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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

The problem with conversations like these.....

If you're going to be talking about "HR issues" out in the open, you can only say certain things. Things people like. The "skeptics of completely virtual organizations" or opponents of flextime, increased holidays, work-life balance, on-site childcare, employee empowerment, higher pay.... they can't exactly blog about it and get an applause. But clearly, they still set the agenda.

I want those things like everyone else does. I'm also pretty sympathetic to a lot of the arguments that they are good for business. But, we can't have a discussion when only one side speaks. I am somewhat skeptical about an existing large company virtualizing itself without major teething issues. I know very little about these thing, so who cares..

Anyway, where's the CEO blog on "why I make everyone work 9-5." or "never allow anyone to work from home." I know you're out there. Speak your piece!

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Here's a good essay arguing that remote development interferes with the development of "deep context" needed to be a high-leverage software developer.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hard-thing-software-developme...

Anyway, where's the CEO blog on "why I make everyone work 9-5." or "never allow anyone to work from home." I know you're out there. Speak your piece!

Here's Marissa Meyer doing exactly that [1]:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020930/yahoo-says-that-killing-...

The reason why there's no one publicly taking that position is that an honest argument perhaps wouldn't exactly be favourable to the person making that argument.

"I'm a petty control freak who needs to constantly supervise his subordinates in order to feel valuable."

Well, good for you sir!

The only arguments against remote work I keep hearing are the quite hazy "Face time is better." and "Water cooler talk is valuable." ones. Nobody making those arguments seems to be willing to substantiate them, though:

Why exactly is face time better? If it is certainly it should be sufficient to just occasionally have people talk face to face, shouldn't it? Then why have everyone in the same office every time, all the time?

If creative, serendipitous talk only happens around the proverbial water cooler you might have a deeper problem with the communication flows in your organisation. Perhaps information silos are your real problem in that case.

I think that reluctance towards remote work often points to more fundamental issues within an organisation.

I would also say in some cases, it's because their arguments are based on things people don't like to acknowledge.

"I require my workers to be in the office because if I don't constantly ride them, they will be on Facebook/Reddit/etc. all the time instead of working.

This is due to hiring second-string developers that I can pay less than self-motivated superstars.

I have consciously made this decision because I can extract more useful work for less money out of a larger team of underpaid developers than I can from a happy, higher-paid, but much smaller team."

Obviously this business model depends on the market, product, etc. but regardless of all of that, NO one in this scenario consciously wants to confront this, because it just makes everyone feel depressed.

They might not be able to hire that team of self-motivated superstars. Let's face it, some 95% of software development is likely boring, run of the mill CRUD stuff or similar. Those self-motivated superstars are going to gravitate toward companies where they can do interesting and novel things, regardless of the pay (those places do generally pay well, usually).

I have heard Eric Schmidt say that he discusses Google's preference for on-site employees in _How Google Works_. I cannot comment on what or how much he discusses.

That said, my personal experience at Google has been flexible. Most people I interact with work from their home office most of the time with large schedule overlap with their colleagues. But people do shift their schedules as life needs and occasionally work from other offices for up to a couple weeks a year.

While there are no blog posts, companies clearly speak with their policies.

For example, Google's project continuous consolidation efforts lead to decreased viability of remote work (even from the different office), and to increased on-site monoculture and luck of project options. This, of course, is fighting the tide since the talent is increasingly less open to changing physical locations and, given current market, can opt out to work elsewhere.

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