What's Lost When Most People Work from Home | Hacker News Reader

What's Lost When Most People Work from Home

theatlantic.com

28 pointsbootload49 comments

I will probably get downvoted for stating an opinion contrary to the HN groupthink but I would not work from home for a few reasons:

1. Facetime/Relationship building - If you're seen more and have better relationships, on average, you will get tapped for better jobs/projects more often than people who are in another state/country. If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day.

2. Ease of communication - Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't. Phone calls and e-mails are great but there really is nothing like a physical meeting when it comes to hashing out problems on a white board or building a working relationship. This is also a negative because it can be very distracting to have people able to contact you any time you're at the office, but for me it is a net gain.

3. I love people. I love working with them and getting to know them and having conversations with my coworkers. This is very easy to do when you are collocated. For me, working at home is lonely.

4. Knowledge synergies - This almost falls under number 2. It is really nice to bounce ideas off people without having to stare at a chat screen waiting for a response. I really enjoy when my coworkers ask me a question and a discussion ensues between all of us about the best way to do things. This is easier than waiting for someone to type a response or getting everyone on the phone.

Many of these things are possible to do over slack or meeting up once a week but it really does not beat being in the office every day. Perhaps I am very career oriented but just #1 is enough for me to not want to work from home.

> Working from home, for me, is frustrating because when I want to walk over to someone and ask them a question or set up a physical meeting ASAP I can't.

As someone who gets interrupted several times a day by this at the office, I don't miss it one bit when I work remotely. Being able to defer responding to a question by a minute or two so that I can finish my train of thought is one of my favorite things about working remotely. At the office, the cost of me trying to recover my thoughts afterwards is much greater than those two minutes my colleague would have waited for a response.

> If you are the only remote worker on your team then you are at a serious disadvantage relative to your non-remote team members who see your boss every day.

That seems like a problem with company culture much more than with working remotely.

> At the office, the cost of me trying to recover my thoughts afterwards is much greater than those two minutes my colleague would have waited for a response.

To you. Your colleagues train of thought will be disrupted. I guess you deserve to keep your train of thought because you're smart enough to not have to ask questions.

When you get used to working remotely (or with people who are remote), I've found you learn to try to avoid being bottlenecked by questions. It doesn't always work, of course, but I think it's an important skill to have either way. And for questions that are urgent enough, a phone/video call is about the equivalent of walking up to someone and asking, and doesn't take any more time.

Edit: typo.

There is no need for personal attacks when someone is expressing their genuine opinion.

Collaboration requires courtesy and both parties should respect each other's train of thought for it to work, regardless of the venue, be it office or remote.

The colleague's train of thought was already disrupted by stopping what he was doing and walking over to the person he wants to question. Waiting a couple minutes will not be any more disruptive to the colleague.

>That seems like a problem with company culture much more than with working remotely.

I agree with you. And from talking with others in my profession I've concluded that it exists at corporations more often than not. But is also a lot harder to work on special projects with people in different locations so it is somewhat understandable in that regard.

PG really summed it up well - Maker's schedule is quite different from Manager's schedule: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html.

From OPs profile he is more of a manager than a maker.

Just one hint on what you may not know: Any useful and good remote-work-included companies set up company-wide group chat networks of some sort. I've seen multiple companies use IRC networks for this purpose, as well as Slack, in combination with occasional phone calls or Hangouts/Skype when necessary. All of these companies had much more effective and close communication styles than any office company i ever worked with, since it was super easy to communicate to everyone at once (at their convenience) while at the same time being engaged in an honest and direct 1:1 conversation with someone else.

> I am very career oriented

Also yes, holy shit. Your post is so "career-oriented" that i needed to consciously force myself to write the first part of my post in a way that acknowledges that you may be a real human.

I agree for all the reasons you mentioned, and another one: Clear separation between home life and work life.

I differentiate between my work persona and my home persona. It is pleasing to have a clear line between them. My long commute gives me time to get into "work mode". I dress up (more formally than my work requires) in order to further get me into the "I'm working now" mindset. A sterile, gray cubicle with no "homey" distractions lets me focus on my work. My reptilian brain needs this clear line separating my two worlds.

If I worked from home, I'd be blurring the line and both my work performance and my "familytime performance" would suffer.

On one hand i can understand this. Occasionally i need to wind down from coding brain to people brain when i've been in the flow.

Gotta admit though that putting myself in that state intentionally sounds amazingly horrifying to me. 1984 comes to mind.

Remote doesn't necessarily mean at home. I know a few guys who work remotely from coffee shops and other areas with free wifi, for this reason.

Personally, I love being able to run to the kitchen and make myself a snack if I need it, or take an hour-long break and run to the gym if my brain is fried (and not have to worry about all the logistical issues of doing this at the office).

Some people also convert a spare bedroom into an office and when they leave "work", they leave the office and close the door. The "fun" computer lives somewhere else.

> 3. I love people. I love working with them and getting to know them and having conversations with my coworkers. This is very easy to do when you are collocated. For me, working at home is lonely.

On my team this is solved by pair programming. Audio chat plus some form of shared screen (whether it's video or shared tmux/screen) closes the gap between colocation and remote, IMO.

I ackowledge, however, that not all teams accept pair programming as a thing. And it is indeed an extra skill that you have to develop in order to be productive with.

If you have a chance, I encourage you to try it! :D Even in the same office you can both put on a headset and have a remote pairing session without needing to sit beside each other.

Over the past 5 or 6 years I've gone from working from home a couple days a week to working from home 100% of the time to working remotely on a distributed team and, most recently, to working from an open plan office every day.

And I have to grudgingly admit something: The people who are trying to dial back on the working from home have a point. I maintain that I absolutely work harder and am less distracted when I'm working from home, and by a pretty darn appreciable margin at that. If we're only considering me in isolation then my opinion on the subject has not wavered. But over the past few years I've come to see the forest for the trees a bit more, and I'm realizing that while all the individual components of a distributed team might be higher-performing, the overall system wasn't running very efficiently. A lot of time was lost to redundant efforts, efforts at cross purposes with each other, stuff like that.

I'm not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I still think there is a place for working from home and working remotely. But I'm also prepared to concede that it's not all kittens and lollipops, and that there are valid reasons why a company might decide that co-location better suits its needs.

Full disclosure: I still ended up leaving my job over it. Among other reasons (none of which were really about the office itself), that daily commute would have eventually ground my sanity into nothingness.

I've observed the same issue of remote teams being not very efficient at times. However this is almost always the result of sub-optimal team management, for example things like using only a bug tracker, or using a bug tracker software for both that purpose AND for task planning. In other words: Yes, it may become an issue, but is easily solved by using the right tools and policies.

Any tools you can recommend?

Depends entirely on what you're doing. However the most important part is this. Depending on your company needs you need at least one or more of these, and they should not be coopted to serve in place of any of their others:

- customer support solution (to talk to people external to the company)

- task tracker (plans the future of when which tasks will be started/done)

- bug tracker (keeps history of problems and their solutions)

- group chat (to address the whole company, or task groups in it at once (IRC + friends), as well as brainstorm on things)

Which exact softwares are best for these depends on your needs and budget. Important is that you deliberate well, choose on quality and don't mix things. Important is also that you make clear that using those is mandatory. People side-stepping the task/bug tracker and resorting to emails/phone calls is toxic. People not having the group chat installed as well.

let's face it, the primary argument against working from home is not wanting to adjust communication styles.

if you are part of a team that tends not to put communication in writing or text (email, IM, etc), and does more of the shuffling-from-desk-to-desk thing, you are going to fail with folks who work from home, folks who work in a different office, and folks who work on the road.

a few years ago, i managed a team of 6: 5 in new york, 1 in california. first, i started out using the conference room for team meetings, and like clockwork, everyone would break out into mini-conversations, or not talk loud enough for the speakerphone, so the california guy would essentially check out.

when it came time for scheduled work to be done, the new york team has already left for the day, and california guy wouldn't have enough details to complete it successfully. so he'd bail on the change, or wake up someone on the east coast.

i didn't realize what could be the root cause until i flew out to california to spend some days with him, and i got to experience how damn frustrating it was to talk with the rest of my team back in new york.

so i started an experiment -- we would no longer meet in the conference room and dial him in, but instead, we would all dial in from our desks into the same conference bridge.

there was definitely a learning curve, but things improved. the welcome side effect is everyone learned how to use mute button on their phones appropriately (keep it muted unless you are talking, no one wants to hear echoing coworkers, or your darth vader breathing).

what happened next surprised me: the mini-conversations didn't go away, they instead either turned into full blown voice conversations on the bridge or it became a conversation on our internal irc server (either privmsg, or our team channel). everyone learned to share details even if they thought it was irrelevant, and started to respect each other's time -- california guy no longer felt like he was left holding the bag, and the new york team would go out of their way to provide enough detail so that could avoid getting a call at odd hours (due to the combination of change window scheduling and pacific time vs. eastern time)

working from home is the excuse, when learning how to effectively communicate is the actual problem. not addressing that is what leads to the redundant efforts, or being too "heads down" in something but going down the wrong path.

additionally, in every work from home failure story or success story, no one has ever addressed the challenges of migrating from face-to-face to remote -- it's really, really, hard.

you're fighting with people who have "being doing it this way forever". you're juggling with people who feel more and more disconnected from the company. eventually, everyone feels offended and things break down, either temporarily or permanently.

working from home is not something to be taken lightly, you either commit to supporting it in your work environment, or don't bother.

So much horrible stuff is lost, too. Commute, distraction, ambient paranoia and discomfort, resentment, etc. The bullshit where someone comes in with the flu and everyone else gets sick, progressively, over the next month.

And the huge things: inclusive workforce (people with kids/sick relatives, mobility or other disabilities, etc. -- this will predominantly hurt women). Visa problems largely eliminated. Global talent pool.

You could make up for the positives by having scheduled in-person sessions with your team (if you live genuinely remotely, do it for a week or two at a time, or longer; if you live in the same metro, do "in-person Wednesdays".

A pathologically bad environment is an open plan with a bunch of disparate teams in the same space. Coworking spaces across several (potentially competing!) companies are the worst, but in a larger company, having relatively separate teams in the same space is almost as bad.

Open plan is pretty much a personal instapass. If it's not worth spending +$1k/mo per employee on office space (even in the worst markets, it's +100sf/mo, which is about $500-700/mo), the employees are probably not contributing much value. Being in an environment where people are making $3-5mm in value is key. Don't be a junior callcenter employee (even those are moving remote, for cost saving reasons). Exceptions for temporary onsite engagements with clients, or something crazy like "we're on a warship" or "enroute to Mars", or <10 people in a single office during early days of a startup, but volitional shitty open plan is just insane. (Unfortunately this basically rules out the majority of Silicon Valley companies these days.)

I do agree that corner offices as status for useless mid-level managers are ALSO bad, but the correct solution is offices for all, or at least anyone who wants them, some kind of dynamic environment, etc. It's entirely reasonable to have ICs in offices and managers in open areas.

Anytime someone complains about recruiting/hiring/retention in a company with work-in-office, open plan, one or two high cost locations, it's hard to not bring this up. A few companies at a time can get away with it, but not everyone. It would be an easy way for companies to differentiate themselves in hiring; if even 25% of workers would rather have a private office, you would get first pick of those employees.

Open plan offices are not always about cost. Microsoft has famously had private offices forever, but many younger employees have indicated that they would prefer semi-shared space. I agree that the "football field" plan has no redeeming qualities.

So you're saying working in-person leads to "ambient paranoia and discomfort" and "resentment"?

I strongly disagree with this article and these are my arguments:

- it's not true that people are isolated when working remotely, you're more then well connected over the Internet

- it shouldn't all be about the high productivity at all places all the time, sometimes life and work should be about people and family and friends too

- once again extroverts are trying to enforce their point of view on introverts, why not let people choose if statistics are showing that the productivity still stays the same or even gets better?

The study in question is here, if anyone is interested:

http://amd.aom.org/content/early/2015/10/07/amd.2014.0016.fu...

In a qualitative study of a Fortune 100 company on the forefront of allowing offsite work, we examine how the prevalence of offsite working arrangements influences perceptions of the onsite office as well as decisions regarding where one works.

One way to address the crisis of climate change is to wean ourselves off of non-essential commuting as soon as possible. Obviously, many jobs require workers to be present at a job site. For so-called knowledge workers, however, online collaboration tools are making remote work very practical. There is no reason why a software developer can't work from home and still participate on a project team. It just requires a little imagination.

I still don't see what exactly is lost. Something concrete and detectable. Yes, people who go into the office don't have others to hang out with. That's not a loss. The article's really stretching the idea of loss.

Since 2007, I've worked at home most of the time... only commuting across the country to go into the office about 8 days/year. I've gone through a lot of personal changes through that time as it relates to working remotely. The company and my colleagues have too.

At first, we felt disconnected. But now, I think we actually talk more. The hallway chat has shifted to skype calls, usually talking about random things before or after discussions about something else.

In fact, I think the hallway chat is even more honest and productive now because we don't have to worry about who else is listening.

Almost everybody is more productive, happier and less stressed.

What's lost? The completely pointless, wasteful and inhumane ritual commonly called "commute".

Yes, the company suffers a little. The humans who make up the company however gain considerably.

A person who puts the well-being of a company above that of the humans comprising it is one who has lost some of their own humanity.

>Yes, the company suffers a little.

Teleworker friendly companies attract better workers from a much wider area, remote workers are more productive, the company is more flexible in terms of growth, and has lower overhead. Yet, incompetent management needs a new fad to seem like there doing something which is why company cycle back and forth though this issue.

PS: On top of all that it makes it harder for lazy employees to seem like there working. Those long hours posting on Facebook pretending to slave for bosses who just cares about the appearance of work stop being so useful.

Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home. Of course I have a five minute commute. If your commute is terrible, arrange your life better.

> Personally I'd find it incredibly lonely to work from home.

Honest question: Why? Please be detailed. I could explain all the things that keep my home work from feeling lonely, but it'll be easier for me to stick to things relevant to you if i know exactly what is on your mind.

> Of course I have a five minute commute.

Five minutes from exactly where to where? Living room sofa in normal clothes to office desk with computer switched on and work software running? The exit of your apartment complex to the external door of your office building?

I'm sure you're being a little ... optimistic about your timing there.

> Of course I have a five minute commute.

You're suggesting people move from a place where they may be near the things they enjoy in their life, to work. That is not an improvement, that just shifts the pain from one end to the other.

This sort of comment is naive at best and rubbish at worst. Try raising 5 kids in a city like Houston Texas and having a 5 minute commute. Let's see how that plays out.

In no particular order you need to: get a job 5 minutes away. have your spouse do the same. hope that your company never moves or you never lose your job. purchase/rent a house large enough for 7 in a nice part of town in the part of town that meets the above parameters. Hope that the school zoned to said house is of good quality or find a private school that is also close by. Turn down offers for advancement in the name of organizing your life better. Uproot the kids and spouse when any of the above conditions cannot be met.

In Houston, houses are cheap enough that your spouse shouldn't have to work.

I feel the same way. I'd go crazy if I worked from home. The distractions are much worse at home (wife, baby, dog), and I'd basically have to force myself to go out and get non-family human contact. Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face. My productivity would probably be close to zero at home.

And my commute is 2+ hours each way. I would not trade it for working from home.

Sorry to say, but you're part off-topic and part naive. If your work explicitly involves meeting with people, then of course you can't easily remote that. That's the off-topic bit.

On the other hand, it is quite naive to claim that establishing an office in your living space, where you may only be disturbed for important things (hey how does not getting disturbed actually work out in your office?), is somehow a worse deal than throwing away an 8th of your week on commute. ( (2.125) / (24*7) )

The article is about what people lose when they work from home, and I was pointing out a few critical things I would lose if I worked from home. Feel free to disagree with me, but my response was not even close to being off-topic. Anecdotal, sure.

> Plus, most of my job involves meeting with people, and that tends to be more effective and efficient face-to-face.

That is only barely remotable, if at all. Bringing that up in a conversation about fulltime remote working is off-topic. It's as if you'd written "i work on a construction site, and let me tell you, moving those metal beams is hard via my ipad".

if you life in a high priced market that arrangement could be difficult to make.

I don't think anything is lost at all. Organizational habits are important here: if you don't have a good set of communication tools and people who know how to use them, you may very well think that you're missing something. Hallways conversations—at least in my own experience—rarely or never amount to much. But if I do get a sudden brainstorm, and I can jump onto a quick google hangout or otherwise run it by someone, then I haven't lost anything. Physical presence is a distraction; good communication is what's important.

I love working from home because....

1. In an office full of fellow developers who I become friendly with I start to recruit them for my startup. Mostly my bosses(lol) which that never works out very well and I end up having to find another gig.

2. No traffic!!!

3. Work and get stuff done anytime of the day or night.

4. Work from anywhere there's an Internet connection.

5. No high school. ..bs office politics. Judged by your work only!

6. Wake up, roll over and start working...did I mention not having to deal with traffic?

I work from home most of the time now or travel for client work.

What I miss the most is the efficiency to be gained from having everyone focused on a certain set of problems while in the same room. I find that even a day or two of such time makes a huge difference compared to the meet once a week which greatly extends the turnaround time of issue resolution.

I think having some of each with the flexibility to choose would most likely be ideal.

This is based off of a study of one company. I don't see how that was even published initially as a viable study, never mind making it to an article in The Atlantic. Does anyone have real research on this?

Is there a link to the actual study this article is referring to?

Because this write up is almost pointlessly vague. The author seems more interested in repeating the coffee shop joke than getting into the meat of the study.

100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse. They also miss out on that subtle competition that makes you better: "Oh yeah, well I do this which lets me build with one button" etc.

The small stuff really matters, it's why I left my last job.

> 100% virtual companies, especially 100% virtual consulting companies, can end up with incompetent people who "hide" successfully for years, and make the culture worse.

How is that any different than non-remote companies?

Because they stay out of the limelight, and quite literally, no one sees how incompetent they are. I know its possible to do the same at colocated organizations, but I've only seen it at very, very large companies where no one gives a shit anyway.

That seems like a problem with management more than with remote work. If expectations are set and managed correctly, of course people will notice if you're not actually doing your part. I don't see how that has anything to do with where someone works.

I've seen a lot more incompetence among on-site employees. Which makes sense, because management is automatically suspicious of anyone working remotely (it's still seen as some kind of privilege that they often resent), so remote workers have to survive much greater scrutiny of their work.

It's true that the serendipitous in-person contact has benefits that are hard to account for, though.

“If the office is going to become a collection of employees not working together, it essentially becomes no different than a coffee shop.”

The horror! You mean the office might degenerate into a quiet work environment where people focus on getting things done? How will these companies possibly recover? Especially while all the employees of their competitors are escaping their noisy, interruptive offices to get work done... at a nearby coffee shop!

What might happen if these offices started offering perks of the best coffee shops, like actually good coffee, fast wifi, and comfy chairs? How could they possibly survive the revolts from their staff, not to mention the decline in productivity?!

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