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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following:

Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.

If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.

Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.

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> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.

Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity.

> Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.

No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that.

The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life.

I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default.

[1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...

I strongly prefer remote over in-person. There are pros and cons to either. One of the interesting things that comes up in remote is confronting the conflation people have between work and a job. Work and a job are not the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two and rely on external things to enforce a work ethic and self-discipline, but a lot of that structure is no longer there when working remote. If anything, your internal motivation and drive has to be strong. Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication.

One interesting consequence though is when both partners in a marriage work from home. In a situation where one or both partners work outside of home, some of the stress that comes with intensely being together all the time is not there. When both partners work from home, though, that can get interesting. I know this because my wife also works from home. I don't think the general populace is quite ready for that yet (you won't see advice for this yet on the self-help section of the bookstore), though it is something that can still be worked out.

> Related is that, when working on a distributed team as a remote worker, what feels like over-communicating to the point of harassment is probably the right amount of communication.

Which gets at another problem of remote work: communication that feels effortless in-person becomes something that requires what feels like "harassment" (in your words) to be effective remotely. When I was working on a geographically split team, it felt like two gigabit LANs joined by a dial-up WAN link, since the in-person communication was so much more effective.

Humans have literally spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person. That software has probably had more effort and refinement put into it than Slack, Skype, and Outlook put together.

That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal.

Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era.

I do think it is mentally healthier to not be so addicted to technology, to have 1-on-1 personal communications. But generally-speaking, the sense of self-worth, validation, etc. for the vast majority of people at their jobs is suspect. The quality of 1-on-1, personal communication has more to do with what mindfulness meditators call "presence": how much your awareness is in the presence in the here-and-now, and less to do with whether you are intermediating that communication through technology. Much of the social communication tend to be on the superficial side, even without technology.

Being present is either the most difficult thing you will ever do, or the most effortless.

Tangent: Buckminster Fuller once characterized words and language as human's first technology. One that follows the ephemeralization pattern such that it disappeared (we are no longer generally conscious of language as a technology).

> Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era.

Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change. I'm not making some kind of Luddite argument for the way things were. The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios. Many of the social aspects translate even more poorly.

I'm just going to skip the philosophical stuff about worth and meditation because it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.

>Communication is a mental process, transportation is not, so they're not really comparable areas of change.

Transportation changes the psychology of individuals and the social dynamics. It affects mental processes, so yes, they are comparable.

> The point I'm getting at is that remote work partisans often have a over-simplified model that misses the benefits of in-person presence. Human beings have a lot of support for communicating with each other in-person, verbally, non-verbally, unintentionally, etc. which often doesn't translate well to remote work scenarios.

Fair enough. I agree with that statement, though I still strongly prefer remote work for myself. Some other thoughts:

1. No technology is going to completely replace in-person presence. Rather than trying to work around it, one should be looking for what remote work enables that cannot be done with in-person presence.

2. Philosophical questions about worth has a lot to do with this topic, even if it does not seem like it to you. There is a bias towards in-person work because there is a conflation and confusion on what work is about, and what communication is about.

3. The same with meditation. The ground state in which one can see a lot of narratives and hangups clearly also reveals a lot of weird things underpinning a lot of people's motives for working onsite or working remotely. However, I don't expect this to be convincing to you or anyone else. It is something to be experienced rather than read about.

Thanks for engaging, it's been fun chatting.

I would try purely emailing / chatting with someone and compare that against the relationship you build with someone who is right there. You probably are not going to be available on video, so there is a lot of transcoding happening between you and your email / IM etc. and that loses a bunch of info. Not to mention the lack of impromptu hallway conversations and general social bonding.

It is the same problem we face with remote offices - closer is considerably better unless we figure a way to be omni-visible in a better way. I don't think a good enough solution exists yet. It doesn't help that people associate working from home with laxer schedules / attire / locations etc. which also interferes with the omni-visible thing.

In my current remote job and in my previous ones, we use:

1. Zoom (or Hangouts, or etc., in other words, video)

2. Slack

3. Sometimes email

4. Sometimes phone

We use video and Slack quite a bit.

Both my current full-time job and in my last full-time job with a distributed team, every so often, people are flown in together to meet up, hang out, and build relationships.

So as I mentioned in one of my responses above, remote work is not intended to 100% replace in-person relationships. Video and Slack did not build the same kind of experience I had when I flew into San Francisco and spent some time strolling towards the Golden Gate Bridge park with two of the other team members while talking about life, rather than work. Not everything about building relationships with other people has to do with being productive.

I've found the idea "impromptu hallway conversations" come up so often, I suspect it is a kind of echo-chamber narrative that hasn't really been examined for what it is. Having said that, when I visited my team, the office was hosted in a co-living space. I had a lot of impromptu hallway conversations ... outside of the team with all sorts of people, perspectives, philosophies. But that is not the normal experience people have when working onsite, either.

"General social bonding" isn't always what it is cracked up to be. Most people do not allow themselves sufficient honesty or vulnerability to have real conversations. It's more the case, social interactions often has more to do with people's masks and social selves interacting.

By the same token, I have found that effective use of Slack following the Kanban principle of "Make Work Visible" allows me to communicate in a way that I can't easily do with an on-site presence.

That's weird. It's totally normal for couples to run mom and pop shops together. Most businesses historically (and maybe even up through today) have been run by families. It's human. It's natural.

I agree that it is normal for mom and pop shops. It is also normal for pre-modern dynamics: tribal (hunter-gatherer), family farms, etc, though the case can be made that there is some physical separation.

I've also seen co-living/co-working spaces where couples live and work with other family groups within the same building.

However, I also think that the Millennial generation did not generally grow up with this. Remote work also adds a different dimension too, if each partner of the couple are working with different teams remotely, rather than working together, and each partner does not have visibility into what the other partner is doing all day.

The reasoning behind our COO's no(low)-remote policy is that he cannot tell if someone is simply punching in and then watching TV. Meanwhile, he is oblivious to the dozens of in-house workers who are punching in and chatting, doing things on their phone, anything but their work, etc. I have one employee who was grandfathered in, since he's been working remotely since before the COO's random policy decision, and he's the most productive worker I have.

It's completely ridiculous, but you just can't get through to some people, no matter how logical your challenges are. The only reasoning I can see is that our COO is also the VP of Sales (small company), and he values "face time", and "body language", and "reading the room", and some such nonsense that only applies to sales and negotiations, but not production.

Yeah I feel it depends on the company you work for. It seems most companies are "butt's in chairs" and just want you there...

There are loads of people who watch Netflix all day at my company, but full time remote isn't offered to everyone.

My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical)

Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead.

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

Please tell, what's broken in my org?

> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

> Please tell, what's broken in my org?

What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.

The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."

Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.

Every situation is obviously different, but I've been there. Our equipment had a build cost of just under $100k when were at the pre-production stages.

The problem isn't just working from home, it's "how do you give enough developers/testers" access to the equipment when each unit requires such a high upfront cost and ongoing maintenance and physical space, supplies, etc? So even if everyone is working in the lab, it's still a problem.

Our response was to create extremely detailed simulations of every aspect of the behavior. The code ran on our laptops exactly the same way it would on physical hardware. By simply flipping a switch in a config file, the software would either run on real hardware, or start up with simulated hardware.

Of course, we still needed to test on real hardware, but because we were forced to create the simulation to allow enough developers simultaneous access, it also made it easier for us to work from home :-)

You clearly don't have site to site mass materializers (ie star trek transporters) then you could just move it to your location when you need it. Get on the ball!

It's because the engineering manager thinks that in-person collaboration works better than a remote team.

I can't really argue with the results, the company is doing exceptionally well. Employees are generally happy (perhaps even excited) to work there, so I disagree that the organization is "broken". We're still a small-ish company, engineering is around 75 people and we all sit in the same area of the office. As we grow, then I imagine that this "in-person" effect (if it exists at all) will diminish

I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person.

Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?

In order to challenge to status quo, which is "Personal presence required in all cases, all the time. Period.".

If personal presence is mandatory you'd have a very good reason for it (as in GuiA's case above).

Depends greatly on the job, I think.

If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary.

But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?

I'm in marketing and working remotely is kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest. I typically want to have in-person chats with product managers, developers, etc. about something or other on more or less on a daily basis.

I'm a huge fan of remote work, I've had a full-time remote position previously, I just think sometimes it doesn't work with the culture of a team or business. I don't think that means anything is broken.

Hour long video chat helps, always on chat. Then another video chat with whiteboard

> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is?

there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices.

the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember?

you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.

I was with you until you turned it into some weird nonsense about class and age for no reason.

For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it.

Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task.

But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"

The manager at my company that keeps this "no full-time telecommute" policy is in his mid-40's. And he's not rich. Well compensated, yes, but not 20 million dollar home in Atherton and a Tesla rich, more like "drives a BMW 4 series from his Peninsula Condo", but he's certainly not rich enough to not need to work.

So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".

i'd bet that isn't his policy, he's just the mouthpiece.

but that's just like, my opinion, man.

He put the policy in place when he was hired (before then it was a more loose "come to the office if/when you want to", which worked for a 20 person company, but doesn't work so well with a 50 or 100 person company), along with more regular working hours (flex hours are fine but everyone is generally expected to be in the office between 10am - 3pm to allow meetings to be scheduled)

by old and rich i mean exactly what you described -- a person who works as a manager, is middle aged, and makes a healthy six figure salary. that's "rich" to most people. the ceo in a 20M mansion certainly qualifies also.

A 6 figure salary in the Bay Area is not what most people would call "rich", in some areas you can qualify for subsidized housing with a 6 figure salary and a family of 4.

And while I may be biased by being a decade older, "mid-forties" doesn't seem old for a senior manager.

In any case, unless someone is truly wealthy, you can't say "Oh well they don't care about their job because they are rich", because they need that job, and if they are a poor manager, they'll lose that job.

i'm from california and have lived in the bay. i'm not a podunk who doesn't know what a california salary looks like. we live in a wealth bubble, meaning even your 'lowly' six figure manager is still a rich guy to most people.

my point stands, and i'm doubling down on it. go check out the rest of america and the world, and you might see what i mean.

Everyone in the USA is rich to "most people", but context is important.

A small to mid sized startup manager is not (usually) rich enough to not need his job or care about job performance.

The really old thing is thinking that you have somehow escaped the human predicament when you really haven't. It's a time honored tradition repeated by fools in each generation.

"If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken"

Pretty hard to run a repair center for physical items without people physically present to do the work.

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person?

Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.

> Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person?

Because town meetings are a performance. I prefer a live performance over a canned version, too (such as watching a well-crafted presentation instead of a YouTube recording). There's absolutely nothing against meeting people in person. Those meetings should count however. They should mean quality time (instead of a synonym for "Free doughnuts and countless person-hours wasted.").

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