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Just a consideration: I don't believe that remote is so much more productive. The central advantage that I see is that in other regions than the Bay Area, the costs of living are much cheaper. Since for the employee, the central metric of revenue is "salary - costs of living" you get:

- "better programmers/employees for the same money",

- "cheaper programmers with the same quality",

- you have it easier to find good employers (less skill shortage) since you can also include potential employees who live somewhere else and are not willing to relocate.

As a remote worker, it feels like spin to me too. Or, at least it's only being compared to cubicle farms or cargo-cult open plan spaces.

I know that personally the most productive I've ever been was attending an office each day which had people co-located in rooms of 4-7 people by team / project.

I absolutely love my remote situation, it's 1000% better for my general happiness (I feel like my work is a part of my life rather than something which puts my life on hold) and stress levels, and there are days where I can be very productive, but due to the simple factor of motivation and the symbiosis which can occur in co-located teams it simply doesn't compare to the productivity I experienced as a part of a good team in a well-planned office.

As an employee I definitely prefer remote, but as a (heartless) employer optimising only for medium term productivity (and ignoring the trade-offs of overheads etc) it wouldn't be so straightforward and would probably depend on the people and projects.

Edit to add: here I'm talking about productivity as quality output per unit time

Yeah, remote work seems to be a double-edged sword for productivity. As you say, the quality of life/work improvements are great, but the motivation and accountability and shared situation of a co-located team can provide the morale and accountability that push you to actually be productive.

I think remote work can theoretically be a lot more productive for solo-ish tasks like coding. On some days this is definitely the case for me, after I pull marathon coding sessions that likely couldn't have really happened so smoothly in an office setting. For some days or weeks where I'm consistently in the "zone", I really feel like I've gotten more done than I could've if I spent those days in an office.

But in practice, unless you have very high self-discipline, you're probably going to be battling motivation and boredom to some degree on a daily basis. You often might in an office, too, but it's not the same. In an office, you see everyone else working around you, probably talking about work, some of whom can see your screen (maybe not ever actually looking, but still in line of sight), and that's a potent cocktail for human psychology. At home, you're in or right near the same place you watch TV and movies and relax and sleep, alone or with your SO/family, and there's probably nothing really going on around you, so the environment is basically the same as your non-work environment. There's nothing around to light a fire under your ass.

I also prefer remote work, but I'm definitely trying to find ways to feel more motivated and symbiotic, and am interested in ways a manager or employer could help foster that for remote employees. I've been trying to work from coffee shops more, and that sometimes seems to help.

I think the team needs to be set up quite well for remote work. You need good tools and workflow in place. Otherwise, people will get bored, carried away and won't feel like getting their stuff done. Skilled management is really a must.

My place is trying remote, and sometimes I'm more productive in the office. However, if I get in the zone at home I will accomplish significantly more. I would definitely rather go outside for 10 minutes to take a break instead of chatting in the office. Unfortunately, it seems like there is no attention on how to make people more comfortable and engaged.

It’s definitely a team effort, and management has to be remote first for (imho) any remote success.

Too many places dip their toes in the water, but as a remote employee, I can sniff out immediately if a team is ‘backchanneling’ in the office, starting or ending meetings before/after the remote call is over, etc.

If the team is not remote-first, living and breathing with the sense that nothing should be isolated in a single physical location, it’s not going to be fun, especially for the remote workers.

It can sort of work in a sense where everyone gets together for some time, then everyone breaks off and does something, then they get back together.

But more often I see a team where 3 people are in the office, and 2 or 3 are remote—I’ve never seen this model be successful in the long run.

I’ve seen it work great. At Autodesk our team was half remote. People would come in at varying frequencies. Mostly for release planning.

Having a separate room dedicated to only work really helps. When I’m done I go downstairs and “leave the office”.

cheaper...same quality

This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring. With the accompanying negative effect on US developer salaries. Indeed companies should be focusing on this significantly!

> This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring.

The (microeconomic) problem with offshoring is that other countries (think of India, to use a stereotype) have a quite different level of education, work morale, sense of quality etc. That is why it worked so badly. On the other hand, inside a common cultural area, this should be much less of an issue.

I have development teams in a variety of locations around the globe (including Boston and Mumbai areas). The Indian primary education system is quite good, as is IIT.

We get excellent work out of India, with the primary downsides being the related factors of 10.5 hour time zone difference to either US coast and higher demands for coordination/communication.

If India was in a time zone with more overlap with the US, the situation would be far more dire for the average US software developer I think.

Well, you also get what you pay for; many companies are not willing to put in serious HR groundwork and hiring efforts in India, and it shows. There are plenty of great devs and employees I’ve met and am friends with in India... but many companies I’ve worked for/with are not willing to spend the money or time investment in consistently getting this level of employee.

Quite right! We took several years to get to this point and two different local HR/leadership "regimes", so it's not all peaches and cream to be sure.

If you go in and just want "lots of bodies, cheap", you're going to light money on fire, waste your time, and pull your hair out.

Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

You shouldn't determine how much you charge by how much you need to survive, but charge instead by how much the company can afford to pay, or how much they're going to make (harder to determine the latter).

After all, the company doesn't price its products by how much it needs to stay solvent, it prices them by how much they can get people to pay.

> Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

Let's rather put it this way: the company saves money; if they give some amount of the savings back to the employee (via salary), both sides should be satisfied.

Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

Yes. I work remotely from Uruguay. It´s basically the only option to compete with U.S. talent, the whole point of remote work for the company is to get the best talent at a price they wouldn´t get in the U.S.

I know that if I get an H1B visa or whatever my salary would immediately go up. Location and salary are unfortunately correlated (it´s not even cost of living, Uruguay is more expensive than 2/3rds of the U.S.).

I guess you're looking for Gitlab then. They even documented their work culture and publicly share it:

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/resource...

>I guess you're looking for Gitlab then.

Gitlab would be the opposite example of an influential company the business decision makers are looking for. Gitlab has gotten $350M in VC money but they haven't yet demonstrated high profitability. And so far, they haven't "won" over Github.

The business world hasn't yet seen a trendsetting and influential company that has shown obvious evidence of competitive advantages because of remote work. The evidence includes beating the competition.

Examples of influential companies where their business practices spread would be Ford Motors and the assembly line improving manufacturing efficiency and therefore being copied by other manufacturers. Or Toyota's lean manufacturing and JIT inventory management reducing defects and saving money and also widely copied. Or Google's single-repository and Facebook's trunk-based-instead-of-branch-based development with continuous deployment to production being widely copied.

The Gitlab/Automattic/Basecamp companies are not influential enough (not big enough, not succesful enough, etc) ... so their remote work culture isn't copied like the previous practices of Ford/Toyota/Google/Facebook.

How about Stripe? They recently announced that their 5th engineering hub would be fully remote: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

Though I would probably argue with this article to some extent, the strength of remote isn't as big a sell for this large influential companies. I think the real selling point is that you can get high level talent form anywhere, the Googles and Facebooks of the work already have access to that talent, and have hubs all over the world. I would argue remote work is a bit of a bottom up movement, and we won't really see it shift to top down unless there is another wide market adoption that it becomes a requirement by potential employees. And as long as you're offering at least 50% more than competitors, I don't see that happening.

>How about Stripe? They recently announced that their 5th engineering hub would be fully remote: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

Stripe is doing what many other older companies already do: have a core of on-site office workers but also open a satellite office that has remote workers.

Google and Microsoft also have pockets of remote workers.

Again, I don't think Stripe's 5th hub being "remote" is going to radically convince a lot of business managers. But that blog announcement is recently dated May 2 2019 so it's too early to predict its potential influence.

Do you think it will really turn the heads of business leaders?

[EDIT correction to Gitlab amount above; funding was $168 million not $350 million: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-o...]

> engineering hub

> fully remote

Is it just me or does this make no sense? Does Stripe Inc. not know what the word hub means?

>And so far, they haven't "won" over Github.

Zero-sum is the only measure?

> repeatedly say "remote is more productive"

Even if the CEO and the board are truly, honestly, sincerely pursuing actual productivity (which is far from granted), there are lines and lines of middle managers below them who have realized that achieving the illusion of productivity by cramming people elbow to elbow in a cacophonous open office and demanding daily or even hourly status reports is far easier than achieving actual productivity.

GitHub was acquired for $7.5B. That's pretty unicorny.

There seems to be limits to remote first though- GitHub is a remote first culture, but even then they had a non-insignificant in-office population, ~30% if I remember correctly. There are many job functions that require geographic presence- dealing with physical things obviously, but also some types of sales and I’m sure other functions I’m not thinking of. It is also harder to onboard entry level workers in a fully remote team.

>GitHub was acquired for $7.5B. That's pretty unicorny.

According to analysts, Github in 2018 was still losing money when Microsoft acquired them. This is another example of remote work enthusiasts inadvertently undermining their case. If the strategy is "use remote workforce for happier employees and it doesn't matter if you're bleeding money because one of the FAANG companies might swoop in to acquire you" -- you can see why that narrative is not convincing at all to business leaders!

This is the same issue as citing Gitlab's remote work culture while the CEO (Sid Sijbrandij) mentions they're not yet profitable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

Another example is highlighting Elastic's IPO with 700-employee distributed workforce: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18168423

Elastic has also been losing increasing amounts of money for the last 3 years (see their SEC 10-K filings) and has never had a profit since their IPO. They lost $109 million in 2019.

To be fair, it doesn't mean that financial losses should be blamed on remote work -- but you also can't use them as positive case studies either.

tldr: do not cite Gitlab/Github/Elastic as evidence of remote work "being a success" to convince skeptical business managers.

To re-iterate the issue: the Remote Work Movement still needs a slam-dunk-world-beating story of its success. They haven't gotten one yet that convinces skeptical business leaders to fully adopt it.

What if Github was specifically optimizing for that end-goal though? It is hard to definite what productivity means unless you had inside knowledge of the goals of the business. Amazon took 14 years after their IPO to turn a profit, but that isn't to say that their employees were not productive. In the same vein, Github may have never turned a profit, but if that was not the goal, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

>, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

Yes, Github remote employees were productive in an absolute sense. The employees obviously created a usable website with enterprise customers before MS acquired them.

Instead of absolute productivity, the issue is if remote worker is more productive relative to office workers. (See the 3 repeated claims from the author I quoted in my first post.)

What we want is for Github's remote workforce to demonstrate such obvious superiority that it causes Bloomberg/WSJ/HBR to write articles explaining how business managers are incompetent idiots for not fully adopting remote work. But that didn't happen because Github wasn't successful enough to influence the business landscape like that.

In contrast, the business media has already written plenty of stories about Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity of workers. So far, influential business publications have not highlighted Github's remote culture as a competitive advantage.

> Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity

Out of curiosity, are there any actual documented improvements, or is it the same "this makes us more productive" that we're talking about the remote promoters spouting?

It's odd they're pushing "more" productive. Wouldn't a similarly compelling argument that'd be easier to prove be "as" productive, but you'd save $XXXk on overheads per year?

Productivity is the measure of economic output per unit of economic input.

But it's not an especially compelling framing of the point though. To influence decision makers then tapping into a loss aversion mindset with a tangible dollar figure attached seems much more likely to work than the more nebulous (and much harder to prove on an employee by employee basis) "productivity" metric.

I’d question how much cost savings there is. Maybe in the highest cost areas. But, leaving aside the implications of hiring people in lower cost areas and paying them less, it wouldn’t surprise me if additional travel costs for team meetings etc. balanced out the cost of a desk. A fair number of remote workers also get their companies to pay for coworking spaces.

Personal anecdata, but I've expensed only £120 in train travel in the last 2 years, and my employer doesn't pay for/subsidise coworking. Obviously it'll depend on company policy, but my benefits expectations with my current employer are minuscule to start with, so don't need any additional sweeteners over and above agile working to balance out.

It’s fairly common and probably a good practice for distributed teams to get together F2F a couple of times a year. The broader team I’m on does this. We’re spread around NA and Europe mostly with a combination of WFH, offices, and hybrids.

If someone has figured out how to measure developer productivity, they're positioned to win a Nobel prize or something. I have yet to see it done. That's why butts in seats is the de facto measurement.

I wish I was more productive working from home. I mean, I am, in the sense that I get more chores done than I do when I work from the office, since I seem to procrastinate by doing anything but actual work related tasks.

This is me. I really wish I was, but home is where I sit around and watch TV, or whatever else. When I am home, I might get a half day of work at best. I am sure I could eventually, but I would have to re-arrange and set aside a place that is only work, and probably block things like amazon and netflix from that room even. Besides, I want the in person interaction with everyone at work. Couple days home and I am stir crazy. I need to get out and interact with people in person. And not just a random person at a coffee shop.

It’s not for everyone.

> set aside a place that is only work

Crucial.

I work remote and have some colleagues who do as well. Working remote does not make you more productive. Having the discipline to work and stay on top of communication is what makes you productive. A couple of those remote colleagues are not as productive as people who are in the office. A good part of the reason is they just aren't good communicators. Being remote, even when the company is geared towards being remote, means you have to be proactive in getting the information you need to do your job.

Every single co-worker I know that has worked remotely was less productive.

Not my experience.

That being said, if your team was mainly non-remote with some remote employees, then I'm not surprised: it is the worst possible organization and a motivation killer for the remote person. Every article about experience of remote work I've read says: "don't put remote people on non-remote team" and I wholeheartedly agree.

Elastic. Public since last year. 5.5B mktcap