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Comment by Sahhaese | Hacker News Reader

Am I the exception? I think Remote work sucks.

I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.

Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.

An environment where people can find meeting rooms when they need them, can find peace and quiet when they need them but also generally have co-location means good team cohesion.

If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.

Yes, when working face to face too many (formal) meetings can be a problem, but don't abolish co-location just abolish the meetings.

And don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office), then remote work will look like nirvana.

Of course I'd also recommend being somewhere with good public transport and have flexible working hours so people aren't forced into long commutes in poluting personal transport. Also offer and allow occassional remote work to further ease that demand without losing the benefits of co-location.

But whole-team remote work? No thanks!

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I got to say, I disagree with nearly every point here. Taps on the shoulder are the worst, anonymous cubical farms would be way better than the current situation (all open offices), skype/zoom/etc. are all immediately available for impromptu meetings, I'm not sure why working on code independently would lead to more silos? Does everyone always pair program in offices? Do you theorize less design meetings or something?

Plus remote you can not play the butts-in-seats game, get non-work related life things done at your leisure, wear whatever clothes you like, shit in your own bathroom, don't have to worry about anyone tapping you on the shoulder, eat what you want when you want, the list goes on. Theses are just the immediate things that come to mind.

I’ve done multi-year stints of both, and it’s highly contextual. For ICs I get the quiet and focus is a net win (assuming proper self-motivation and no social isolation issues). However for high-level or cross-functional collaboration there is no online tool that approaches the bandwidth of two people in a room with a whiteboard. The energy in person, serendipity and the ideas that come from prolonged close collaboration (especially in a startup) is hard to quantify but it’s real. It’s not optimal for everyone all the time, but then neither is full remote.

The energy in a person bears zero relevance to how good their idea is, though.

I found remote team code reviews to be much more objective. That way most people aren't worried they'll shame someone in person and they give better and more useful feedback.

The energy you speak of, while very real, is not related to the quality of the work that will follow.

You're talking about two different things. I work almost entirely non-remote. If all I did was write code, I could do so remote. I collaborate with people in 3 continents, probably 10 timezones, maybe more, many of whom I've never met in person, when it comes to code.

But design is a different beast. Collaborative design of complex systems has a few stages. There's a rapid prototyping stage where 3 people in a room bouncing ideas off of each other and scribbling is better than anything else I've done. Then you circle back with a document that formalizes things (like an RFC). The second part can be done with a distributed group. But the first part is better when people are close to each other. You see this even in distributed groups like OSS projects. They have conferences and work sprints where the maintainers can be colocated for a bit and brainstorm about things in person.

Sure, but you are not actually contradicting me as far as I can see.

I too collaborate with colleagues in different time zones but design and tons of brain-storming is not the main focus of our work. When we need to do that, we do long video calls with shared diagrams -- or we just scribble with the mouse. Works quite alright 99% of the time.

I agree that the rapid initial stages of a project are best done in person but failing that, there are replacements, and they are not as bad as many in this mega-thread claim.

My point is that that rapid prototyping stage is really important, has long lasting consequences, and so optimizing for it is a reasonable decision.

And that's just one reason to disfavor a remote-only environment.

Rapid prototyping happens only once per project and is likely less than 1% of the time spent so to me it does not make sense to optimise for it.

What other reasons do you see to disfavor a remote-only environment?

Rapid prototyping should happen every time you need to add or change an abstraction. With the way many (most?) software projects work, with new feature requests and requirements appearing along the way, this happens all the time. With new requirements, the old abstraction often doesn't fit 100% anymore. Applying a few band-aids to the abstraction is probably fine, but at some point you will need to reconsider the design, or you will end up with a design that does not match the problem it's solving, making the code difficult to follow and therefore error prone.

In my experience, this need arises very frequently in complex systems with evolving requirements.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I fully agree! What I was saying is that the initial rapid prototyping of a project is happening only once.

Our company offered us to sometimes reconvene physically and discuss such things but since our team are all family men, it hasn't happened yet. But it is a really good idea and we should reconsider actually doing it sometime.

That 1% (and is often more like 5 or 10) can have big implications, but you can just have an on-site, it's a lot cheaper than having an office year round. Plus you can do it somewhere fun and it's a great perk and team building exercise.

> that rapid prototyping stage is really important

This is an excellent argument for annual all-hands retreats for distributed companies.

So you're going to discuss all your designs in February? What if you need to make a major modification to a design, or like some priority changes or whatever.

The whole idea of agile is to design iteratively and reactively, but you're throwing that away.

I suppose if your process relies on that type of design happening regularly, remote work is not going to allow for that. But I don't think colocation is a requirement of iterative & reactive design.

I work on a remote office, and while I definitely agree that the rapid prototyping stage works better in-person, current tools help a lot - we have a pretty large app that was built 100% remotely (I did ask for in-person meetings but there was no budget).

Honestly, you can collaborate and do almost everything remotely. What does lose a bit is team building, you have to go a bit out of your way to build rapport (but it´s also doable).

I'm still learning how to be more personal while remote. An always-open casual video chat room is a fun idea (especially if you have a screen with it always open in the office!). Games (while on video chat) might also be fun.

Have you ever used a video conference or collaborative online whiteboard? If the actual scribbling is important, have you heard of these things called drawing tablets?

Yes, in fact the company I work for provides, bar none, the best experience for video conferencing and collaborative online whiteboarding I've ever used. We go to great lengths to reduce latency and make the discussion feel as natural as possible.

Its still, at least to me, markedly less productive, than an in-person meeting.

Like I said, conferences, summits, etc. These are done for a reason. Not to mention that there's some research I've seen that suggests that places like Bell were so successful because they cultivated happenstance interactions between smart people that don't happen in distributed environments.

I think that conferences, etc, build up on the human element and are important, but not for the reasons you mention.

My current belief is that a 95% remote team works, you do need in-person opportunities, the more the better, but at least once in a project can be enough.

Are you saying you produce the same work at all energy levels?

I don't see how this is related to the previous matter discussed -- namely that the energy projected by another person is somehow helpful for work getting done.

I was not talking about the energy "projected by another person", I was speaking much more generally than that.

Okay. I was commenting on that particular aspect. Still, feel free to elaborate if you wish. The discussion on the remote work is always interesting.

I think this is more or less the consensus opinion among managers, which is why we mostly have office jobs that support some WFH rather than fully in office or fully remote.

IMO, that's because managers favor butts-in-seats and the idea that they can "see you working".

IME the only people who actually like open plan offices are managers, extroverts, and flakes, most of whom irritate non-managers, introverts, and non-flakes.

1. I'm an extrovert and I don't like open plan offices. I'm not a manager and I'm probably not a flake, I'd say :p

2. Your tone is super condescending, regarding the extrovert - introvert bit.

The managers I’m referring to don’t need to see you working. They want you to see you collaborating and socializing with the team in person, but are fine with you doing your actual coding at home and rarely if ever touching your desk. The office is open plan but usually pretty empty, as everyone is either in conference rooms or at home.

It seems like there isn't a great digital replacement for a whiteboard yet. Maybe a tablet and stylus, but I haven't used a digital whiteboard enough to justify buying or setting one up. Incorporating the stylus/tablet into laptops isn't a new idea, but I've never owned a work laptop with that feature.

There are, but they’re expensive. There’s Google’s Jamboard and Microsoft’s Studio Hub as a couple of examples. You could also go the iPad and Apple Pencil route and just use similar apps, or the apps for those products (i.e. Microsoft Whiteboard app), but that’s still fairly expensive if that’s all they’re used for.

There are lots of inexpensive online whiteboard programs that work fine. You just need to get used to typing and using the drawing tools, or buy a drawing tablet if that's really important to you. You can get ok graphics tablets for $25.

A real whiteboard with video feed? Or do you mean for collaboration?

> there is no online tool that approaches the bandwidth of two people in a room with a whiteboard.

VR will change that at some point. Even in today's infancy, there are some VR apps that give you that sense of presence with all the other tools needed and then some (whiteboards, screen-sharing, projecting your desktop on a huge screen, etc...)

A videochat and whiteboard application would at least approach that bandwidth. If necessary get drawing tablets also.

For remote workers to be effective, a lot of things that go unsaid or unwritten have to be written down. If you have that, then the difference between sitting in the same building and being remote isn't as pronounced.

But also if you have that, the advantage of sitting next to each other instead of just in the same building is also less pronounced. It's also easier to train your replacement, and some people are terrified of that.

You can learn a lot about the problems or architectural issues with your system by participating in conversations, and that supports the bullpen organization of offices. But you learn a ton more by participating in private or one-on-one conversations. In public only the brash get to talk. In private people will share their real fears as long as you don't belittle them for it. And those fears may reveal existential crises that are brewing in the system that nobody talks about.

It's much easier to have a private conversation with a remote person than it is to have a private conversation in a bull pen.

I mostly agree with you. But I do see what OP is getting at. There's a lot of accidental innovation that occurs during casual bull sessions over coffee breaks.

In a remote environment the tendency is for communication to be more formalized and structured. "Hey, are you available for a call. I just want to go cover X, Y and Z, then I'll let you get back to work." Often time half-baked ideas end up getting polished into important innovations. Without some sort of channel for informal, impromptu discussions a lot of ideas get overlooked.

For me it's the social aspect. I don't mean 'socializing' at work (although that also helps). I just mean avoiding isolation. Being physically distant from my team leads me to start feeling detached from them. But it's different strokes etc. I know myself well enough to know that I pull a lot of motivation from the sense of camaraderie I get by being in an office with people I like, so fully remote work is not for me. In fact, any more than one telecommute day per week is too much for me. Not everyone is like that.

So what I really wish for is increased flexibility.

Remote work eliminates any incidental information transfer. It makes it much harder to have a company culture, which is especially difficult for juniors and new hires to get an understanding of what's important and what's not.

All of which can be done via texts, chats and video conferencing.

In theory, sure. In practice, I've never had a Slack conversation or video conference which felt as natural, rich, spontaneous or productive as a focused discussion in person. I say that as someone who worked fully from home for five years on a remote dev team.

That's not to say it's not useful. It's better than email, leaves a neat record to come back to and supports asynchronous communication. There are advantages. But strictly speaking, no, you cannot capture everything good and useful about in-person conversation using text and video. I don't think it should be controversial that much of the richness of in-person conversation - tone, nuance, body language, facial expression, spontaneity, speed - can't be meaningfully replicated through remote mediums. You can't get all of these things from a message or video chat. You can get some of them well, and a few others decently, but it isn't the same.

I like remote work a lot and wish more companies would support it. That being said, in my experience when people give honest, cogent criticisms of remote work they mostly receive responses which don't speak to the spirit of their point. In this comment thread, for example, the person you responded to is talking about difficulties. You are responding as if the person was talking about impossibilities. It is (emphatically) not impossible to function as a remote team, and very few people will try to make that case. But in the world we live in and with the technology we currently have, there are things about in-person discussion you will not be able to capture on a remote team.

If nothing else people have different values. Some developers enjoy being highly social when they're working, others don't. Some don't mind interruptions, others do. Many people feel a sense of comfort and empowerment by using Slack or Zoom which makes it easier for them to have productive discussion, for a variety of reasons. Likewise many developers do not get any of the same enjoyment out of a Slack or Zoom conversation that they do from face to face communication.

The vast majority of chats seem to take much more linear time than a 1:1 conversation. Multi-tasking them just means 5 people are tapping you on the shoulder within a near-timeframe. So 5X worse than an office? Slack is often the worst part of some email and forum hybrid.

I often wonder how many problems used to be resolved because people worked together in the same location vs now it feels like the 10 things I interact with in a week are broken or require finding a work-around. Many of the chats are "how do you get around this?"

Video conferencing is great for people taking turns presenting, but my experience is that Zoom with high-end integrated conference rooms on 1Gbps fiber cannot support conversation. The latency and audio processing wreck the normal “traffic control” protocol for interactive discussion. Participants don’t perceive and yield to others trying to jump in, like they would in person. Instead you get a sequence of monologues, which requires formal moderation to work decently.

Texts maybe. Video conferencing and chats tend to be more tedious than human to human conversations from my experience.

IRC/Slack/etc is great because you can have informal conversations in a channel where your whole team can observe and participate in a more asynchronous nature.

Human conversations are fine, but you generally don't get a durable record of them after the fact, and only those present will have a chance to participate.

Yeah, I've been remote first for three years now and don't have any of these problems. Perhaps OP had a bad experience. And not knock IRL first — there are definitely things I miss about being in an office but they are all social aspects and not work — but I think remote first does have a lot more benefits. It's also tougher, the discipline required, the social isolation, all difficult issues.

TBH, OP sounds like a manager. Which is fine, but their experience is usually constantly worrying people under them will work more slowly when given more freedom. So, since their job is contingent on the people under them doing a good job, its easier to claim accountability when they can physically seem them in their seats every day. People who talk about "impromptu collaboration" generally aren't individual contributors.

This seems rather uncharitable lol. Managers, or good managers anyways, are constantly connecting conversational channels -- conversations between product, between developers, facilitating conversations between product & developers, etc. Take the communications challenges that pretty much everyone buys into with remote, and then put someone at the intersection of that pain point amongst multiple people, and they're going to have a unique perspective.

I believe that is a great point.

I have a feeling that we don't have more work-from-home-first jobs because (middle-)managers wouldn't know how to deal with that. They are not quite there for such change.

And I'm talking about the "simplest" things. Like properly defining a task. Tracking it. Signaling when it's complete. Managing risks, changes. Communication. And so on. To have as most as people at an arms reach is just too convenient to workaround any shortcomings on the managerial side.

If in the general case, i.e., working at offices, all together, we're nowhere near[1] excelling on those "simple" management stuff, things would collapse in a work-from-home situation pretty easy.

I also don't see, in general, (middle-)managers changing their stance in favor of working from home either. Don't see them getting ready for such change. Prepping to work with virtual teams in any future and such.

Perhaps, those who believe are ready for such change could (myself included), somehow[2], show theirs capability. Slowly pushing the changes bottom-up by improving his/her own communication skills, reporting, risk and change management, displaying availability, to such an extent that the concerns of those (middle-)managers are barely noticeable or reasonable?

If we could show that we can organize ourselves and coordinate our efforts towards a goal, effectively, while working remotely, those concerns about remote work could start to fade.

I believe the point I'm trying to make is that we could show better that remote work works! We could be better sellers of this paradigm. Show how we can actually help those worried (middle-)managers. Like safely climbing a ladder, one step at a time :-)

Would be this a good opportunity to create a work-from-home manifesto, in the same way we have an Agile manifesto? I don't know. But that would be something interesting to collaborate on for sure. I might put some thoughts on paper about this subject for starters.

PS: I was an IT project manager for many years, working both on-site and remotely. Now I'm a software developer working on-premises for a big company in my country not friend to the idea of remote working at all; so I could contribute my experiences and views on this subject from both ends, I believe.

PS2: non-native English writer here. So if you find something that needs clarification or correction, please let me know, I'd be grateful to accommodate those kind of feedback. Would be more grateful if you share your thoughts too, though :-)

[1] yeah, I'm aware that there are famous cases of success, but I believe those doesn't account for the majority of offices. [2] not sure how right now.

Whenever I have challenges that are difficult to Google (architectural, lots of different views/opinions etc all of highly technical nature) I feel that I don't ask, because as others mentioned here; asking for time face to face is so much easier and better than setting up a Zoom call. I feel the same for all interactions, whenever I'm alone at the office I always tend to save interactions to whenever people get in because Slack/email/hangouts always incur a cost to communication. This said, ppl should def be able to do remote, however getting people in to the office sometimes still has a lot of value.

Regarding pair programming, some of my best work was done “remote pair programming” with voice chat and screen sharing.

I agree. Even if within the same building, I find it more ergonomic to screen share / voice chat than awkwardly try to share the same monitor, etc.

Agree with this, but most places set up to pair effectively have mirrored monitor set ups. Makes a huge difference.

Agree. With tools like Remote VS Code it's definitely as good if not better than in person because you each have your own creature comforts but share the same workspace (even terminal) and can edit the same file at the same time.

we've only just started using live share, but it seems quite good, so far

I don’t get why it’s always presented as cubicle farm vs fully open floor. My company uses semi-open offfices; you have an open office with 8-10 people in a team, but don’t share space with other teams. So it’s access to the people you work with directly and no more.

This setup is my favorite, although I have worked in offices of 3-6.

That's still an open office.

Technically yes, but it feels very different to an open office with 50 people in it. <=10 is small enough that everyone is able to respect each others' privacy, noise, etc while still enjoying some of the benefits of an open office such as turn-your-chair-around collaboration. I think we need a new term for when <=10 people are in an open office. It just isn't the same as what is usually referred to when someone says "open office".

It is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them.

> It is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them.

Those have historically been called "bullpen offices".

It really isn't. Most people are thinking of this: https://blog.nuclino.com/files/9f08086a-9bde-4d95-929a-f7f2c...

No, open offices resemble sweatshops, 50+ people per floor with no doors, privacy, or noise barriers.

That's the "team room" concept - each team has an "open office", but it's not open to all the noise from everyone else. There's a door for when the team is heads down on stuff.

I work in a 10 person open office with lots of separation - 1200sqft, 7 would be better but there is no comparison to a 50 person bullpen with everyone within arms reach of another.

What is the room layout of this setup? A dedicated room with 8-10 people in them where you close the door for quietness?

Every team on the floor is in a semi-enclosed room with an opening into the hallway (no door).

In practice noise doesn't really leak from rooms into the hallway, so it's not a problem most of the time unless something extremely loud is happening, like a dog acting up or someone building flatpack furniture.

I think it's safe to say there are people who work best in radically different environments. I can't stand working from home, or working from a coffee shop. I also can't stand offices where everyone is just wearing their headphones as if to say "don't you dare ask me about something important that I know a lot about." What's the point in being at the office?

In my opinion and experience, professional programming is a deeply collaborative experience. But of course other people who ostensibly do the same kind of work have completely different preferences, and that's great. It does mean that people need to be very careful what kind of company they take a job at.

I agree and disagree with both of you. There are real, tangible advantages and disadvantages to both.

My approach is to embrace both at the same time, by almost always coming into the office, but arriving before 0700. The first half of my day is super focused, uninterrupted work, and the second half is relatively unfocused, talk to people and be talked to at random times kind of work. I leave around 4pm.

I've had no substantial problems going home so 'early' among the eight or so orgs I've worked at in the past couple of decades.

Shit in your own bathroom. I second this.

The bathroom in my office is nasty. Nobody has a gallbladder and they all eat greasy food. It's a shit factory and I hate being here for that reason alone.

xD Thanks for the laugh!

I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes. This is actually huge for me at least.

the thing is I'd rather shit in the office bathroom, it's so much nicer than mine. I'd rather eat the FREE food at the office, it's so much better than what I could cook spending money and time.

I sometimes regret weekends because I don't have access to those things.

I think you should pair program at least once a week...

Your argument seems to be that optimal/ideal office working is better than remote:

"An environment where people can find meeting rooms when they need them, can find peace and quiet when they need... and don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office)... I'd also recommend being somewhere with good public transport and have flexible working hours so people aren't forced into long commutes..."

Of course this ideal would be great!

But this also totally misses the point that in reality, the reason that people are often attracted to remote-working is precisely because their experience and environment fail on some or many of the ideals you list.

As such, you've not constructed an argument against remote working - just a (valid) argument against most office writing environments.

I'm a remote worker. The office I was in is as described. Fantastic place to work. I went remote because I don't want to live in a high cost city and I don't want an insane commute. I was commuting 2-3hrs each direction for years to allow myself to live in the mountains and forest but still have a good job in Orange County, CA. I've now gone fully remote and it has been fantastic for my work life balance that I'm still trying to get right.

2-3 hours each way for years? That's pretty crazy. Depending on the road though, you probably had many moments of deep introspection by spending that much time alone in the car. And plenty of time for audiobooks / podcasts. Interesting life!

a fair bit was by train, and that was a tremendous help. I have consumed a whole lot of audiobooks, haha. I prefer multi-book series, where the longer each book is, the better. Plenty of 40hr+ books. I figure I went through maybe 150 such books. As part of the commute was by train, I could work or do other things there, but for driving, audiobooks all the way.

I assume I'm going to have to work with remote people now. In essence, the people in an office might as well be remote. There's almost always someone working from home. And when everyone is in physically in the office, many people don't like being disturbed, so you gotta hit them up on Slack and wait for people to respond.

What percentage of those remote work setups are “ideal”?

I would argue that if a remote worker is dissatisfied with the physical setup of their remote office, that's on them, not the employer. Having a team that does not prioritize remote-first-style communication is another situation entirely.

If the variance is tighter, it doesn't matter.

> the reason that people are often attracted to remote-working is precisely because their experience and environment fail on some or many of the ideals you list.

Disagree. They want to live someplace that doesn't have the highly paid jobs that, say a city or tech center would have. A San Francisco salary with a Modesto cost of living. Or they want to do the digital nomad thing.

Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

The "open office" has been repeatedly studied and proven sub-optimal on many aspects that impact both employees and companies. Yet companies continue to design new offices with these designs. I would love a fully-remote gig mostly because it would be respite from the open-office.

Fully remote requires a huge amount of discipline to not end up working 16 hr days 6-7 days a week.

I do agree open offices kill productivity but a blend of remote and onsite is best IMO.

disclaimer : I currently travel mon - thurs to be onsite everyweek

"Remote work requires discipline" is true. Some people find it hard to stop working, others find it difficult to focus.

I'd say it's 100% different, but it's not necessarily difficult. We need to talk about how change is hard on the one hand, and how remote work is different on the other, and not conflate the difficulty of the two together to have an effective conversation.

There are fixes to just about all of the problems people mention including dedicated in-person time occasionally - just not all the time.

Based on your "onsite" it sounds like you're a consultant or with a pro-services firm servicing clients, rather than part of a product company. I don't think as consultants you can really have the same freedom because you cannot control your client culture, and the client culture will dictate how effective you can be when remote. I would argue that if you're a client-facing consultant you first have to put in the time before you can really consider going remote because you need to build the trust and understanding to do that. That can be hard, and many client cultures do not understand it and will have a hard time connecting delivered functionality to value. They value, instead sometimes, a butt in a seat.

Recently transitioned into consultant work, before that I was a silicon valley native who worked at big names and startups.

Remote work is difficult because when you are remote and care you feel pressured to do more work to make up for the missing office political presence you get from being onsite.

That human interaction is much more important than people want to acknowledge

Been there and understand that completely. I transitioned from full time on-site to a remote worker with the same organization which meant that I understood the things I needed to work to replace when I started working outside the office - that was a huge edge compared to folks that joined 100% remote.

While I don't feel pressured to do "more work" necessarily, I think where I have seen intensity increase is in making more of an effort to actually speak to other humans adjacent to your work. This might require taking time out of your day and end up causing you to spend more time.

Overall I find being remote allows you to focus more which means you can often get more done in less time (if you're on maker time) so hopefully this doesn't result in many extra hours.

If you're on manager time (which I often am) then this is a whole different challenge of course, but it's an interesting one.

Mainly I would say it's best to balance your self-pressure to do more (coming from a fellow person who cares). Doing more work probably won't help, but ensuring you have regular touch-points with the right people will go a long way toward people knowing you exist, what your value is, and providing you with context to execute effectively without guidance.

Probably saying something you already know but feels good to type it either way :)

>Fully remote requires a huge amount of discipline to not end up working 16 hr days 6-7 days a week.

For you perhaps, I for one certainly do not have a problem Not Working All The Time.

I can see that. Different people work differently.

Like maybe a week ago there was an article on HN arguing that true blended remote/onsite is impossible. That at least some of your office co-workers won't be inclusive to remote workers (e.g. refuse to use slack).

I work remotely & onsite. This is a problem.

It's all about forcing in-person workers to use the same communication tools as remote workers - which is worse for those particular interactions, but better for the company overall.

After 9 coding jobs and a year or three in labor and service work at each end, I much prefer fixed schedules.

On-site is best, tho I think taking away time flexibility could actually be a boon and help make remote work tolerable.

Working for minimum wage now as a green waiter with people juggling 2-3 jobs and/or kids and a marriage in the Bay Area, more than any office colleague, I observe that fixed schedules work. The gig people I interact with are far more stressed than my colleagues.

Apparently tangental perhaps, I think this case helps isolate factors of logistics well when contrasting the more common cases; and I think it’s a wise way to go, and am building a life to support that type of engagements. Thanks for sharing.

I would love to hear more about your work history. You were a coder and now a waiter?

The opposite can sometimes be true. I work remotely about 1 day a week. Some days I get in about 4 hours of real work and others it's in the 12-16 range. In any case it's a different environment and requires some self-awareness to be effective.

I'd still prefer remote of an office fully optimized for what I'd want in an office. For me, remote just works so much better. I can live where I want, I can work hours that work best for me, I can spend time with my family rather than commuting.

Another benefit of remote work is that a company that's 100% remote has to spend time thinking through and improving communications and culture in ways that are optional for other companies.

> Another benefit of remote work is that a company that's 100% remote has to spend time thinking through and improving communications and culture in ways that are optional for other companies.

A really good point

"I can work hours that work best for me"

I have been working remote for years, and one reasons why companies hire me over a much cheaper resource in other countries is that I am US-based working US hours. If I started working crazy non-standard hours, I will no longer be employed.

Plus, the company saves by not having to pay for more office space, parking, cafeteria, yadda, yadda. Instead of cramming people into an open office like battery hens to save money on high SF office rents, people can work remotely, commute less, and save the company money on offices. The cost of communication software is far less than even the skimpiest open office rent and build out.

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

I’ve worked at many companies who spent a huge budget on the office, but I was never offered my own office with a door. Anything less is far from optimal.

When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2009, I had my own office with a door. A month into the summer, a teammate (another intern) moved in to share it, but we still kept the door closed and basically stayed out of each other's way (she was pretty awesome though, wish I'd stayed in touch). Productivity was incredible. And if I got stuck, it was more worth my time to stay put a few minutes at least trying to solve it on my own than to bug anyone else.

As a full time dev in one of the world's most valuable companies, I don't even have a cubical wall between me and my teammates. If anyone wants to speak, we all get interrupted.

I did not know how good I had it back then.

Even rooms of 4-5 people with a door would be an improvement on an open office if those environments bother you.

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

Sorry, but most companies nowadays use open offices, which are absolutely anathema to me.

Here's the thing: I absolutely want to work in a cube farm. I want to work in a traditional office environment with individual cubicles in a suburban office park. Unfortunately, there are very few companies like that anymore.

I like my current company. I like it a lot. We're a B2B telecom in the northern suburbs of Dallas with cubicles as far as the eye can see. I'm happy here.

But if I ever end up leaving (which isn't going to happen anytime soon, because I'm happy here), then my next job is probably going to be remote, because I seriously doubt I'll find another non-remote job that matches my criteria. Sadly, the kind of company I prefer working at is a dying breed, and I'd rather work remote than work in a trendy open office environment that caters to millennials (hell, I'm technically a millennial, but everything to do with millennial culture makes me cringe).

I don't think "most companies" use open offices. I think it varies.

I do agree with you, when I graduated from college, I explicitly didn't want to be in a cube farm. Graduating me was an idiot, and I very much do want to be in a cube farm.

Also, I don't think lumping "millennial" as the cause of open offices is the correct reason. I feel like it's initially attractive for a lot of college grads, but it's generally opposed by people with experience. If you're at a place that doesn't have the working conditions you like, it's because they don't (or can't) value you enough to provide those conditions. I'm a millennial as well, but have only worked in an open office once, and that was when I was younger and had less experience.

What is it you like about cube farms so much?

Individual offices I understand completely. Cubes? Seems like a very cheapskate version of a real office. I've never worked in one though, so I guess I can't quite understand it.

There is a hierarchy, IMO, best to worst:

1) Private office - I've had this, it was great

2) Shared office - had this too, it's ok if you have a good officemate

3) Team room - had this, larger office/conference room for one team, you have to be able to close the door

4) private cubicle, high walls - had this, pairing was easy

5) private cubicle, low walls - had this, a few more egregious interruptions

6) shared cubicle - haven't had this, still beats open office

7) open plan, big desks - at this now, it still lacks privacy and noise control

8) open plan, benching - had this, 36" of bench space, had to carry my laptop, mouse and office supplies with me

9) open plan, hot desking - IMO, this is just cause for a resignation letter on ergonomic and dehumanization grounds.

TL; DR: Cubicles are better for concentration and privacy than open plan, not as good as offices. Open plan makes me nostalgic for cubicles.

Better than open offices and hotdesking?

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

I kindly disagree. Open spaces are more prevalent than ever.

Dowtowns where office space are plenty are hell to commute.

In general I think companies want bullet points “we’re a great place to work” perks to recrute new people, but overall comfort or ease to work doesn’t seem to have gone up IMO.

Yeah, I see all these companies with open plan hell pits claiming to be a "Great place to work!", and I have to say "Compared to what, a sweatshop in the third world?"

The commutes are awful, the parking is expensive or non-existent, the office is noisy and crowded, the culture is repressive, the compensation is below market, but they all claim to be voted "Best workplace" or "Top ten place to work" or some such.

Hypothetically, if the going rate of a developer in San Francisco is $250K and that's what I have to pay to hire someone locally, but I can hire someone from anywhere in the country, if I know the going rate in Modesto is $120K, why wouldn't I offer them $140K? They would gladly accept it.

Companies also don't offer San Francisco salaries to people living in India even if they are equally qualified.

This is a good point. If everyone is working remotely, you will need to compete on salary with everyone in the world, not just in your area.

Which might mean you can't afford rent.

Why though?

Why not? As a business owner why would I pay $90K more than I had to? Since my pool of candidates is basically the entire country, that means my pool of potential candidates who would happily take $140K and be able to work remotely has grown.

"As a business owner why would I pay $90K more than I had to?"

For the same reason might ask why they would take less than they have to.. although it is true that the candidate pool grows, the pool of jobs we can select from is also worldwide.

I mean, I can afford to work cheaper if I want to, but I don't have to because people will pay... the principle works both ways.

Why would I take a 140K/year job just because the people around me are living in abject poverty unless I have to work locally?

Really a bit confused by the "abject poverty" bit you threw in there.

I'm remote working from a folk festival in rural texas. I have a cousin here who is homeless when she's off the ranch. I don't think it would be good for anyone for me to set my pay based off her pay.

Well yes, I agree. I don't think anyone would argue that though. I believe the argument being made though was that a company didn't need to offer Tech Hub market rate when they could simply offer above-market rate for a remote worker, and then both parties would come out economically ahead.

The way your comment was worded, I thought you meant accepting $140k/year was akin to being in abject poverty, which seemed like a very uninformed view of the world. I don't think that's what you meant though.

because the goal/interest of a company is different compare to individual.

as an individual, if you can demand more money, you should.

as a company, if you can spend less for the same amount of quality, they should.

Theoretically yes, but most companies don’t allow remote work so it puts the company at an advantage.

Gitlab gives few reasons in their handbook [1]. The obvious one is: "If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results."

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

So why doesn't GitLab fire all their high cost of living employees and replace them with someone cheaper?

Because I assume they have a headquarters which would be empty. Firing high-cost of living, high expertise employees to hire new ones (might be senior level, but not well versed in the problem) does not sound wise.

They say then they’d only have people who live in low CoL areas and they want diversity. Seems odd to me.

The same reason no one offers to pay extra at the grocery store.

its a well established practice to establish compensation partly based on employee cost of living.

The employer doesn't care about an employee's cost of living. The employer wants to pay as little as possible. The employee wants to make as much as his local market will allow. What the employee will accept is based on his other alternatives which is indirectly based on the cost of living.

> Why though?

Cuz they don't need to!

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

My last 3 companies over the last 7 years (I'm new to one of them) have:

* open offices (2 of the 3) or short-wall cubicles. That latter actually had a noise meter to try and flag when people were too loud...but they had to make it mobile so it could be wheeled around to the area that was currently the most complained about.

* A constant battle to find open conference rooms. All 3 changed offices while I was there, and promised more meeting room space in the new office. All 3 quickly found it wasn't enough.

I don't doubt that the companies are trying to make the open office space as nice as they can, but you can only polish a turd so much - they are still committing to the open office spaces.

> Companies these days bend over backwards to make the office experience as optimal as possible.

Ha! Not my company.

Why can't it be both? I want remote work because our office environment is horrible and my company isn't likely to change that AND I don't want to commute (after my company moved it's offices).

They make parts of it as optimal as possible (free food, nice facilities, readily available supplies). They do not bend over backwards to make the actual work environment optimal, as evidenced by all of the open office plans.

> Am I the exception? I think Remote work sucks.

Not at all. I think that some folks just don't work well in such circumstances. A close friend of mine was much like you: he craved the social environment, and the immediate collaboration with peers. Personally, I'm the opposite. I hate drive-bys, I crave the flexibility to work when I want and how I want, and the social interactions offer no real value to me.

I think it's great that you know how you best work. It's a key to happiness.

> If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.

That's just patently false. Not only can this happen in co-located work environments, but is often symptomatic of a poorly functioning team rather than how they're located on the planet.

> but are happy to let people overhear what you think.

In my experience, most engineers in offices spend their days with headphones on because they’re trying to drown out the office noises. They’re not going to overhear anything. Also, again, in my own experience, even if you don’t and are listening to what’s going on around you, you still can only overhear what’s said by those relatively close to you. That is, the probability of overhearing something useful has been, for me, incredibly low to the point that it hasn’t been worth it.

> rather than grabbing her for a “Can you look at this?”

When I’ve worked remotely, we’ve often sent each other messages asking to explain some code or hopped on a quick screenshare to go over it. Bonus: due to the asynchronous nature of text chat, I don’t accidentally interrupt the other person. Also, the more that is done in text chat, the more of a record of it you have when you inevitably forget. Its much better to be able to do a quick search in your chat logs than to re-interrupt the person to explain the thing again.

> But whole-team remote work? No thanks!

I’d rather have everyone remote, because it means you can optimise the company around it. If only some people are remote, or people are remote only some of the time, then companies tend to treat them as second-class citizens and optimise for in-person.

Personally, I prefer remote work, but have had a hard time finding it lately. Half of my opportunities require me to go to an office to work. I don't complain much, as I increase my hour by ~40% when it is not possible to do it remotely. That also comes to compensate for the time lost in commute, the extra money spent (e.g. transportation, food), and the fact that I can't really choose the hours I work. This last point is always funny, because my employers always tell me I have a completely flexible schedule. Their faces when I ask if I can come to work from 10pm~4am is priceless though. "Oh, your hours are 100% flexible given that you come anywhere between 8am and 6pm", heard this so many times it got funny.

PS: writing this at the office, feeling sleepy... they won't allow remote work... and this computer takes a while to build, 23x more than my personal workstation, I timed it.

To be fair, in a lot of place it is probably illegal to work those hours. Where I am from, 11pm to 6am are night hours and you need a special contract to be be able to work during those times. This contract is subject to restrictions (i.e. the employer needs to prove you need to work those hours, e.g. you work in healthcare, retail, ...) and they would need to compensate you more per the law. Same thing for Sundays.

Where are your from? AFAIK in the US most developers are paid as salaried exempt employees, which means they never got overtime pay and can work any hours. I don't think the restrictions you state are generally true anywhere in the US either, even for hourly employees.

This. That's one of the reasons. Here anything between 22 and 5h is also considered night work. If your work is nocturnal (e.g. a security guard) you receive a "night time bonus" on top of your hourly rate. If it isn't though (e.g. a programmer), in theory one would need to receive double hourly rate to work those hours. This does not apply to contractors here, but is an issue when hiring someone as a formal employee.

There are several type of people of course and there's no correct answer. And for good personal reasons usually. A lot of asocial introverts are likely to have an issue with open plan offices but might do just fine in a private office - yet some of them would prefer only working remote.

Developing personal rapport with the colleagues is often another factor. I have seen remote-only people join the "office" camp and consider it more productive and motivating, simply because they found a workplace that they liked more than working remote, with one of the factors being relationships they developed. Some even prefer the synched schedule over flexible hours.

Personally I am remote-only but I appreciate everyone's different and not everyone work the same way.

I have not found that at all. With good engineering practices and mature developers, no one should be gatekeeper of any functionality in any environment, remote or co-located. Inside a good piece of software should be idioms that work across the whole platform, so that no matter what the code does, anyone in your team can pick it up.

If you have a bad mix of junior and senior developers, and either of those groups are left to go on programming tangents that are outside of the idioms of the software then yeah, you're going to find yourself with code no one else understands, or tools no one asked for in the codebase. But that was a failure of the software's architecture, and the way you trained and managed your team to work within it.

I'm not saying it can't happen on a remote team, just that it's not a problem caused by remote work. A remote team is not any less competent just for being remote.

No your not. We’re building products with remote teams and I’ve to tell you compared to co-located teams it’s just pure hell. My conclusion is: either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.

> either everybody is remote or the team needs to be co-located entirely. The middle ground results in entrenched warfare between the 2+ parts of the team.

Are you sure? I’ve worked remote and worked not remote, and trench warfare between team factions can happen in both situations. It’s leadership and culture issues that leads to that kind of collaboration breakdown, and can happen even with locally collocated teams. In a large company many of your collaborators are going to be in other cities anyway.

I agree it can happen in both cases. I think the likelihood is just way greater and efforts to build a strong team thus way higher in the remote situation.

Having been remote to a much larger team (at Google) in the past, I know where you're coming from, but I'd also like to point out that this is a question of balance and communication structure. In my case the team was about 20 people, and myself and another guy were remote, but in the same time zone. The co-located team made no effort whatsoever to disseminate information or seek my input. As a result, I sometimes had to undo or re-work other people's changes because they _thought_ they understood the gnarlier bits of the system, but they really didn't. As you can imagine, sometimes this led to confrontation. I lasted about a year and a half, but I was extremely productive during that time, communication notwithstanding, mostly thanks to the constant communication with my TL.

The point I would like to make is, in that team of 20 not sharing information and not seeking input was a problem, even though people sat right next to each other. And that problem could have been solved very easily by putting most of the decision making into one pagers, Google Docs and bug tracker, as well well as by defining the goals more clearly.

That is a cultural problem which remote team members did not create, but merely magnified. It existed before we joined and after we left. It resulted in a project which you need to have a PhD in computer science to figure out how to use, and as a result few teams inside Google use it.

Which is a long-winded way of suggesting, that if introducing remote workers shows some cracks in your team structure, perhaps there's a deeper reason why, and things aren't 100% ideal to begin with.

I've had that experience when there are two teams each colocated but remote from each other. They tended to build their own culture and that quickly becomes us and them. I've had great results when there was one hub and a lot of individuals working from home. We shared a culture. My guess is that an entirely remote team would work well too.

Yes, that is exactly the situation I am talking about.

I'm one of the two remote workers on my team, one of only a few in the entire company. There's no warfare here.

Why do you think that happens?

Good question. My feeling is that distance creates emotional separation and vice versa. Maybe because remote communication is abstract and misunderstood quickly.

BTW: The best I’ve read about this so far is: “The Culture Code”

No, I think remote work sucks, too.

Once you've worked in a environment with healthy technical interaction on an organic basis it's qualitatively and quantitatively better than a group of remote workers. There is so much shared information that is lost when you can't just strike up a conversation.

But even for fully on-site teams the preferred format of a "knowledge base" is digital (wiki, Google Docs, etc.), because it's something that lasts, can be improved over time and is always accessible. And having the discussions stored digitally (Github issues, emails) is also usually preferred because it's "asynchronous" and it's something that can be looked up in the future.

So on-site teams also use Wikis/issue trackers/emails a lot. The difference is that instead of a face-to-face chat remote teams have to use Slack. Which is also largely used in on-site teams... So my point is that some of the modern IT offices already resemble a "co-working" space because all the tools are already digital, and all meaningful knowledge sharing already happens in the digital space.

I'm assuming you don't have children? Regardless of personal interruptions with having kids, it's way more convenient for the modern parent.

One thing that always gets lost is this:

Some humans do not think on their feet. They often need time to digest thoughts and new ideas. If you start observing this behavior, you will notice that an impromptu brain-storming session often results in a couple of people talking and many others observing.

It ends up being highly productive to the people talking, and very frustrating to those who are observing.

If you don't see this trend, your hiring practices may be optimized for finding only one type of person - extroverted people who can say things quickly.

Consider that you may be missing out on some very good ideas from people who aren't comfortable with quick context switches and immediate requests for feedback on ideas.

So, the secret to a good office, is to be enormously wealthy?

Because to have a nice high-quality office (not cube farm, not open-plan exposed-ducts) that's also a large office ('where people can find meeting rooms when they need them and also peace and quiet') in the pricey core of downtown ('somewhere with good public transport'), and to also have your employees afford to live downtown too ('so people aren't forced into long commutes')

It's all true, I agree with all of it, but it's super expensive. Even to do just one of those things is pricey, to do all of these things is enormously expensive.

I've worked in profitable companies that had that, but then Wall Street started demanding more profit, so the work environment (and headcount) was easiest to cut, but has the worst long term impact on the company.

"and to also have your employees afford to live downtown too ('so people aren't forced into long commutes')"

...it also has to be in the countryside at the same time, because so many people find it exhausting to live in the city centers for sensory reasons.

Good public transport exists where people live, as well as in the priciest parts of the city. A suburban office, or one in a medium-sized town would be walkable for a large portion of your staff.

I've been working mostly remotely for my clients (in office part of 1 day every 2 weeks; I do charge my billing rate for commute), and I enjoy remote work tremendously. I wake up at 11AM (without an alarm), and all I need to "get to the office" is go downstairs to my work desk (I don't do work anywhere else as a way of enforcing the separation and creating the routine).

"Can you look at this" at random points in time would ruin my productivity.

Open plans ruin my productivity.

Constant bullshitting at the office that has nothing to do with work ruins my productivity.

Not being able to do my work between 7PM and 2AM (when I'm the most productive) ruins my productivity.

Commute for 1.5 hours a day ruins my productivity, too.

I actually have my own company now, and while it's just me so far, when it's time to hire people I will structure it such that it's remote-first, and I will hire from all over the US, and possibly all over the globe when the company size allows.

You don't need an office for team cohesion. You don't need a bunch of meetings for that either. You just need reasonably clear goals and responsibilities (this is the hard part, but only when you have no clue what to do), the rest can be handled pretty easily via email and GitHub. Have a weekly Zoom meeting you want, to sync up.

If remote is the alternative to the open-office, chit-chat hellscape of non-cubicles and non-offices, I'll take remote 100%. If I have to choose between destroying my hearing long term with loud music to drown coworker's conversations and working from home, the decision is simple.

This is far too reductionist. Of course there is a middle ground, from open work spaces that emphasize quiet (library style), to small "pods" that hold 6-10 people in a team, there are a lot of options that companies provide.

You also do not have to "destroy your hearing with loud music" to avoid coworkers conversations. Earplugs are cheap and available, and industrial grade noise protection (25db+) is available for <50 bucks. Unless you're opposed to wearing any sort of headphone/earplug at all, then you have to heavily screen your potential employers to get the environment you want.

> rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence

Is that experience, or speculation? Having worked remotely on large teams for a decade myself, I've had just about the opposite experience. The unavailability of a component's main developer can be a powerful spur to dive in and take matters into one's own hands, vs. the short-term convenience but long-term bottleneck of always walking over to your hypothetical Naimh for assistance. This effect is seen all the time in large open source projects, even for challenging code e.g. in the Linux kernel. If your experience has been otherwise, that suggests more about your team than about remote teams in general.

Actually I liked cubicle farms. I had my own space and could have meetings at my desk if I needed to and would go over and chat with my colleagues a lot. I mean it wasn't visually exciting but as a work space for a order company it had a lot of good qualities.

Also the complete social isolation for at least 8 hours a day (sounds) like it would be awful. Honestly confused as to why anyone thinks they would like that. Everyone I know who have tried working remotely complains bitterly about it.

I never understood this argument.. you don't go to work to socialize, you go there to get work done.

I am of course respectful and cooperative with my fellow coworkers but my relationship with them ends at 5PM.

I personally find the offices that push for forced socialization quite frustrating.

After working remote for the past few years I love the fact that I no longer have to commute, am in charge of my time, can eat what I want , have better sleep, can exercise and have the luxury of actually getting work done.

Not to mention remote work majorly helps people with kids / newborns and also caters to women who need extra comfort during pregnancies.

When I was working in a big office, I actually had to arrive early or stay late to get work done (I'm not kidding), because those were the only non distracting hours.

I suspect the reason why most companies are not remote is because they rather keep a tight leash on their employees and celebrate the butt in chair "work" rather than trusting them with actual work.

I doubt I'm alone in this.

I can understand why you might feel the way you do, but have a hard time understanding your confusion. Given that social isolation is a common punishment for children and prisoners you can't understand why people wouldn't want to work in a socially isolated environment? Sure, you don't go to work just to socialize (well, some people do) but that's quite different from saying you shouldn't expect to get any socialization from work.

I crave isolation - remote work is perfect for me. I detest offices: stinky lunches, music, mastication noises, and too many snacks.

Not everyone is the same.

You must be more active when working remotely wrt. seeking social interactions. When working on-site, you get some of the interactions for free. When working remotely, you must actively organize them by yourself. I know people who get MORE social interactions from working remotely because they have more energy/time for things like meeting with friends, clubs meetings etc.

Remote work doesn't mean "Sit in your home by yourself." It means you can work remotely.

I just switched to a remote job and at first, it did feel pretty socially isolating. But it doesn't have to be. You might be isolated from your coworkers, but you have to choose to isolate yourself from other people. Depending on your working style, there are dozens of places that work great for working.

I don't spend 8 hours in isolation. I lunch with my wife, pick the kids up from school and walk my dogs. I also get to go run on my local trails (as I can just work later / earlier from home to make up for it). As long as my work is done, the company does not care where / or how long I sit at a desk for. I don't have a big brother monitor making sure I stay isolated at my desk for 8 hours a day.

People are different.

Yes, people by and large are different. I'm sure there are some people who would enjoy social isolation. That said, in my experience most people who claim to be special and enjoy social isolation deeply regret it.

You're really against the idea of remote work, aren't you? I've been remote for almost 10 years. No regrets.

Well, personally I am. I also think it's the sort of thing where a lot of people like it until they actually experience it. That said, if you do enjoy it, all the best.

It's absolute bliss.

>I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.

In my office talking is EXTREMELY discouraged, only certain people have messenger, email is for specific uses only, dress code, in the winters it easily gets into the low 60Fs in the office and in the spring we start seeing upper 70Fs and even 80Fs in the summer, we get 30 minutes for lunch and the closest fast food is 10-15 minutes in traffic, been here 13 years and we just got the right to wear jeans last fall, no office phones, open office with team leads effectively in the back of every row to watch everything you are doing, shared desks with other shifts, not supposed to even look your personal phone, can't go microwave your food on the clock but only 3 microwaves for 100~ people, 1 drink vending machine that wouldn't take cash or coin for the past 3 weeks and is often empty for most choices, parked off of active runways so our cars get coated in unburnt jet fuel/deicer/bird mess, parking lot is cratered nearly as bad as the moon (not exaggerating), photo ID has to always be visible, cameras on every entrance and exit, have to sign in at your desk but it can often take 2-3 minutes to even get a browser open which means realistically you need to be here 5 minutes early, minimum, every day, have to fully log out AFTER clocking out before you leave --- as you don't have admin privs software hangs and you have to force close it every single time you log out because it wants to update (mostly looking at you adobe), even if there is a county travel ban for snow/ice we're supposed to work our full shift...

Yeah man, I'd love to be able to work from home given there is nothing I have to do here that I can't do from anywhere with a computer, a web browser, an internet connection and a few BlueZone mainframe displays open.

Honestly that just sounds like an awful place to work in general.

Welcome to life outside of tech companies. :/

Umm no. This is a terrible work environment. I don't work in a tech company and we have exactly 0 of the issues that you brought up.

Then you're lucky and probably have 1 or more degrees, this is most offices across the country for those of us without a stack of degrees and certifications.

This ideal environment is impossible.

If person A needs “peace and quiet” and Person B needs to grab Person A to “look at something” then it will only be ideal for one of them.

Those are issues of culture and communication. I'm not saying it's easy to solve but it is possible given enough effort and push from management. Although generally you have to do so from day 1 since retro-fitting it after the fact is much more difficult.

>That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.

For example, with something like USE Together it's possible to have the equivalent of over the shoulder looks complete with easy input sharing.

> something like USE Together it's possible to have the equivalent of over the shoulder looks complete with easy input sharing.

That sounds neither as effective nor as fast as pointing at my screen with my finger.

I find it more effective. To looked over a screen you need to talk to me (or IM me), I then need to walk to your computer, squint at the screen and then ask you to move over if I need to dig into something (which then results in you squinting at the screen). The last one may involve me asking you to come over to my computer since your setup may be harder for me to navigate.

With screen sharing I don't have to move, don't have to squint, we both get to have a perfect view of what is going on and I can pull things up on my own computer concurrently (and show it to you if I want to).

edit: In fact, I find it so useful that even when we're in the same room the approach is to screen share.

I am with you. I personally hate remote work and companies who actively use remote workers as a strategy. I was a remote worker for 6 months and was borderline depressed due to limited human contacts. My next employer had a very distributed team in different time zone. And it was incredibly inefficient. It was difficult to find a common time overlap. Every meeting was disrupted due to webex and network issues. Quick casual meetings were not possible. My current employer is 100% onsite and I love it. Ability to just walk over and white board is good for my soul

I've been working remotely for 8 years now for a couple of companies. Currently work in an environment where I'm one of the few devs working remotely, where the rest share an office.

I'm trying to figure out if you've actually worked remotely or not. It does take a much more concerted effort on everyone's part to be more inclusive of remote workers, especially if only a handful of devs are remote and the rest share an office.

Meetings aren't usually a problem. We primarily rely on Skype for Business and all meetings are generally held online. We've even managed to move scheduled meetings (which I loathe) into Microsoft Teams channels. The written words manage to keep everyone on the same page, much better than just hearing it.

Microsoft Teams and Slack facilitates the sharing of cubicle conversations and informal ideas but it takes effort to get everyone onboard with using these as their primary ways of sharing convos.

I mean, I don't get interrupted very often. I can be as out of site/out of mind as I want and need. And I'm way more productive working from home, than I am where I can be interrupted constantly. I don't know about you, but it usually takes me about two hours to recover from an interruption to get back to where I was. Not always, but usually.

All of the above is pertinent to being a mixed bag of remote and office sharers. I would imagine that an all remote team, would have an even easier time with communications and inclusivity.

I have been working remote for 4 years, both full-time at two different companies. I also do not like the experience.

My issues stem from working at non-remote-first companies and my personality. Being one of the few people that is remote, I will have no visibility. My pull requests will linger, no room for advancement, no learning from others. And as an incredibly social person, I find the isolation to be too much. I also detest people that work from cafes. They are not offices!

> And as an incredibly social person

I think this is the key. I am an incredibly NOT social person and LOVE isolation when trying to get work done.

Why would you detest people that work from cafes just because you don't like it? For me working remotely full time, it's a good break from working from a home office all the time. Coworking spaces are few and far between where I live so it's really one of the only alternatives.

Simply because I want to grab something to eat or drink, but I cannot because there is no place to sit.

> Sometimes you don't want to formally disperse some information but are happy to let people overhear what you think.

I'm not disagreeing with your main point because remote work is not for everyone, and who am I to tell you what to prefer? But I wanted to note that I've been working fully remote for more than ten years, and I'd say 95% of my contact with team members is informal, and along the lines of just sharing thoughts and ideas exactly as you describe. The only difference is that we share them on slack and via emails rather than having that tap on the shoulder as you describe it. Which is "better" is a matter of personal preference.

In most development work team productivity is more important than individual productivity. I have found that the best approach is to have co-located team rooms. (And the team members should be working on the same project. Putting people together does not make it a team. If everyone has a different project, that’s not a team)

If the work has to be done individually, then there is no point in being co-located. Remote works well.

Co-located teams communicate well, decide and move quickly, and has much higher trust between team members.

Work that does not require too much communication, speed and collaboration is more suitable to remote.

This hybrid approach worked well for us.

The boring answer is, there are range of preferences; some prefer offices, others prefer remote-only, yet others prefer a combination of remote and office. To each unto their own.

On "But whole-team remote work? No thanks!":

One of the cardinal rules for "remote-first" to work as intended is that either the whole team is remote, or not. Otherwise, information asymmetry can affect team dynamics and morale in non-trivial ways and the product suffers.

Depends on the role, I am a DBA and work totally -remote, and I find it better than getting stuck in an open-plan office with people interrupting me constantly. There are enough collaboration tools (slack, zoom) to collaborate when I need to. May not work for developers, but our entire team has a choice between coming to work or being remote and they're doing great. Depends on the company culture and will only work with seniors folks.

Remote work is the solution to specific problems. For me, that problem is commuting. Office buildings are not where people live. I can't have a house right next door to the office for an amount that the company is willing to pay me.

Since the company is cheap, hires the bare minimum of people to do a specific job, those people either have to come from a large local area, or support remote work.

A common topic, and not without controversy for sure, I can see both arguments for and against remote working.

The only addition I would like to make is that an employer should try to take into account the personal situations of their employees. For example, a blanket ban on remote working at a big tech company [1] to me is rediculous. Some people are exceedingly efficient working on their own and on their own terms. At the same time, some employees can become demotivated if left to their own devices.

I would say that in the capacity of the employer and their inherent responsibility towards their employees it sounds natural to me that some would work from home and others not. An all remote team would presuppose that (all) the employee(s) would like that kind of thing.

[1] I see from time to time this happening (or people trying this). A google search some of those that tried: Yahoo, IBM. Top-to-bottom decisions are sometimes rather disruptive and maybe unnecessary in this case.

I think that the issue is not whether remote work sucks, or working in an office is superior, but it's more about hiring the right people. This gets a lot harder when hiring for remote work, which is why many remote companies require previous remote experience.

Working at the office is a Luxury, a very very high priced luxury that the employee pays for entirely with the price differential in your Home Rent/House she/he pays. In SF for example, you pay 1000$/sq ft vs the 130$/sq ft the national median.

> I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.

Yes I agree. This informal communication is an under-appreciated aspect of an open-plan office.

I wonder whether remote teams can be structured to mimic the 'closeness' of co-located team members. Here's what I'm thinking:

1. Two colleagues work similar timezones

2. Each colleague has a dedicated TV screen with webcam 45 degrees to the left of their main computer screen

3. The TV screen displays an always-on Zoom meeting showing the webcam video and screencast of the remote colleague

4. At any time, communication is as simple as turning to the TV and saying, "Hey Bill, did you see the Cowboys game last night?"

I've done many multi-hour video calls switching between pairing and unrelated tasks with 1-2 co-workers on my primarily remote team. We talk both shop and not shop. It works well, plus any of us can exit the call to focus. I find it vastly more productive than an open-office.

> rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.

I mean, what about grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over a quick video call.

> I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.

I can't tell you how many ideas I've come up with & worked through and problems I've solved while remote. When you have a culture of DMing and chatting in interest channels (#haskell has been a fun place in multiple companies), ideas flow wonderfully. And then you can add to it with Zoom chats and tmate pairing. The next thing I want to try is collaborative distributed whiteboarding using drawing tablets.

I think neither extreme is perfect. I very much enjoy working closely with my peers. After a while you build a small family. Social factors are a big plus for office workers and a big risk for remote workers. But in an office I cannot work at full potential. For me it would be good enough to have occasional zero disturbance times. Sadly the occasional mode is usually harder to integrate and realise then the full mode. On top of that I highly despise communicating remotely.

our entire company (not just developers) clicks video chat almost before thinking about an issue. I get a lot of calls that are just one of our technicians saying something looks odd in a config file and asking me for a 30 second sanity check. It can be annoying because email communication is (it feels like) avoided even when it would be a better medium or force someone to actually think through an issue.

However, it does mean that we have good team cohesion.

I'm in a technical director role, and have been in IT, DBA and development roles in the past.

Today, I work remote approximately 1 day per week. It's great for creative/heads down activities, which for me are writing, reading and tasks like spreadsheet work or ideation. I do it more when I'm on call-driven projects. It's not great for coordination with "close teams" and not great for operations team dynamics.

Okay. Remote work sucks according to you. Have you ever worked in a remote company? Remote work has its pros and cons. So does working from a office.

From a purely personal point of view, I don't really want remote work. At least not full time.

Work is a distinct social environment. You meet different people, do different things, etc... It has value. It helps see things from different perspectives. If things get hard at work, going back home gives you an escape, and vice-versa. You don't need for commute for that but it helps.

> And don't be a cubicle farm. Yes, if you think the alternative to remote work is an anonymous grey cubicle on the 5th floor of an anonymous office block (or just as bad, the 'trendy' exposed ducts open plan office), then remote work will look like nirvana.

What is the alternative to "not a cubicle farm and not and open office"?

I have friends who couldn't work remote. But for me, it's the greatest perk of my current job.

I love working remote. No gas to buy, no wear on the car. No commute time. Instantly at work, instantly back home after. Video conferencing keeps me close (enough) to my co-workers. I can't say enough good things about it.

I think its just that non-remote work is considerably more common so you are much less likely to find people openly complaining about it because their needs are mostly met.

Online discussions always amplify the decent of the minority because the majority tends to get its way. And because the majority is satisfied, it remains largely silent.

100% agreement. It's continuing the trend of offloading management onto the burden of the individual worker. It's the responsibility of the company to create a solid, quiet, accessible work environment - by enabling "remote work", they can effectively write off this responsibility.

~all tech jobs are anonymous cube farms or open offices in the US (and probably other places)

I agree. Everyone seems to have a hard on for remote work but I don't understand it.

It is absolutely possible to get all of those benefits while working remotely, provided you have some Tim wine overlap with at least part of your team. You just have to be explicit about it and not rely on the shoulder tap.

I'm with you. I currently WFH 1 day/week and i actually look forward to going in the next day. I guess it helps that i'm a single guy in my mid-20's living 15 mins bike ride away from my work.

Perhaps small office spaces in areas with many employees could be a solution. For example, you have the opportunity to go to a local workspace for your company on a weekday, but have no obligation to do so.

Remote is the worst way to work except for all the others.

Menlo Innovations are pretty anti remote-work. You might enjoy their book Joy Inc.

Agreed. I'm a remote employee with even a better setup at home than at my office, but I go in nearly every day. I don't have the long time experience to maybe be burned out of office work but I still enjoy the "separation of concerns".

I couldn't agree more.

Well articulated.

Jesus, you're describing a hellscape, as far as I'm concerned. A noisy place where people can interrupt me whenever, where no work ends up documented because you can just "look at this," and people are motivated by the beer and parties, not by actually working on something worthwhile. I mean, yes, especially in the eCommerce world the "worthwhile" is rare to come by, but you're not going to disguise that by trying to replace your employees social life. Finally, my experience tells me that if "only Naimh can owrk on FooBarAdapter," then Naimh left the company three years ago and moved into the Ural mountains to live off the land.

And good grief, if my choice is between a cubicle farm and an open office, cubicle farm every day. Thankfully, my choice is no longer that limited. Oh, and working with people who document their work and read team message board, turning your "only Naimh can work on" into some forgotten memory of past nightmares.

Remote work is the new open office. Such a bad idea that takes some companies years to realize it.

I've been working remotely for 8 years now. I'm truly interested in understanding why you think it's such a bad idea.

I mean I used to have to commute through downtown Portland, Oregon at rush hour. Just being able to leave that out of EVERY day has tremendously improved my quality of life.

I, too, think remote work sucks. Remote work misses the most crucial parts of working as a team: interactive learning and collective progress.

This is a cultural thing more than a remote work thing. At my company we're remote 2-3 days a week but can chat on Skype as needed. Our team (3 people supporting a major app on Android and iOS) talks several times a day to go over things and our team cohesion is good.

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