically, some companies own buildings that need to be leased out and some companies have long leases which would mean money "down the drain" if they're not utilised. That's wrapped up to equate being told to come into the office as a profit driven thing, rather than a productivity driven thing. As a blanket statement it's not true as not all companies care about it, and when we're talking just about productivity, it's irrelevant as it's not actually a consideration.
If we're talking about motivations for coming back into the office, then sure, it's a very relevant topic there.
Boring email jobs where people are on their computer most of the time anyway and meetings are simply status updates, there's no reason why remote work is any worse, and likely just boosts productivity because of the mental health benefits of no commute, better environment, no distractions, etc.
In terms of jobs which require more creativity and collaborative rigor, I imagine remote work is where that element suffers.
For manufacturing it's easy - just measure the output per day and number of working hours spent. But how is it done for finance, marketing, software development, creative work and such where the output is either limited (you don't need more financial reporting than last month) or is entirely different in scope and complexity every time?
If productivity could be objectively measured it seems to me it would be easy to determine objectively whether WFH is better or worse, but the discussion seems to be mostly based on personal opinions. Some feel that workers must be slacking off at home, some feel that they get much more done from home.
I still don't see the reason why you should go to office if you do your work just right.
There are more expenses if you go to office rather than being remote.
# How I know if a team member will perform well remotely:
- They take initiative. They take ownership. They learn how to effectively use different communication tools, and then they use them. They ask questions with the goal of solving problems. They get things done.
# How I know if a team member will perform poorly remotely:
- They wait for others to tell them what to do. They tend to disappear. They don't communicate.
- Turns out that these are shitty traits to have for onsite team members as well.
# How I know if a manager will perform well remotely:
- They would perform well as a remote team member (see above), and have a team capable of working remotely.
- They lead by example, know how to build trust, understand how to set achievable short-term goals that lead up to big longterm successes.
- When questioned during meetings, they build trust, confidence and alignment.
# Some signs that a manager will perform poorly with a remote team:
- They prefer a command and control approach to management.
- They lack respect for their team members' time, experience, capabilities and / or intelligence.
- They are unable to explain problems such the team can help solve them.
- This leads them to micromanage.
- They perceive questions during meetings as a challenge to their authority, which makes look insecure.
A micromanager will see more success from poor performing team members if they're all onsite or, as is often the case, frequently on all day conference calls. A micromanager will also quickly lose their best team members.
Only causes issues when remote people demand to be able to do it at companies that value in person working. Studies are irrelevant because at the end of the day you'll never change peoples minds.
now thinking in business terms. you can run a (remote compatible) company without having an office at all, which may reduce cost very significantly, giving you an economic advantage. being a remote company also forces everyone to exchange thoughts/data/documents digitally one way or the other, making automation ideas with AI tools more feasible, which would then be another economic advantage that still needs to be realized in the future but its there.
now add ontop that people don't waste their time and pollute the environment by commuting, that employees can live wherever they want (probably: way cheaper and with higher QoL) than in commute distance, so they have more money left each month to spend (instead of it going to insane rent/...), which stimulates the economy in theory.
not going into the discussion that some people actually like to be in the office with others, basically forcing everyone else to do the same indirectly or directly. just the pure economic advantages. did I miss something that counters my points?
If the market can do anything then it that has to be optimizing productivity. Every single company has a weighty incentive to work out what works best and so I fully expect that after a bit of churn the optimal remote/on-premise balance will be found on a job-by-job basis.
This is a more complex issue than simply measuring work output of one person and comparing it to their work output in different locations.
For my wife, it is objectively false to claim that remote work is better for her teams, in her specific situation.
Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
Given the breadth of this study, two different conclusions spring to mind:
• productivity is up across the board, regardless of wfh; or
• sending the pen pushers and bean counters home and letting the shop floor people get on with their jobs made both more productive!
So offering people remote work for a 20% TC reduction?
Most companies do this by using a cost of labor index for areas. NYC/SF/Seattle being the highest, and then smaller reductions outside.
Basically you don't want to be in a HCOL (High Cost of Living) remote area with a LCOL (Low cost of Labor)
If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work.
A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence
B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...)
I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"
B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects.
C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on.
Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight.
There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite.
Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month.
If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker.
Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time.
The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing.
There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that.
Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here.
If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida.
Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.
Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end.
I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere.
Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.
It's a buggy whip. The internet is still relatively young, it hasn't fully dispatched with last centuries ideas just yet. As has been noted, the investor class failed to predict the consequence of cheap and wide pipes in homes as a matter of course.
Or put the other way: Remote work let's the employee pay for the office space.
As for different people, I'm way more productive around others than by myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most productive, I'd give being around my teammates to be 9-10, being at a cafe with people I don't know around a 7. Being at home by myself varies from 3 to 10. Their are certainly spurts of productivity at home for me but there's also zero feeling of camaraderie which is something that gives me energy.
Maybe it's related to the similar feeling of watching a movie at a full theater on opening night vs watching at home on my large TV. There's an energy at the theater that's missing from the home viewing. Similarly, for me, there's an energy at work with teammates that missing from working at home. By that's just my experience with my jobs.
For sure - singing in choir and making music remotely is from what I know mainly impossible because of the latency.
Distractions happen. They come from lots of sources.
Also since commute time is not accounted for in your work time, this is a moot point. You don't work more because you don't commute. You just have more free time to do stuff out of work.
When I had to WFH for a year during COVID, my productivity completely plummeted, almost to zero. It was very hard for me to be actually productive for more than 60-120 minutes each day. I could be playing video games or guitar, or watching videos, or petting my cats, or doing dishes, or cooking, or going for a walk. Instead I have to sit at this desk and do work? Ehh... no one will notice if I bug out for an hour... six times per day. I hated it, the guilt of being paid to do nothing stacked up like crazy. I went back to the office on the very first day that my state allowed me to. I wore a mask at the office every day for months in 2021, because the alternative was to WFH. Having to work remote was one of the worst periods of my life, and I think this experience soured my feelings about the work so much that it was a significant factor in my decision to eventually leave that job.
(This is not a statement about anything or anyone other than myself. If WFH works for you, great. It doesn't work for me.)
So if I'm distracted I can't be clocked in, generating time deficit, which will motivate me to not be distracted.
And on the other hand I'm free to distribute the work any way I want.
Needs honesty and trust of course, but I'd wager that's not an issue for most.
(Same disclaimer as parent - everyone works differently)
I live 10 minutes from my office, and there are much, much fewer distractions there. Anecdotal of course, but it's one way to answer your question.
I can control my focus at home because I am in full control.
In an open floor plan office environment, I have the added challenge of needing to shield my attention from others. For me the open floorpan office is like trying to do work in the middle of an airport terminal (not the lounge, sorry).
I think the productivity gains of remote work depend on personality and type of task. Some things work better, others don't. But as the study shows, the net effect is neutral.
If they would just use the "extra" time to live their own life, they would probably be just as productive and have additional time to themselves.
Go on TikTok and look at the sheer apathy for corporations. "Think of the share holders" memes as an example.
It's clear for 99% of workers there is going to be zero reward for producing more, so they simply aren't going to produce more, remote or in person.
Exception is startups, which is part of the reason I work for startups.
Work from home is a cost savings companies so it would seem they'd be motivated to downsize office space, but this isn't what's happening. In a world where costs are always the highest priority, I'm not buying the culture/work ethic argument.
The investor class is furious about remote work, because it affects their real estate pyramid scheme.
Pre-pandemic you didn’t really notice these things, but it adds up fast.
I started working in a hybrid setting and found remote so much better for learning compared to in-person where there's 30 people talking and distracting me from getting familiar with the work, how much hand holding do Juniors even need anyway? If anything having it be async is so much better since you'll have everything written down so you can reference it later whenever you need it, rather than listening to some senior blab off for half an hour about unimportant crap that just confuses you more.
If Juniors don't know to ask questions, that problem isn't solved by forcing them into the office and having someone peeking over their shoulder constantly (which can be daunting and detract heavily from any potential learning there could be had), you need to foster an environment where they're not afraid to reach out for help when they need it.
Also who wastes their lunch break talking about work? On whatever rare occasion I'm forced to go into the office, literally no one wants to discuss anything work-related (myself included) during lunch. People are talking about anything other than work, because duh. I've also never even seen these mythical watercoolers where people are apparently discussing life-altering breakthroughs all day every day that you hear about constantly, we do have a sink where people will chitchat about, again, literally anything other than work with others procrastinating though. This might be a US-specific thing I guess, but I've never in my life encountered anything even remotely like it in either Asia or the EU.
> ...and there is nothing to compensate for this.
I mean if you do literally nothing and just throw up your hands and say "welp, nothing can be done here, guess we all have to be sardines in a miserable can!" (aka the office) then sure, I guess there's nothing you can do. On the other hand you could invest time into properly documenting the project and the processes surrounding the project while setting up proper asynchronous channels and methods which ultimately benefits everyone, regardless if they're remote or not.
Most meaningful gains in productive capacity come from either resource windfalls or technological progress, and general theories of how to reproducibly increase worker productivity via policy are more akin to sacred rituals than settled science.
To be clear, I personally do think that markets function as optimizers, though as with any optimizer this tends to function in a very narrow scope. Most extant companies, for example, are driven by capital markets, not consumer ones, which means that ROI for shareholders - even when that's driven by essentially marketing stocks or goosing metrics - is the main thing being optimized. Hypothetically, markets could optimize for organizational productivity in some other sense, but I think it's even pretty unclear whether there's a way to subdivide that usefully into any kind of apples-to-apples comparison of individual workers within organizations.
Except if margins from the company's commercial real estate holdings are higher than the gains of remote productivity.
But saying "the market will fix it" doesn't really help you when you're a business owner. You're telling him to just go with any approach, and if his company tanks, the market is working as intended. Not that much guidance. I understand that employees don't have to care, they can switch to a surviving employer.
How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.
That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.
For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.
Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.
It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.
I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.
The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/taking-breaks/ https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-take-better-breaks-at-work-ac...
Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.
People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.
This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.
At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.
This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.
This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.
This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.
If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is
If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.
The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.
I'm moving out to a town 3 hours away, which is not really commutable into London. It's a better quality of life, and the housing options are much better. Selfishly, I don't much care about the housing pressure in London, but I do care about whether I can spend my downtime going places and doing things I enjoy, and remote working makes that MUCH easier.
This sounds more like it could occur at least temporarily when most people get some categorically new task that's potentially costly to screw up, and I could imagine it being voluntarily requested rather than overbearingly applied.
> Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.
I feel like managers identify a risk and apply their toolkit to it, which often ends up being increased oversight regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. It may or may not be I suppose, but it seems like only a niche person would respond with greater effectiveness in response to more frequent and perhaps intrusive scrutiny.
Seems like poorly considered delegation, or a system problem. Good managers should be able to identify or discover through conversation if someone will benefit from more specific and frequent interaction, and bad ones decide it'll be a good choice and work backwards from that.
In other cases, or if established up-front, one should expect a certain range of regular capabilities be within some agreed upon parameters; you probably wouldn't ask your system administrator to get on the sales floor, but you might ask your sales people to be able to work the cash register and lock the doors.
I mean depends on the team but approximately:
1. Discuss high level initiative
2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions
3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)
4. Prioritize work and assign tasks
> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?
Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.
> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?
Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.
> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.
It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).
"Hello CEO of Awesome Inc, it's me CEO of Rentalz Co. Your people have to return to office so that I can keep collecting the rent".
CEO of Awesome Inc: "No."
CEO of Rentalz Co.: "shucks!"
I like your reply, but for different reasons. I am a middle school teacher, and my day to day is managing people. It is tiring, decidedly so, and yet at the end of the day, management is rewarding for me for because it is relationship building through gaining individual understanding and building classroom consensus.
I love my job and am good at my job. But if I’m to step outside of my classroom your latter quote becomes far too truthful for me:
“we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly”
Your quote applies directly to my supposed superiors; assistant principals, principals, and higher ups in the school board. Most of the managerial class outside of a classroom is trash at their jobs. Their management style seems mostly morale busting and ego inflation at day’s end.
I agree with you, just from a different occupational domain.
Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.
My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges".
Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good.
It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish.
No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.
Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either.
> For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support
Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...
Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position.
So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?)
I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to.
Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears.
Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away.
Welcome to capitalism.
But my main point in the above comment was that I don't have the morale to do shitty work to make a corporation rich unless I have human connection with my team. I don't value any fucking corporation enough to lift a single finger for them. It's only having other humans around me that makes work feel at all bearable to do.
I do think about this. I think my current workplace office has enough people that this isn't likely, but if they did get rid of it, I guess I'd try to find some co-working facility and see how that feels. More likely though, I'd quit and find some other job that does have a local office.
However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips.
What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two : - working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money - working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO. Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies. Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
It can't be an everyone gets a gold star situation. Encouragement/reward is good when warranted, and encouraging everyone to recognize their strengths and weaknesses is required.
Texas -> Michigan is a very long way. Afaict this trend really got started with covid, where people fled to their home towns, right?
> I'd much rather live in an urban core within walking distance of work The best. I have 14 minutes by tram from door to door.
I had to do something like this. Not every hour, but several times a day was needed to keep this person on track and productive. And no, I did not want to check on an otherwise-functional adult that frequently. Nor did anyone else, but circumstances led to them working on my team.
> I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.
Yes, that was the best option and is ultimately what happened. Going through the required HR hoops was just as much effort as micromanaging, which is why no one bothered to do it for several years. It was easier to shuffle them off to another project and tell the lead "they're alright, they just need to work on communication".
The only real problem are the people who I can only describe as maliciously incompetent. They do the bare minimum that is asked of them, take advantage of all of the freedom and lack of definitions (no core hours meaning I don't work 10-4 Monday through Friday, that sort of thing), and when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.
The only solution for these people is for them to be part of large companies with rigid policies that they are guardrailed into and have no way to test the boundaries of. If you have one of these people on your team you need to get rid of them. My experience is that there's usually one in every 40-50 people. If you get one early on your team, you're in big trouble.
I could probably fit the description of the malicious person you described, but only because it wouldn't map to what my manager knows exactly how to work with, almost always defaulting to a doubling down of otherwise unnecessary tests of my competence, as defined by their uncommunicated expectations in terms of how they differ from what I'm doing and why. More specifically this seems to manifest as micromanagement. It's quite shocking to watch, it doesn't take much to set things on a bad course, and it's very difficult to recover from.
In the case of my last job, I was working remotely from the the PST timezone with people in Vietnam, Spain, and Germany where the manager was. At first I was waking up for a 6am morning meeting every day to have a little overlap with the rest of the team, but later I'd discuss it with my manager and change it to 3 days a week. I made it clear that despite being in a wildly different timezone, I'd do my best to be in attendance at the most important of the new meetings that were accumulating as the result of org change and boilerplate agile, and be available for a few hours in the morning and a few hours later at night that overlapped with other developers who needed to chat in real time with me, so I could get a block of relatively uninterrupted focus time in the evening or late afternoon. This actually worked pretty well, I kept up with responses on Jira, code reviews on Github, and delivering the features and bugfixes I committed to. I was originally hired as a contractor and then moved reluctantly to employment, which is when my boss started asking I keep core hours, which I agreed to. Things kind of kept moving along fine, but he seemed to be accumulating resentment about something, which impacted his ability to communicate respectfully. He started "checking in" during strange hours for no tangible reason, and when I didn't respond immediately, he would just keep sending more messages. Whenever I did respond, he'd seem to come up with an excuse for why he needed my attention, such as for a status update on something I'd already visibly commented on. My response was always to try and be more communicative, but surprisingly he kept getting more toxic, and more passive-aggresive, in what seemed to be an effort to remove what agency I had to get work done.
> when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.
All 1on1s concluded with him seemingly re-affirming his belief that frequent supervision is what he should do, ignoring anything I had to say, and this just kept compounding what almost resulted in burnout and depression.
At one point for example I had added and finished a ticket for a simple typo fix in a route, but noted that there was another ancillary issue worth looking at, not specifically related to this ticket and should be looked at independently at another time. He commented and said the ticket was incomplete until the ancillary issue was looked at, even though there were much higher priorities. So it sat paused or in-progress for some time while I finished my priority work, meanwhile he continues DMing me almost daily asking for status updates on this and other ongoing work. I eventually get around to investigating it, conclude that there's a good but undocumented and unbroken reason things were like that, and it's not something to pursue at this time, ensuring that I documented my findings thoroughly and visibly. He then assigned it to himself, realized he didn't have time to work on it, and then asked in the general slack channel if anyone would look into this, "because ___ refuses to", subsequently backing off only after I called him out on it and he wasted his time concluding exactly what I did, almost as if I'm a capable software dev
After that, he'd proceed to start moving meetings around to hours I couldn't possibly attend, cancelling 1-on-1s, and eventually I'd get laid off. Honestly it was insane and I hope he gets his head checked. The only reason I didn't burn out was because I mentally denounced his behaviour as laughably petulant and I shouldn't do anything beyond what I'm doing to appease it.
I've had other instances at other companies, and I do believe I'm the problem, but me as the problem wouldn't exist if people who had good communication skills and empathy were promoted to management. I've had 1 on 1s with spineless people approximately my age who spent the entire meeting prodding me with vague questions to try and get me to admit some pet wrongdoing, only to deny it upon being asked what they're looking for, when just stating it clearly could have helped work through the issue. Managers often avoid confrontation and resort to passive-aggresion.
Forgive the typos here, wrote it on my phone and it's a bit to review.
Edit: from his perspective, I understand that he was probably faced with home life problems and an issue of someone not conforming. So my point is that things appear wildly different depending on what your sense pf normal compliance is, especially if you have no apparent difficulties with shifting focus for example
We actually deal with this nonsense in our household; my wife is hourly and between the commute, parking, and walking to/from her workplace she loses about 20-25% compared to the time she actually gets paid for. We also spend a lot on gas, and have been putting ridiculous miles on her daily driver. Not to mention physical fatigue and emotional stress; she talks about quitting at least once a week. All for a mediocre wage (I would have said it’s garbage if she was our sole earner - my compensation is about double hers and I WFH).
Edit: also, I remember company cars being a thing not too long ago. I don’t hear about them as much as I used to.
And yet they don't. That is not because they are bored, but because they fear the possible failure.
There is a meme, or some "motivational" thing that floats around. "Exercise for an hour a day. It's less than 5% of your day - what's your excuse?"
Uhh... because, if I factor in: - 8 hours for sleeping
- 8 hours for working
- 1.5-2 hours for commuting
- 0.5-1 hour to get ready for work
- 1 hour to prepare and eat dinner
All of a sudden we are at 19-20 hours, and it's not less than 5% of my day, it's actually 25% of my day.
If you've played MMOs, been parts of raids, or been active in a guild - you figure out how to solve these problems.
I've been in a community management and moderation role entirely online - those interactions and issues were, by far, the most subjective and complex project discussions I have had to conduct.
I believe that there is an entire generation of workers AND managers, who will be entering the workforce with highly effective remote working habits.
The caveat is, that this applies to work that can be done online, where your product can be examined and verified online.
You are right, however I would say that raids and coordinated e-sports were on the periphery when I was playing. I had to set up my own teams and lan tournaments.
Nice distinction to highlight though, thank you! The skill set would require specific coordination skills, not just being able to play team matches occasionally.
I suppose its proof that the skill exists, just not its distribution in the workforce.
Most offices I’ve been in have had deficient conference room setups and open floor plans, and I’ve come to enjoy the ease with which private conversations, pairing, and ad hoc meetings can happen without being disruptive to others or booking a room way in advance.
I do think that conversations have higher bandwidth in person, and I’ve really missed having a proper big whiteboard to gather around, but I’ve come to realize that this restriction can be a positive forcing function for organizations to write things out and maintain more organized planning documents, which is a desirable outcome.
I think this is extremely cynical. Feedback makes for good organizations, and when I built teams, anyone who doesn't value, actively solicit, and provide good feedback doesn't have a very long tenure.
There are many things which go into building this culture, but I think I've only had one or two cases where this led to negative career impact for individuals. Most people adopt to this very quickly, very well, and work well in high-feedback settings.
I've absolutely never had, nor could imagine having, this problem on teams I've led.
Much more, I find the limitation is on my end. Going for a walk-and-talk is relaxing. A Zoom meeting is tiring. 1-2 Zoom meetings per day is not a problem, but a day of Zoom meetings basically leaves me a zombie. Group meetings are also much more tiring online than 1:1s.
I'm a good in-person manager. I'm also a good remote IC. I not nearly as good with those flipped around.
I also don't find any of these to be the case for me:
> keeping people on target is difficult remotely. Consensus is difficult remotely. Feedback is difficult remotely
I can do all of those individually -- quite well -- remotely. I just can't do those for anywhere close to 8 hours per day.
To be very clear: That's me. I'm not speaking for you or for anyone else, and YMMV. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing other stories or contradictory opinions, and how things work for others.
I've worked for 20 years in global teams, and written communication is very important. Having US/UK/Ireland/HK/Singapore split team isn't much different from remote. Over the years I've worked in smaller orgs with a higher % of local people.
What I can tell you is that the amount of chatter grew exponentially. One place I used to call it "bilateral communication" because A-B would side-talk then A-C, then A-D, then B-C, then B-D.. all in-person. Tremendous games of telephone constantly.
Remote is a forcing function on better written communication.
It's funny that half this site is people working on various SaaS tools that are supposed to make work collaboration better, but somehow we need to sit next to each other to be productive?
The obvious solution is to fix your very-noticeably fucked up communication culture, since that would also improve in-person work.
Some orgs and managers seem to have decided, comically incorrectly, that WFH is the problem element in the above scenario, however.
Or having the universe revolve around Jira, berating devs for lack of story progress in standup, and shouting about velocity in sprint ceremonies.. while also doing the above said verbal drive-bys? Who is causing all this churn?? Where is our focus? Where are people spending their time??
It's unknowable.
How important is that stuff, I have no idea, but if half the team are friends at work and the rest can only be reached over slack, that doesn’t sound like much of a team
I have plenty of friends outside of work. I work for a living and I'm a professional doing a job, not a kid on a play date.
The cynic in me always felt that people who emphasize this benefit of office work just can't make friends unless people are forced to hang out with them every day.
Places that are very focussed on "culture fit" or if they'd "have a beer" with the person they are interviewing.. leaves a lot of people behind. Women / non native speakers / older folks generally fail these types of implicit or explicit screens.
Building a development team is something like building a baseball team. A bunch of specialists, a few generalists, and the ability to get along. Whether they'd grab a pint after a game isn't really important.
I certainly have and maintain friendships at work, some of them from before remote, some of them from after. Some of them are people whom I've never lived in the same continent or city as.
It's unhealthier (loads of sleep deprivation out there), it's bad for the environment and its costs are higher. We can argue all day if the perks of in-person work are worth the cost, but if there aren't any perks besides "I just prefer it that way" I don't think there is even a valid discussion to have. We are talking some of the largest CO2 reductions possible from the average fellow together with more free time, less usage of infrastructure and possibly changes in the housing market.
A corporation doing this "just because" is comparable to a corporation purchasing mattresses to burn them in an open field "just because"
But the only way I commute now is by train and/or bike, most commutes to some godawful office park hellscape in San Jose are agony.
To be clear, I don't honestly believe the previous paragraph. I'm just using it to illustrate how one can pull out a "just so" story to argue the exact opposite that you're doing. I believe your argument is flawed in that makes a universal condemnation supported by generalisations based on local specifics.
I work in a company which, for all intents and purposes, allows its employees to be almost fully remote and yet a significant number of us actively choose to come to the office (partly motivated by things like free brunches from office management). The overwhelming majority of workers come to the office on foot, on public transport, by bike, or by electric scooter, and a tiny few come by motorbike. How is that "borderline morally evil"?
- risk of accidents
- sitting longer hours, leading to loss of muscle tone etc
- inhaling particulate from engines and tires
This stuff builds up over time. The decrease in life expectancy is real.
Edit: Subcontractor at bp. Opec crunch. entire floor fired. Hardware startup, unexpected giant bill overnight. Layoffs. Fullstack webshop, sales didnt land. Crypto finance gig, asset prices crashed, clients all went broke instantly.
Sometimes thats just how it is.
It’s waking time, not sleeping time, which is out of a 16 hour waking day.
5 hours a week makes about 20 hours a month roughly, which is about half an extra work week to live that you miss out on.
Multiply that 30 minute commute each way by 12 months and it’s close to 260 hours a year.
160 hours a month of work so you get back about 1.6 working months to put into something else.
I had a few minute commute for 10 years. It was an unfair advantage.
I too prefer a voluntary 20 minute walk over a mandatory one. Then my brain can be aimed at what I value, not work.
Again, by what plausible incentive do you think non-FAANG companies, with tiny real estate assets, usually leases for a multi-billion company, would impact their productivity for tiny help in the overall real estate market?
I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?
How sustainable is to work 11-12 hours a day though? If we do 5 hours of intense work and the rest is spent in meetings or other overhead activities make 8 hours just enough to make it sustainable over long periods of time…
How I spend the time in between in terms of doing research/reading/etc is up to me. If I had to do this in an office setting it would suck to be stuck there when stuff does come up.
Why? Are you contracted for 45-50 hours per week? Or if contracted less, are you compensated for the additional hours?
I'm contracted for 38.5 hours per week. That's 8.125 hours Monday to Thursday and 6.00 on Friday. If I work longer than this I am compensated with time off in lieu. I do have to log my time daily. Overall works great. I'm fairly paid and have a good lifestyle.
I actually find it hard to imagine working 9-10 hours every day for any extended time period.
As a manager, with both WFH and in-office employees, the difference is very clear on my end: In-office employees do undeniably better. In my personal experience, of course.
There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.
Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.
(Especially building startups. What a slog that is. The fun part is building the product, and that’s a fraction of what you have to do.)
The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.
Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business.
As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
You can get best people overseas for a fraction of US costs, and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws.
I'm glad this happens so I can use geographic arbitrage: work for US client but live in nice place in Europe with reasonable costs of living.
The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants.
As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago.
Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one.
And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year.
Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.
Best talents are not paid at the similar level globally. Even tech giants like Google have different salary for same levels in different countries inside EU. You can get x2 if you move from Warsaw to Dublin or x3 if you move to Zurich.
I don't think this can be true. An employer has to follow labor laws pertaining to the country of residence of their employees. Typically some sort of legal entity has to be established in those countries.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.
The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.
Wow that is a lot. That is (almost) a WHOLE DAY of meetings each week just for syncs.
I can only provide my own anecdotes, but I'm at 0.5-1hr for standup status-report type meetings.
My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.
For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.
I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.
Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive.
It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.
In some cases, it was getting brought into more senior manager meetings I previously wasn't privy to, that had always been too early (7-8am).
In other cases, it was moving those same managers goal posts because they'd always been online early and hey if you want access to them, the only place to find time on their calendar was like 8am or 5pm.
I know A LOT of senior IC / team lead people who fell into this trap during COVID.
The cost of doing all this measuring and evaluating and preparing-to-measure certainly isn't being measured, though, so we'll never know.
It's entirely possible to construct beautiful metrics, amazing velocity charts, etc and have a terrible product with miserable users. Many such cases.
Some of this metrics stuff is like "expressed vs revealed preferences". Users who complain about your product and demand new features more quickly don't want a beautiful burndown chart. They want you to improve your product. You may actually need to slowdown to speedup. It's likely you need to do some R&D, and lots of experiments that will look bad on metrics.
You see this a lot when you quantize teams into little buckets like operations vs new features vs customer success vs core engineering teams. It's possible for a team run by a bad actor to have nice metrics while being a net drag on the other parts of the org.
100K is indeed very high for S or E Europe, but in my experience there are very very few people who actually get that kind of money. Any of those are absolutely on the top end of a bell curve. Also I'm quite certain that the quantity of those kind of workers vs remote workers in USA is less than 1%.
For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc
The one customer owned cooperative I have worked for did limit equity to one share per shareholder, in addition to being the most pathologically corporate and political company I have ever worked for or known off. Maybe worker owned cooperatives work better.
I would certainly not want to work at a non-worker-owned cooperative. That's not an incentive alignment for me as a worker, and it's a hierarchy placed above workers. Customer-owned coops are only meant to be good for the customer, it’s standard hierarchical wage labor bs for workers.
Not that worker-owned ones are able to avoid politics though - all social relations have varying degrees of success and conflict.
indeed it seems that effective remote only work requires a more coherent team or more formalized processes.
Occam’s razor. These co’s came to the same conclusion co’s like OpenAI did, that in persons benefits outweighed the negatives. Only when the conclusions don’t agree with the preferences people like you have, that the cope, conspiracy, and rationalizing come out. Also, what may be good for the individual, doesn’t mean it’s good for the org.
Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.
Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.
I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.
This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.
Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.
This if course needs to:
1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and
2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.
Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.
Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.
They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.
Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.
(And when they're not being loud, they're being cute, and it's a tempting and easy distraction to go spend some time with them in the middle of a work day.)
In this sort of dynamic, I see working at an office as a fairly healthy option. I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father), but I'm definitely more productive and less stressed out working from an office.
A reply to you mentioned noise-canceling headphones. That doesn’t work for me, because the kids want to engage and play with the parents when they’re at home. It’s not just a matter of noise.
That said! I still agree with OP’s sentiment. I find that I’m much more relaxed without having to worry about the commute. More time to help the kids get ready and just enjoy the moment. More time to walk them to school.
Before, I would be a ball of stress trying to get people out the door in the morning so I could catch one of only two buses that could take me across the bay to work.
Same thing in the evenings. More time to pick them up, walk home, take serendipitous side adventures and help foster their curiosity. I love it.
I would still not accept working from office jobs though.
Not much of an outlier.
Personally, I don't believe I must either be working or spending time with my children every moment they are awake. I'm a person too, not just a worker and parent, and need to have my own time.
If you need mentorship, your employer may offer that as a formal program. You also might be able to reach out directly to more senior people. Frankly, I find more and better opportunities to provide mentorship over Zoom than I did in the office.
Good luck with your career and mental health, my guy.
Also, my profession is being a Software Engineer, not a train passenger.
I made a calculator for this a while ago: https://flat.social/blog/get-a-remote-team-back-in-the-offic... (scroll a bit down for the inputs).
Kind of wish I hadn't looked... :(
Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.
> This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments
For one, one would need to look into how many car commutes are avoidable to more precisely quantify the species-level irrationality of fossil-powered forced cramming of office towers inside cities day-in-and-out.
I'm sure it's all been done...
>98% of workers want to work remote at least some of the time 65% report wanting to work remote all of the time.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti...
If 1/3 of your workforce meets 2 days a week your average utilization is about 14%. The logical conclusion is a ghost town that goes away as soon as your employer cuts the building off like a diseased hand.
That's a good point. All that fancy real estate and coffee machines start to look like a wasted investment when they're used 14% of the time.
Anyyway, where-ever i've been though that encourages a few days a week in the office, everyone says the big days where everyone comes in and we catch up are fun. The wfh days give us balance. only a handful of people attempt to avoid coming in like the plague. Most people don't like having to commute all the time, but very few people hate going outside and seeing people at work like the wierdos that argue for 100% wfh online.
I have a colleague that takes like a 1.5 hour train to get in and we just went to the pub together after work yesterday, sometimes i let her stay over at mine so she can be in office for an extra day. I love seeing this person. If there was no mandatory office, we would not be friends. Last year I worked 99% remote and I barely ever spoke to human beings and I wanted to die. We are not made to exist like that. And I think the wfh crowd is way too skewed towards middle aged people with spouses and children. If you don't have that wfh ruins your life.
E.g. my yearly cost of commuting when I did added equivalent to about $2.5k/year in after tax transport costs.
I've typically told recruiters about 20%, from a high base, and frankly that is lower than it ought to be when accounting for both the time and costs, but given I already live where I live, I feel I could justify it in terms putting extra cash straight into my pension pot and retiring earlier. But not enough to lower it further to find a point where someone is more likely to take me up on it.
... but not even close to enough to car-commute more than about 10 minutes to it, given the option. That's roughly the cut-off. Under 1.5 bikeable miles (that's ideal!) or maybe 5 miles by car.
And to get that short a commute, I'd need all kinds of other compromises in most cities. Worse schools, more expensive and smaller housing.
Is my preference for the office worth hundreds of hours a year lost commuting, thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, and all the extra micromorts from the commute? LOL. LMFAO. God no, it's not even close. No typical commute is a low enough cost that I'd pay it to be in the office. It's way off.
So, though I do in fact prefer working in the office... nah.
>Company A is 2.5 hours of drive time
>Company B is remote
Pay is the same.
lol I imagine that Company A will find some sucker, but instead of getting A+ workers that can realize company B> company A, they are going to get the leftover workers, their second choice. To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.
> To be fair, leftover workers seem to stick around at a company for 10-20 years.
Even if they were "leftovers", their value to the company they know in and out after 10 to 20 years and their productivity skyrockets compared to the A+ rock stars that left the company after one year.
What about the top of the crop who live around the corner and prefer office over WFH for a clear separation between work and personal life?
That being said, there's lots of meetups, clubs, organized sports etc etc for people looking for a structured way to continuously hang out with a group of people sharing their interests. The key thing there is that it's voluntary association though.
Being forced to hang out with coworkers who you might not even like just because they happen to have the same employer shouldn't be a substitute for putting in an effort to make friends.
There are some social spaces I try to go to regularly but the people who turn up are not always the same. A lot of the time I'll manage to connect with one person, which is hard for me, and then I will never see them again even if I keep going to the same event. Or I see them about once every couple of months at the event. Or on the one day I'm going to the event my energy levels are low and I feel overstimulated by the novel environment and I don't manage to really speak to people. Putting myself out there a lot to new people in new places is something that I find stressful because I have been rejected and made fun of for trying to connect with people for the majority of my life. Honestly, i always had an issue with this, but I became better at being sociable in uni. Being in my house most of my time has brought my XP down and I find that the more I am stuck inside the more I regress in my abilities. I find it really hard to leave the house once I become unaccustomed to it. My brain just starts to break down.
I think a sports team might be the most consistent spaces but I'm pretty dyspraxic and when I do team sports I end up getting anxious and like hitting my team members in the face. I can't do that sort of thing.
What works for me is having a consistent space where I can slowly build up relationships with people over time. This is sort of how things have worked for the whole of human history. Work, school, uni, sports teams. This is where people make most of their friends. Always has been, always will be. And again, if I have to be working for most of my waking hours, I don't want to do it alone in my little box. It's not enjoyable. And saying that I must meet all of my social needs from concerted effort outside of work on top of all the other responsibilities I have is insane to me.
When I have a workplace that i know i can go into and see people a couple times a week, my mental health and energy levels are better and my social XP is stronger and I can actually enjoy socialising. Last year i was mostly remote, this year I've found a company with compulsory 2-3 days a week and lots of other young people. Its amazing. I finally feel okay. And yeah if I was working somewhere where I hated everyone and I didn't get any benefits other than money I would LEAVE. Don't stay at a place like that. Your mental health is too valuable and work should enhance your life otherwise you're literally ruining 80% of your waking moments.
Edit: on the point of leaving, yes i know some people have kids and can't move around like that. but this is why i'm pro mandatory hybrid not 100% in office. workplaces should be okay with you needing to stay home when your kids need sth or you coming 2 days if you live past a certain distance instead of 3 days. My office accomodates this. I come in 3, others come in 2 because they have long commutes. Everyone is fine with it. 100% wfh just punishes anyone who doesn't have kids.
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.
So at least for me, it doesn't work.
Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.
A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).
> “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”
This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.
While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.
Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.
Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.
Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.
Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.
Previously I’d see them during holidays only, and now I see them once a month and actually am able to spend quality time with them.
And while I respect the idea and value of non-remote, I don’t think any amount of “in-person whiteboarding sessions and relationship building” would be worth sacrificing for the flexibility of spending quality time with my family and seeing them more often.
This means that I couldn't read anything. Shaking of the bus also gives me time to time a mild headache. Now if the ride was smoother (like a train or a tram) and I still could sit and read then indeed I would agree with you.
Fortunately I don't have to commute very often so I can tolerate this to a degree but if I had to commute every day then it would add considerable extra strain into my life.
Normally the day should be divided into 3 equal parts: 1 sleep time, 2 work time, 3 personal time.
Commute time effectively steals from either personal time or from sleep time and this comes on top of getting ready for work that is also a major waste of time in the mornings.
But I also self-selected roles closer to the end station in London so the commute at the other end was short-ish.
Whenever I had to do any other commute: by car, bus, multiple changes, etc it was always a grind and shortlived.
However, I was able to stop even the not-so-bad commute long before COVID as I wanted to be at home when the kids came back from school as they are only young once and briefly so. Though I miss the "me-time".
Public transit use:
https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...
https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/public-tran...
Population density:
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/28/americans-moving-map-2022-f...
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/31/cities-pandemic-moving-tren...
Just as an example, right now I am in an Indian city where there is some minimal public transport but a majority of people need their own vehicle to commute for most of their journeys. And it is not an unusual scenario for India, which contains more population than Europe and North America combined.
That depends on the public transport. When I lived in London (inside what is known as the zones 1-6), I had a walk, a wait for space on a train, then stand for 40 minutes on that completely packed train, then a change at a crowded station, then another wait for space on an underground train, then stand on a completely packed underground train. All of this while dealing with angry and rude other people trying to push on each step before you. I would get to work completely stressed and in a bad mood already. That is on a good day. On a bad day the trains would just be cancelled, or the underground halted, or something and it would take hours to just get to the office.
The only way I would consider going back to something like that is for a huge, huge amount of money.
This is very subjective, as well as personal and irrational, but I find it to be true. I benefit from having a reason to go out into the world in the morning. WFH and the freedom to go to the coffeeshop or take a walk didn't match up.
Can you give an example of a headless company that's running fine?
Rip off the band aid and feel some pain.
When all expenses are considered, working in-office can (and often does) cost the employee way more money than remote.
The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.
57% have both parents working full time
28% have one parent working full time and the other not working at all.
The remaining 16% is one full time, one part time.
As another commenter pointed out - while not the majority, it's definitely not an outlier.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
So, less common, but not an incredible outlier.
At no income level is it lower than 20% stay at home parent though, so not too much of an outlier in any case.
If you are single and want to live alone, you can certainly optimize the hell out of housing costs. But of course, each single constraint you remove will probably let you reduce your costs by a bit.
I work at a 100% remote company, and most of us are married (no kids) or single. We, or at least my specific r&d team have social lives outside of work and live in urban areas. Some of us even do a weekend dnd session online.
Hybrid mostly doesn't work from an economic pov. If the company employees can do their work 2-3 days from home, it's likely they could do their entire job from home, and a company just can't afford to spend money on expensive commercial real estate if it can avoid it.
Edit: Also I now work at a company that has a 3 day office policy, which is one of the top reasons I chose the job. I think they're doing fine and they have no intention fo changing. It's not impossible.
An ideal situation would be different companies with different philosophies in proportion to preference but this isn't really what's happening. You had a plethora of options during covid now you have a bunch of old people trying to force everyone back into the office.
If part of your people are there and part are not then you must necessarily adopt patterns and communication techniques fit for remote work. Your remote people wont be happy because they have to come in and your in office people wont be happy because many days less than half the staff will be there.
If you want to have enough space for most people to be there on some days you need almost as much space as full in office. You can't realistically hire anyone who lives more than a 30-60 minute commute and because you want to have access to a large desirable workforce your building is probably located somewhere expensive as well. A large chunk of the most desirable workers who want to work remote are forever off limits or if you do make exceptions you now have jealousy and drama.
Hybrid work is the answer to how can I have all the disadvantages of both styles and none of the advantages while not being shitty enough that all of either group leaves.
> I think this is a remarkably dysfunctional policy that only serves to placate mostly irrelevant middle managers who now look as useless as they are and has literally no other virtues.
I know people with 1.5 hour commutes at my office. They come in twice a week. I ask them about it. They like coming in twice a week because everyone is really nice and friendly to be around. It's refreshing and fun. The only person management reprimanded about how often he came in was a young guy who lives less than 30 minutes away and didn't come in for 4 months. He doesn't really have an excuse. But everyone is allowed to skip a few weeks. It's not a punitive policy.
Let me also point out I'm not in the US. Living more than 1.5 hours away from your office is rare as hell and nobody is driving that distance. They're reading on the train. People leave early to miss rush hour. That's totally acceptable in our office. Because we're not micromanaging people. We just like people being in the office for culture. I know you can't fathom any reason to talk to other humans other than to control them, but some of us can.
And the people coming into the office are happy. We like seeing people, so we come in on similar days. Some people Mon-weds, some tues-thurs, some tues and thurs. Everyone knows noone comes in on friday and very few on monday. Most people come in on tues and thurs. So we coordinate. Because we are human beings with social skills.
Even the guy who avoided coming in for 4 months, when he came back said that he actually liked being in the office and would like to come in more he was just being lazy. I asked a girl who takes a 1.5 hour train and sometimes crashes at my house. She says she doesn't mind it at all she likes to have an excuse to come to the city and she still saves money over living here.
Not everyone is a miserable sod like you.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
Most workplaces aren't social clubs much less families. It doesn't make one a sod to pick their friends and family and their work for different reasons and be jealous with their free time. You should celebrate your great fortune and I'm certain work put in to have your life figured out so well.
Most of us settle if we are lucky for something that pays enough to live with a reasonable work life balance and would do well to guard our time to spend with real friends and family we pick rather than the folks who happen to work in the same profession.
What I'm confused about with the hatred for office work amongst people who are mainly working in tech is that most tech companies pride themselves on good work culture. Even in non tech specific companies there are a lot who want to emulate that in their tech departments because it's famous and revered. So yes, I put in some effort and found a good company. I've never worked at FAANG or even a startup but I found companies that value tech culture enough to not micromanage their tech department. So of all the demographics of people to be moaning so much about their work culture I don't understand why it's tech people.
I would also point out that you should perhaps get more agitated about your labour laws because in other countries we have twice or thrice as much anual leave and live in less siloed communities and both of those are proven to increase longevity. Both having more holiday and going to the office when you aren't on holiday will probably make you healthier and happier. At the end of the day, I'm advocating for working practices that align with human nature and are good for our mental and physical health. The fact that you don't have that is a whole other legal and cultural problem that comes from having no labour movement in your country. Which is really sad. But that's the problem at the end of the day.
We can compare US to Japan, to Europe, perhaps to some parts of China but certainly not to India - it would be too much apples to cucumbers comparison.
Imagine that we but every country and their development index and their public transportation development index on a XY graph? Would US still stand out?
Let's assume that it does. Then we can say that US is a global outlier.
I don't think OP understands the meaning of the word globally
When comparing similarly wealthy countries the US is absolutely an outlier in this.
Because you said - "Thankfully the US is a major outlier in this aspect globally." "Globally" implies the entire world. Now why are you moving the goalposts? If you wanted to confine the discussion to the developed world, just call out US being an outlier in the developed world.
I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.
My story is an anecdote, and moving seats was not an option. For this situation I might as well be remote if I'm not next to the team.
You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.
It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.
Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.
The meeting model is more like phone calls and, while I adore WFH, not well suited for that.
And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...
It does not follow that the deep social interaction that is beneficial to mental health has to happen at work.
One can WFH and see people outside of work. Some people enjoy deep social ties with coworkers, others prefer keeping work at a distance from their personal life.
> People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces.
That is incorrect. Some people do, some others don't.
There are loads of places like this. The irony is that in such context people enjoy the watercooler talk as an escape from the hellscape that is their 9-5 shitty job, doing everything they can instead of their job to make their experience less miserable.
> I've never had that experience.
Lucky you.
> And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working.
This has happened all the time for me (could be zoom, could be Slack). From scheduled informal chats with teammates to regular chats with close people to members of non-work or work channels of interest to random ones via Donut with yet unknown people, it's lively and on everyone's own terms.
> I've had people never turn their cameras on.
Ever since I have been remote they all did. If they don't it's either one of the odd low bandwidth situation and they save it for an acceptable audio experience, they're on the move - and open about it, with either an apology about possible noise when speaking thus unmuted or setting expectations about their ability to talk or follow - and audio only "phone mode" is more practical, or they're at home and privacy respecting of their SO or otherwise guest.
> And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable.
I am genuinely empathetic to your situation and am glad to hear from a nearby comment that it has resolved - at least to an extent - and you found an environment where you can be happier.
I say so because I realised long ago that people can come from all ways of life and be wildly different in their needs, and having been through similar suffering for something in the order of three decades - only from a symmetrical end - I can relate.
And I say "end" and not "side" because it's a continuum, there are no sides, there's no team A vs team B, and it's not a zero sum game.
> The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
By and large "pro WFH people" are not arguing that everyone-and-their-dog must WFH, instead that WFH does make sense and is a true net positive for many, and that the recent pro-office-for-everyone discourse that it is inherently more productive because humans is at best loaded with prejudice that fails to take into account a good chunk of actual humans, some raising their voice, others staying silent, and at worst has hidden agenda.
The pendulum was mostly stuck one way for aeons, then it progressively moved with the rise of the Internet, and swung full-force with COVID. Now it's swinging back hard the other way. Change is hard, old habits die harder, but I'm hopeful that someday we'll find balance, but for that we need understanding of each other.
I have had shitty office experiences don't get me wrong, but since becoming a software engineering professional, I find that I am in enough demand to actually choose a decent place to work. Since entering this field, I had one horrifying remote job where I never learnt what my colleagues looked like and felt miserable and demotivated all the time, and I've worked two other places where I've been more in the office. When working in the office, I've never had horrible experiences like I did when I worked shitty non-professional jobs. Being a software engineer is cushy as hell and I find it weird how some people complain about their tech workplaces as if they're not some of the chillest places to work in person that you could possibly be lucky enough to work in.
Thank you for your empathy for my past situation. However, the problem when pro-wfh people say "we want you to have a choice" is that my shitty remote job was technically hybrid. I could go into the office. People even tried to organise a single office day a week. And because it wasn't mandatory, half the time I tried going in the place was a ghost town. I don't want that, ever. So yeah I LOVE that my job has (semi)MANDATORY days otherwise there would be so many colleagues of mine I would never have met and I am great friends with them (By semi mandatory I mean we have a 3 day target average. So you're not penalised for missing a week or sth its just the mode of your weeks should be 3 days. Which is a great system)
Basically, for me to have a choice to live the way I want there HAS to be companies with MANDATORY office days. And the pro-wfh people demonise that SO MUCH.
If anything it’s people failing to consider commute times when looking for work that’s the issue not company’s requirements. Going they will pay me 10k more per year but I’ll spend X more hours a week commuting is effectively being paid to commute.
I find this very unintuitive and even mentally rebel at the idea when I think about it, but I still think it's true.
But for example, consider three scenarios:
1. Work from home, with a consistent habit of going on a ten minute walk and reading for half an hour before and after work. 2. Commute with a ten minute walk and half hour train ride, with a consistent habit of reading on the train. 3. Same as (1), but family responsibilities and other distractions end the moment work begins and begin the moment work ends. 4. Same as (2), but spend the train ride doom scrolling.
For me (1) is best but also unlikely because there are too many other "choices" of what to do before and after work, so in practice I end up doing (3).
But option (2) of commuting by train would actually be better than (3) despite having less optionality! I would have more wind-up and -down time each day, and get more reading done.
But the risk of option (2) is that there is still too much optionality; instead of reading, I could scroll crap on my phone. Removing that optionality somehow - by getting a dumb phone or some other solution to keep myself from this bad habit - would be another improvement.
Clearly it would be better to make better choices without limiting options, but human nature being what it is, it often turns out better in practice to not have the other options at all.
In what other things is 1.4% considered "significant?"
At some point I got a week more holiday than every other employee in the UK at my employer at the time because I was the only hire who had questioned a contract clause and gotten them to confirm my preferred interpretation of a woefully misleading clause in writing before signing, and when they later wanted to stick to the technicalities of how it was written I was able to just forward them an email from the COO confirming that in my case they'd agreed to my interpretation.
Most people seem to only pay attention to the headline amount, and then grumble about the consequences after the fact.
My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.
I like that and the description that follows because it shows how much the whole thing is neither monochromatic nor even linear. Even when talking inside an {ex,in}troversion model there are all sorts of subtle mechanisms and processes at play, and that's not even beginning to talk about other aspects, from varying shades of ADHD, Asperger, or autistic traits, to delayed sleep disorder syndrome.
p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.
Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.
In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!
There is a distinction to be made between loneliness and solitude though.
One can feel hopelessly lonely in a crowd, one can also find great solace in solitude.
In fact, another great cause of mental health issues is the apparently growing inability for people to stay still, instead constantly vying for interaction (and often resorting to that quick virtual dopamine hit loop, sometimes even when face to face)
There's balance to be had, both ways, but not everyone have the same needs.
I agree, not everyone has the same needs. But I think on average the majority of people would benefit from or would be able to handle a mandatory hybrid situation. If a few fully remote jobs remained that may satisfy the few unusual people who are actually that disturbed by social interaction, or live in such odd locations that it's not possible for them, that would be great. And I am absolutely sure those opportunities will remain. But I think it is bad for humans to aim for a mainly remote working world, both for our mental health and for the dynamism of our collaborative work. I really believe that people who genuinely thrive significantly better in 100% remote vs a couple days in the office are less than 10% of the population. We are social animals and we increase our risk of dementia the less we socialise, it's just our biology.
On the contrary, not being forced into the office let's you choose your journeys.
If I’m feeling up to it, I get another 30-40 minute walk in once it cools off in the evening.
I don’t mind driving in during the winter though, because then I don’t have to pay to heat my house (beyond 15C for the cat) for the day.
I love to go to the park with my kids. I love going to parties.
I don't like sitting in my car unpaid to do work that doesnt require sitting in the car unpaid.
