People love working remotely
usefyi.com
usefyi.com
Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being officially encouraged by corporate policy). The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain". My response to that is "What about the other 99.9% of my work time, when I don't need to interact with anyone?" Sigh.
Since I had left the office, they had redone everything to be open plan, low walls, brighter lights, white noise over the speakers, etc. Contractors are packed like sardines, the noise is insane. We're also "Agile" now, so we spend a ton of time in useless meetings.
I'm not very happy anymore.
One of the crazier things that has happened.
When the XP folk said "we do a standup", the idea was that meetings are useless and awful, you shouldn't have them, but if you're going to have them, then let's "encourage" brevity by having everyone stand.
Add a few decades of agile certified consultants, sc(r)umification and now "agile" means "lots of meetings".
Sigh.
It seems nowadays the "standing" up has become some weird ritual that one must undergo, without questioning, as a sacrifice to the gods of "Agile".
Bizarre.
All the practices have a purpose. If they don't fit, don't do them. Figure out what works for you. Adjust, adapt. Think!
No, the planes of productivity will not come to your fauxgile wooden landing strip.
Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.
I don't disagree with this. However,
>True agile teams never need to do backlog grooming. If a team has a backlog which is so big that it needs grooming, then they are not agile. An agile team build something, releases it to its users, and afterwards react to the immediate feedback/next important request.
This is like saying the first test should always fail because the tested code doesn't exist. While that's a good start, it usually takes a few sprints to release anything useful; especially if you have any hardware involved. Therefore, having a number of stories in a backlog really helps, especially if you do have to re-prioritize because hardware is delayed, etc.
Our team uses backlog grooming to point tasks and assign them "definitions of done". This is done to solve two problems: getting everyone on the same page as far as how the task will be done, which also speeds up diff reviews, and to determine if the task should be split up into smaller tasks.
When would you perform these tasks?
> Teams which constantly re-prioritise items which some fake product manager came up with a few months ago is not agile.
This is not at all what we do with this meeting.
I agree 100% that it's not Agile.
I was talking to the CTO of a large non-tech company and he was so excited how the whole development organization had adopted agile. Later he told me that after the conference he had to fly to a huge meeting where they plan and schedule out the next 6 months to a year of development work.
I'm fine with open spaces, but this would be the final straw for me
In an open office, that is. The dentist is less painful.
The offices where it's worked best were not open, though. They had thin doors/walls and a small speaker (also doubled for the fire alarm/etc) in the ceiling of each office. The white noise was unnoticeable until it was off or you really looked for it.
The main advantage was that you no longer heard every conversation on the floor. You'd still overhear bits of things in the adjacent rooms, but that's hard to avoid. When the white noise stopped working (happened every few months), you could hear every voice on the floor and every phone call...
All in all, it sounds like torture, but done well, it's actually a really nice way of damping distracting ambient conversations/etc.
For me, blowing fans are unpleasant. Piped in white noise would be torture. Like gratuitously flashing strobe lights into the eyes of someone with night-blindness.
Maybe this could be used as the basis for ADA complaints against open offices? I can't understand why anyone would think that's a good idea, but then again, I don't understand open offices either.
(I also prefer 2-day email chains to face-to-face conversations, because I can both understand what I read much faster than I can understand listening to speech, and refer back to it later.)
Everybody seemed to like me except the PM who was either a little Kruger Dunning or straight up Peter Principle. He wanted very much for me to know how smart he (thought he) was. Pessimism != smart (something I have to remind myself of regularly). In an interview I'm supposed to be convincing you how smart I am, not comparing dick sizes.
I have no doubts that particular brand of insecurity that looks an awful lot like ageism cost me that job. But dealing with a boss who is uncomfortable around anyone who has more experience than them, especially with that tin roof of an office space would have been torture. Bad fit all around.
But it's rare that I find a place whose business model is terribly engaging. The hazard of experience is that a lot of problems start to look similar, a lot of verticals sound more meaningful than they really are, and you won't devote the rest of your life to making up for how you got the money in the first place. If you even get the money (I've skipped step 1 and gone onto step 2), which statistically you will not.
So true.
Good thing we have better tools for videoconferencing than ever. I can have a 15 minute face-to-face with anyone in my company, no matter where in the world they are.
It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting.
As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)
Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.
To the conferencing software's credit, it's generally user error. But when you have 10 people in a call, and only 2 of them really understand or even care about their conferencing software setup, things break a lot. I have to explain the concept of changing your recording device more than once a week. Usually to the same people again and again.
The only problem with remote is that incompetence is much more visible.
When I'm hosting a video call I prefer google hangouts. Works OK without installing apps.
It's a relatively simple problem to solve. The amount of conference call failures I've experienced working remotely for an all-remote team is substantially lower than when I was working in-office, despite I'm probably on 5x the number of conference calls now.
My neighbor owns a consultancy. They’ve started shipping the Meeting Owl camera to their bigger clients to improve their meeting experience. It’s has a 360 degree camera, eight directional mics.
The camera stitches together a full view of the conference room up top, with the bottom 2/3 intelligently shifting the focus across multiple speakers. It will even put a whiteboard into the focus of the frame, if someone starts drawing. I thought it was pretty cool.
Disclaimer: I just thought the product looked cool after my neighbor mentioned it. Nothing more.
> The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
They fail to realize that when it was written in 2001, communication technologies were far inferior to what we have now. So that face to face should be updated to something like "immediate" or "real time".
Anyone who just says "We do X, because that's how Agile recommends it" is not actually doing Agile.
You should absolutely be keeping documentation. However, you should not require hundreds of pages of specs and design documents before a single line of code is written.
Instead, documentation should be written at the same time as the code, and should follow what is actually needed for and by developers and the organization rather than being subject to a "gate".
It's about writing the right documentation. Some of that documentation is harder to write: For example, writing a specification that can literally run against the software, like in behavior driven development. (This is one of many potential tools. It may not be applicable for you.) It may look like a wiki. It may look like a set of UML diagrams and a formal spec. It depends on the team and the domain of the problem.
The problem that the manifesto was talking about was one of documentation as a deliverable that was not properly updated and only written to pass a requirement of the process.
% where working code != the code will work if all stars align and no invalid data is input and comprehensive documentation != a single typed character more than what is forced out of your tortured fingers by those who have to support your code at 2AM
I love my job :)
* "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." implies that the ops team also needs to be given the environment and support they need from development.
* "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility." where "technical excellence" implies an understanding of working code that isn't dependent on valid data.
* "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." means that if ops can't do its job, then the development team needs to reflect and adjust its behavior accordingly.
So, sadly, they tried. We just went too far in the other direction in some organizations, and that needs to be stopped. If it isn't working, change it - agile shouldn't be in the way.
Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and should work fine remotely. And hey, one of the principles is that you give teams the environment they need to get the job done, not the environment management thinks they deserve.
Unless you mean "Agile" as, say, UK government terms it, also known as waterfall. In which case, yes, you can expect to be required to be in meetings all day in a terrible office space. Feel my pain.
I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
I mean... sometimes you need to course-correct, no? And cross pollination is useful, isn't it?
"Just Shut Up And Get It Done" workflow means that people might be spinning their wheels building the wrong thing (or duplicate things) in their silos.
Come on, there's got to be a few meetings to synchronize vision, scope, etc. within a team.
One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement").
One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.
Moreover, for certain types of work (such as, for instance, building platforms) a forced "design" and specification phase would probably be a net benefit. As they say, "half a year of coding can save you two weeks of planning". Except when you also release your shit to users you can't fix your old design mistakes because everyone depends on them now.
I can't believe that people who are so out of touch with reality are still given so much responsibility at companies which they effectively unknowingly misuse to make everyone's life miserable.
There's nothing wrong about a multi day email chain. Sometimes it's the best communication tool, because non-critical/important things can be more efficiently being discussed in an email chain which doesn't disrupt everyone's work day. Secondly it is a nice way of keeping a log of ideas, thoughts and compromises which essentially lead to the final conclusion/solution. This gets documented for free and people can reference back to that email chain in the future which is hugely valuable, especially when the "big boss" conveniently likes to forget his own decisions.
Face to face lacks all of those nice features.
Secondly... there's A LOT more alternatives and other options inbetween F2F and long email chains. People can work 99% remotely and travel into an office one every couple weeks or per month for team bonding time.
Video conferencing is another great way of getting a F2F conversation done without the hassle of everyone being in the same physical place. More often video conferencing calls can even be more productive, because people are more conscious about the time spent in the call and also about the people who frequently contribute and those who just got invited along but never really participate. Makes it easier to trim attendees down to the ones who really need to be there and those who just can be sent a summary afterwards.
I can only hope that your new big boss will quickly get sacked and replaced by some young blood who has heard of instant messaging and video conferencing. Good luck!
Maybe it's because the lower info bandwidth but higher emotional bandwidth (?) forces a kind of expedience you can't get otherwise. This seems especially useful in open-ended, "planning" conversations.
Maybe you can hold on to a lot of that with video/audio conferencing, but lag and tech issues are always salient. (But I'm technologically proficient and physically lazy, so I'd still rather deal with those than going somewhere.)
Email chains can work for some things, but they mostly suck compared to face to face meetings. You never know if someone else is silent because they agree, they haven't read the whole email, or they haven't taken time to write a response.
Most things able to be solved by email chains are better off in some sort of issue tracking or wiki system.
Seriously. I’ve always been a very good writer but people in STEM often aren’t.
I was mostly just making the counter point, however to expand on this, at least with the email thread you can take longer to compose your response or go talk to someone about it if you think it's important. It's viewed a bit weirder to follow up a face-to-face meeting with your counter points in an email.
But I actually just think communication is hard for a lot of people. Locking people in a room and expecting them to come up with a decision is a pretty poor way to work. Combining both text and talking, and giving enough time between discussion and decisions is probably a winner.
A good meeting lead can make sure they get everyone's input in a face to face without necessarily putting them on the spot. Sadly those are few and far in between.
I worked with one and they were excellent meetings. They got ideas out, and predicted possible issues better than any other meetings I've been part of.
What I like about an email is that it allows you time to digest the information and then respond to someone.
I like a combined arms approach. Start an email thread and if there is no timely reply, or consensus is getting hard to reach, walk over to the other person’s desk for a chat or call a meeting.
In my experience, nothing except "bugs" and "customer support issues" are better in an issue tracking system. Issue trackers add too much overhead for end users, and the "structured data" features encourage people to adopt processes that require every user to think about what level of the hierarchy some issue belongs at, what tags to assign, who "owns" the issue, etc. For most communication, there ends up being a serious impedance mismatch between the structure of the data in the issue tracker and the natural flow of communication.
If my participation is actually needed in the thread, I will be inevitably @mentioned by someone, and the email stays in my main inbox folder.
nothing against yearly meetings, but would hope people have ways of getting together more often if the group decides its necessary.
I have seen it in dozens, maybe hundreds, of execs I have interacted with over the years, including people I have worked very closely with.
Sometimes it is varieties of dyslexia, sometimes ADD. Could be any number of other "disorders."
It's not a preference/policy. It's just how they engage. Often it is best to recognize it, and engage with them on the terms that work best for them.
And of course this is not new. Illiterate leaders have been with us since there has been literacy.
I would really have more respect if they just came out and said, "we're going cheap."
Contractors in general might be better off working in an office if they aren't in a gig which is well paying. As remote work takes off, a greater percentage of those people may not be getting paid enough to make working from home a viable option, yet they'll still have to fake it. Sure, you might have the problem of your car breaking down on your way to the office because you can't afford maintenance. But at home you can still run into computer issues or a spouse who makes your life difficult. I think we tend to imagine WFH scenarios as being well paid and cushy, but there's that other side as well. WFH could still put up barriers between people who can afford it and those who can't? OTOH, affording working from home is way cheaper than affording to move.
What if it takes you 4 hours to come up with a good answer?
I asked for a special chair for my back. Started challenging our processes.
Funny thing happened. People started to see me as an important person.. an expert. I started to work from home again slowly.. then never came back. A year later others were encouraged to wfh because of office space concerns.
Get in there and make sure they regret pulling you back. Show your face everywhere. Make your voice heard. Take on all issues and then drop them.
Seems like a quick route to the unemployment line...no thanks!
In the TV show "What we do in the shadows" this is called an energy vampire. (you suck out other energy) Also a great show.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
Re: a special chair for your back... "Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work."
Memories work in funny ways. The first thing that jumped to my mind was the Asterix book where the Romans capture the druid (Getafix, in the English versions) and want him to make the magic potion. He insists that he must have fresh strawberries to make it, which are out of season. He doesn't really need them, it turns out, but it delays the whole project as the Romans dispatch someone to points far to the south to try and fetch some and bring them back while they're still fresh.
In Spanish the druid is called Panoramix for whatever reason :)
They must be either good, or you need to run away, fast.
'When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five'
The big boss[0] would not like me. I follow up all conversations with an email. It eliminates the he said/he said conversations. I have an email that I can refer to as needed.
[0] Boss seems to be appropriate here as opposed to manager or something. Doesn't sound like they manage well.
and of course, word-of-mouth / loose social connections.
Linked-in recruiters. Say what you will about the constant cold emailing, if you set sane guidelines for them (only interested in 99-100% remote positions with comp above $x, using y or z technologies) there is an entire industry of people who will go and do a lot of the work for you. Just make a copy/pasta of your desires and reply to their copy/pasta with it; ask for job descriptions up front along with comp ranges, once they show something you like you can move forward with actually getting on the phone with them.
This shouldn't be your only lead generation tool during a job search, but it is a ruthlessly effective force multiplier.
AngelList has the largest amount of remote jobs right now out there
(Disclaimer: work at AngelList)
I found a less serious crowd compared to indeed or linked-in about hiring now. Previously when working full time I connected with a founder over a two year period and ended up working on a year long project.
What's the best way of connecting through AngelList? Are most people connecting over a period of time or do you find most are using it like a job board where they try to fill a position asap?
Also having a good reputations with other engineers who also work remotely, they'll get you in places you wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
Why did we end up coming back on-site? My manager (who works in Finance!?) couldn't explain to the higher-ups what we have been up to (very non-technical person) and they decided we were too disconnected from the rest of the company. Never even had a chance to plead our case or discuss alternative options... not sure how much longer I will be here.
Show that you were completing X number of tasks per month, and after a couple months show them that your productivity is down 10-20% in terms of tasks completed.
Make it extremely easy to present, and if your Manager agrees to work with you on it, make it look like the work to compile this report was all theirs. In other words make them look good and do their job for them.
My FAVORITE EXAMPLE in the road map for Star Citizen. That game's development is at an agonizingly slow pace, but if you were the Manager who put together their roadmap it would be instant promotion. It's goddamn BEAUTIFUL. And their is no way the team could be fucking up if the Roadmap looks this good.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...
Don't make the mistake of thinking management is mistaken and just needs to be educated. The big shake up, changing WFH and open office plans are all giant neon signs that say management is attempting to line their pockets off the misery of their employees.
I'd join a company under the condition that they allowed flexible hours and wfh. Then 6 months later managers would change and all of a sudden the way we'd been operating would no longer be acceptable. Always the person leading the charge towards eliminating wfh and remote work is some non-technical idiot who wants to make his mark by demonstrating his "leadership skills" and has no idea what engineers actually do.
So D don't even take promises for flexible hours and remote work seriously anymore unless it's a fully distributed team. I hope the trend of increasingly distributed workforces continues to rise so that developers don't have to deal with this "ass-in-seat" nonsense anymore.
I mean, I've taken remote jobs for which I could well be living 200+ miles away. Saying 'come in to the office' - lol, sure, perhaps once a week or something for a catch up.
What gives?
If my boss suddenly decided to no longer employ me as a software developer and instead "pivoted" to making hand grenades or something equally random, well, yeah, bye then?
Haha about sums it up
Its not supposed to be that way though
It could be they really believe that. But it is often one of these real reasons:
1) They want some people to quit, but they don't want to lay them off explicitly to avoid looking bad. The idea being some employees won't relocate or enjoy driving to the office every day so they'll just leave.
2) They think people are lazy and don't work when they are at home. So they want them in the office to supervise them.
3) It makes them feel important walking around and seeing all their subordinates right there in one place. Sometimes it is just as simple as that.
If you're not tight with your manager (or whoever else is a strong dotted-line with power over your employment situation) then it's time to move (or at least make your discomfort known).
W-what? I know some people swear that white noise makes them concentrate better, but forcing everyone to listen to white noise? Wtf. I'm not even sure that's legal from an occupational health & safety standpoint.
Offices for the important people, high cubicles for semi-important people, shorter cubicles for the peons. White noise generators to reduce the excess conversation interruptions. (It didn't help me, my cube was outside one of the few large, unallocated meeting rooms, which got used by everyone at MSFC. I got to listen to the meetings until I started working from home.) Oh, and the AC goes off at 3:00p.m. to save money. By 5:00, everyone still working is rather sweaty.
Instead of investigating the social fixes to the problem (asking people to take phone calls in private rooms, having arguments/meetings in private rooms, enabling sidetone in noise-cancelling headphones so people don't scream into conference calls), the proposed answer is a Simple Little Widget(tm) they can buy that will fix everything: the white noise generator.
Except now you have a layer of white noise on top of all the loud conversations. And white noise doesn't mask human speech at all unless it's louder than the speech itself. So nothing is fixed.
I agree with that. But 15 minutes phone or video call works just as well as a meeting in person.
Speaking from experience, I’ve been working from home for 8 years now.
If only we had some sort of technology that allowed us to be able to get ahem FaceTime ahem while remote.
What a wondrous world that could be!
This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged:
Why is it better?
Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up?
If so how often does this happen?
Why does this need arise?
If you have to clarify matters in personal conversations all the time doesn't that tell you that your company's processes and communication behaviour are lacking?
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but being remote does not exclude having face to face meetings. There is (finally) easy and reliable technology that facilitates that very thing.
Highly diverse timezones can be a problem, but I've never know anybody working remotely to resist attending a relatively rare video conference call in order to quickly hash something out.
Developers are smart. You might con them into a bad idea in that 15 minute meeting, but someday they'll figure out they've been had. Most won't take it lying down.
In my experience, and talking to my peers, engineers don't come straight at you when they feel slighted. Especially if you're a big talker. They may not even gloat when they feel that the odds have been evened up. Not all 'bad luck' in companies is just bad luck. Some of it is work stoppage or malicious compliance by someone with a grievance who doesn't enjoy confrontation.
I'd prefer remote work, too, over sitting in an open floorplan office, but I'd much prefer an actual office to either one. The easy "why" is: despite all the drawbacks, a lot of us will do pretty much anything to get out of an open floorplan.
So as long as your commute is 10 seconds home office beats real any time. At least until we get the whole teleportation thing nailed down.
I'm not saying I couldn't do both of those things when working from home, merely that as an added bonus of working out of an office I end up doing those things more often.
I dislike commute in general, but as long as I can read a book or use a laptop over it, it can be even more productive time than spending it at home.
But that same commute in a car sucks ass, so your point stands.
The problem people have with remote work is when they don't change their lives to embrace its flexibility. When they try to emulate their office life, just in their home. Not only does that not help them reach their peak efficiency, it completely misses out on the opportunities of remote work.
I guess you're blurring the line between "full-time from a stable remote (home/coworking/etc.) office" and full on "digital nomad".
I work full-time remote and I think there's a huge difference between working from a stable office and wandering around working from a camper van or ducking out for personal travel while on the clock? It's hard to imagine that the latter type of employee would be ready to quickly respond to incidents, to sync with their team on short notice, etc.
Where I work, we have core hours (12-4 Eastern) that everyone is supposed to be online, but otherwise your schedule is up to you, so it allows considerable flexibility. In practice though, it's even more flexible. Part of remote work is that you're no longer glued to your desk. Your output is what matters, not where your butt is.
Sure, if you take business days off to fly across the country, that could go badly. But I tend to travel on weekends. And my family understands that I might get a message and go hop onto work for an hour or two.
Most of the remote workers I know would turn down a job that expected 8 hour shifts of "butt-in-seat"-style working environments. The whole concept of "on the clock" is alien to how my teams work.
But, there are big advantages of remote work over private offices:
1. Lower cost to the company. Private offices are expensive to build and maintain.
2. Less commute time to the employee. Private offices still require commuting which impacts the environment and the employees personal time.
3. Job flexibility. Home workers have (or will have) more options for employment.
4. No relocation expenses. Relocating an employee costs a few thousand dollars, hiring them and letting them stay put is cheaper.
5. Maintain ties to community.
6. Distribute income geographically. Offices concentrate incomes into a small geographic area. The effect is compounded by global companies as the worlds revenue streams feed into a single area. Think about how inflation and costs are out of hand in Silicon Valley.
- Accountants/lawyers are also expensive to employ, and remote workers that live in N different states will require accountants/lawyers that are experts in tax/employment laws of said N states.
- Requires much higher quality of team communication and coordination (of requirements, workload, work scope, expectations, etc), which can be hard to achieve.
You're just pushing that cost to the employee. Are you paying them the amount saved, to furnish their own private offices? Or are you just penalizing the worker to save a buck?
> 3. Job flexibility. Home workers have (or will have) more options for employment.
I have not seen this. Most companies still don't offer remote work.
> 4. No relocation expenses. Relocating an employee costs a few thousand dollars, hiring them and letting them stay put is cheaper.
Again, maybe it's different now, but I've worked at several tech companies, and never been offered "relocation expenses".
> 5. Maintain ties to community.
What does this mean? The company? The worker? It seems like the company not employing local workers, and the worker not leaving their house, would be worse for community all around.
No, like an actual community. Like people who live near each other and don't necessarily share a corporate brand but take care of each other and share memories and build traditions. People naturally have communities based on place, so getting hired and forced to move for that job disrupts communities. It's better for the everyone's social and psychological well-being to stay put.
This one does seem to be a relatively common thing, at least in recent job posts I've seen. I can imagine it's not all that common if you take a step back, but quite a few companies have given what I consider very generous monthly stipends for use in personal offices or (co-)workspace expenses.
I agree with the rest.
I mostly work from home and incremental work-related expenses are pretty small. Maybe I buy some computer gear I wouldn't have if I worked at home less. But the expenses are pretty much trivial relative to commuting.
I have gotten to know my neighbours from nearby houses much better after starting to work remotely, because I spend much more time on the nearby park.
Haven't seen this as an issue for awhile. I'm old enough that when I started programming I had to wear a tie to work (it wasn't a 'tech' company). Over time and different jobs it changed to golf shirts and khakis to now where if anyone wears more than shorts/jeans and a t-shirt we think they are going on an interview.
Of course, I've arranged my home space around this. I have an "office" at home, with a door and everything, where I can work. I still do a hefty amount of my working in coffee shops, though, which is somewhat akin to the open office experience. I also preferred remote working back when I first started it, and was just occupying my kitchen table or couch.
If I was in SF and thus able to access our office, I might well go in sometimes. But I suspect we'd top out at once a week, or when I really wanted to catch up on that hot nonprofit gossip. Commutes really are horrible things.
This year, however, I've started working from home a lot. I like it much more than any of the above and generally get so much more done. I can relax and breathe in my own home. Make some tea and sit in the garden when I need to think. My focus, productivity and well being have been through the roof. It also helps that connecting from home saves me an hour's commute each way.
Some things can't be done effectively over VPN (mainly working on Xbox or PS4 specific bugs), but for most tasks it's great.
An hour commute is just nuts. According to statistics I found, that's more than double the average. I've worked at places with a 5 minute commute, and they're great. I realize not everyone has infinite flexibility in where they live, but a workplace would have to be pretty amazing in every other way to make me spend an hour every day getting there.
I've worked at places that had a garden or park right outside, and it's terrific to go out there and think. Why don't all knowledge worker offices have this? When I look at what the big tech companies are building, it's certainly not that they can't afford a garden.
We used to know this. Do an image search for "university campus" (those other places where people sit around and think) and you'll see buildings in a sea of grass and trees. Yet do an image search for "company campus" and it's all steel and glass, with greenery only to fill in the small useless spaces between the parking lot and the building.
What good is a workplace for thinkers, if it doesn't include good places for thinking?
You say an hour is terrible and talk about an average. Average for whom and where? I live in Sweden, 30km outside of Gothenburg. It's a nice 15 minute walk through a wooded area and along a stream, then a 25 minute ride with the commuter train. On the train I read the latest articles while listening to music or play on the Switch. Once in Gothenburg it's a ten minute walk from the station to the office.
The office isn't terrible and has a lot of good things going for it, including a beautiful rooftop terrace. It's also quite social, filled with people who very passionately share my interests and with whom I play magic over lunch.
The main issue is that it's very busy and I often need peace and quiet. Even when I had my own office and could think uninterrupted it still wasn't as good as being home. It's the comfort of being home, with all my things and a beautiful house in a peaceful neighbourhood with a large garden at the edge of the forest. It would be unreasonable to expect an office in the busy downtown area to be able to compete with that. Also, when I need to think at home I often do household chores, and then they're done and i can spend my whole evening playing with my kids or spending time with my wife.
My home workspace is an airy attic office with a view of trees and houses. My downtown office is an open-plan wreck with exposed pipes and broken chairs. I am pretty certain which one is more conducive to productivity, let alone which one means a higher quality of life.
I think I was probably very blessed to have such an understanding and flexible company to work with, because thinking back, that was pretty crazy.
I've worked in private offices, home office, open floor plans and small shared rooms. The worst are large open floor plans. My favorite have been offices with rooms for 2 - 4 people. That's the sweet spot, I think.
My favorite of all is mixing that with WFH. e.g., Office M/W/F and WFH Tues/Thurs.
I come in to the office every day because my wife stays home with our 3 kids. Work from home when home is four people that want your attention doesn't work out very well. The few times I tried it, everyone just got frustrated that I was present but not available.
Maybe in a couple years when the kids are in school working from home will seem appealing. Honestly a ten minute commute and the entire office to myself twice a week isn't half bad.
The trick to making family understand when you're on the clock is training them to treat the closed office door as though it was locked. If you come out of the room, your attention is free game at that point, but once that door is closed, you're not home. Takes awhile of effective communication and discipline, but once enforced makes remote work incredibly enjoyable, even with family at home.
Having worked from home when only a partner OR 2 kids were present, I can only imagine the additional pressure faced by that situation.
But speaking as a single parent of school-aged kids, summer vacation is... a challenge.
That being said, you have to invest in it. Have a separate room with a door. Spend some money on good ergonomics. Have a good, stable internet connection.
I rather not use my time to commute, and prefer working at home, some cafe, or even nearby park or restaurant terrace on sunny days.
Why would you prefer an office to home? The only situation I could imagine where I'd like to occasionally go into an private office would be if I were single and living alone, so I could see people occasionally.
I suspect you mean private office at HQ, or alike. To which I'd say... that'd be a hell of a lot better than tradition or open office layout. But you'd still lose most of the remote benefits for what I suspect is little gain.
There's a large gap between "the small fraction of workers who are remote love working remotely" and "everyone loves working remotely". My wife works remotely, and likes it a lot. I've worked remotely, don't like it at all, and am back in an office.
(For me, I'm just happiest if I'm in the same place as my coworkers. The place I worked at remotely seemed to do everything right, but I still felt disconnected and lonely.)
It also really depends on the job and the company. If remote working means never going off, I think it's a company culture problem rather than a problem of remote working itself. It might be true that since remote work is relatively new the boundaries and the culture might not be fully formed yet for many companies but I think everyone that works remotely should realize this and set expectations and boundaries accordingly.
I also may enjoy going to an office more if I actually had an office with a window where i could feel comfortable instead of staring at a gray cube wall and listening to my loud neighbors the whole day.
Not everyone is cut out for a 9 to 5, not everyone is a morning person, not everyone likes sitting in a chair all day. But they deal with it, because it's their job. The same will be 100% true for WFH, cut out for it or not, they'll adapt and make it work.
There's huge wins for working remotely that everyone has already stated but the isolation factor is real, especially if you're single.
It might seem fun for a while (couple of months) to not wear pants at work and be able to put in 4 super productive hours of work before 10am if you wake up early and those are great things but I have to wonder if working remotely has long term mental health issues.
To get human interaction I force myself to leave the house (I walk a few times a day for exercise), have some friends and hobbies, run errands etc. but it's not the same as being out of the house for 8-10+ hours a day. I'd like to see a test done on single people who have been working remotely for 5+ years and seeing if they have higher levels of general anxiety than anyone working a job where they need to commute full time.
Even if you have a private office where you spend 95% of your time alone for ~8 hours, that's so much different (arguably better) than not leaving your house or apartment except for occasional short duration activities.
I later moved to a city in southern California, which was a more suburban environment. It wasn't walkable, you had to take a car everywhere and I didn't know anyone other than my partner when we first moved here. I now was in a situation where I had to re-establish my social connections without my previous activities (I had stopped being involved a few years before the move) and I also didn't have a work environment where I had also made many social connections over the years.
For the first 5+ years, this was fine, I was able to make a handful of new friends but many of them started moving because of cost of living and starting new families. At this point, I feel like it really started to become determinantal to my mental health. Honestly, it took a long time for me to even notice and admit it was affecting me, but eventually, it was pretty debilitating. This wasn't the only source, but it was a major factor to be sure.
That being said, after being back in the office for 2 years (they have pretty strong no work at home policy) I am ready to go back to remote work. I loved the benefits of remote work but I also now am much more aware of the importance of getting out and finding more social activities to balance this out. Also, I wouldn't go back as a consultant. Having a rotating cast of people you interact with made it much harder to form longer-term social bonds and also there was never dedicated time planned to meet in person at regular intervals, as a lot of remote-first companies do.
I love and really miss the flexibility of my schedule and if I can find an environment that supports stable interactions with people and I continue to re-engage in more social activities outside of work, I would jump back into remote work in a heartbeat.
* Rent a co-working space
* Work out of coffee shops
* Make an effort to have a social life outside of your job.
Second, much harder, is the employer support. Direct manager of remote workers should know how to manage them (which is a rare skill) and be interested in doing it. It means parceling work in a larger, independent chunks, planning integration and communication as needed and spotting and resolving problems early enough with no/rare face to face contact (and face to face does help for this).
Fail either of those and working remotely is inviting failure. My 2c.
You'd be wrong to suspect that. I am very productive at work but I just end up getting distracted at home. It is hard. It's a mentality thing. Additionally, when I'm at the office, I can talk to another person and just ask a question in 5 seconds that would take possibly hours to get a reply otherwise.
I've thought about this a lot, and for me, as a remote working, I believe I have about the same amount of productivity as in the office. But instead of water cooler talk and socialization, I find I'm able to take care of chores and keep my affairs in order so that my free time is more free. It makes me much happier to work remote, simply because when I socialize in the office and commute, I find I have no energy to keep my affairs in order.
I don't want to be forced into a open floor plan office. But I also don't want to be full time remote, or forced into a singular private office.
I want to be able to go into an office when I feel like. Work out of a small office/conference room when it gets noisy. Sit in the open when it makes sense. Work from home when I need to be heads down.
I wish management would stop looking for the "productivity magic bullet" and just start offering options based on their employees. There is no one-size fits all solution here.
It's a great approach, and I've enjoyed it for a good 3 years or so. It has the effect of damaging collaboration though - which for some roles is perfect (where I am, some roles you can be ignored for a good few days), but for ones like mine, it actually makes it hard. It also scratches out pretty much all sense of camaraderie, so it depends whether you want to feel connected with colleagues or not.
This kind of agile working is a double edged sword, the benefits give rise to different challenges, challenges I never thought I'd see as such previously.
That being said, working from home from 7:30-9, then heading to a coffee shop for an hour, then coming into the office for a bit, and then going home is freedom it'd be hard to give up.
I did not like working remotely honestly. As an extrovert, I did not like the isolation. However, the major drawback was not being able to steer any of the tech/political discussion because I was remote. I had poor managers/CTO that needed a good smack to the head because they were too scatterbrained, but I was not there to do it. Impossible over Slack.
Now that I am job hunting again, I am wary of remote jobs. Of the three roles I am pursuing now, only one is remote. I have a good feeling about this one since there already is a sizable part of the office that is remote.
Any employer that could leverage remote workers could have the equivalent of a $1 trillion headquarters employing 1 billion people, tomorrow: at a cost of exactly $0.
So it stands to reason that there is SOMETHING keeping remote-only workplaces from eating their competitors for lunch. Something turns off that growth or ruins the economics.
What is that something?
In places that I've worked, WFH is usually reserved for divisions that are expected to be intrinsically-motivated high performers. Some companies can afford to be staffed with nothing but these types of people; other companies are not so lucky.
WFH only works if the people that are W-ingFH are motivated enough by their work to do it without being supervised.
And for some job roles in some organizations, the savings from not having to hold an office for a role, are more than offset by the lost productivity from having that role as a remote hire.
I'm not trying to say that all HN-ers are magical special large-brained unicorn employees; but I've worked at several places where certain key roles are staffed by people that couldn't figure out how to effectively work remotely if their lives depended on it.
For me it was the opposite: I was highly productive, but the onsite managers did not know how to work effectively (if at all honestly)
The thing that ruins the growth and economics is that nobody knows how to do it yet and trying is either risky (you fail) or expensive to train/experiment until you figure it out.
You create all this traffic, congestion on trains, sometimes people packed liked sardines for what? To sit in an office and work less than you would in the peace and quiet at home.
Much better if governments encouraged people to work from home, maybe have local hubs where people can go to if they can't work at home.
Cut down on the traffic and let people enjoy more of their lives.
When I don't WFH, I commute 4 hours a day, in and out of london - i'd rather spend that with my kids.
https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2019/07/25/governor-baker-wo...
I have worked remotely more than not and it's not ideal. I suspect that if teleportation machines existed, then remote work wouldn't be a thing. Once you leave the office for the day (or leave the house to go to the office) then the logistical problems start (where do I find an affordable place to live.) Logistical problems for employees become logistical issues for employers. Working remotely is a trade-off and much of the time it works well enough.
I'm guessing that most early remote workers get relatively cushy setups with allowances for equipment and good salaries. As remote becomes more common, then I bet that gets squeezed. Employers shouldn't expect that the average person can make it work. If you don't have a dedicated quiet office area then it gets real difficult. Pets are a distraction. Other people in the home are a distraction (and it's not their fault, they have the right to "be at home".) If you have a significant other living at home full time and that person is in a grumpy mood, then good luck.
I feel that people who can make it work are those who either live in a cave with no other living creatures or they have the bread to get a big enough house and funds to create an operations center in a dedicated room. Everyone else should at least get a desk at a co-working space.
There's also a lot which gets lost in the communication of remote working. The communication you do have is much more mercenary. A group of special operators can carry out a mission together and even do so with mostly radio silence. But these people lose out of a lot of the more interesting elements of civilian life. Alice is an avatar and emoji's who can get stuff done in remote space. But you don't get to see her world class key short-cut skills from which you could open up a whole new way of thinking about your own operations. You don't see the real pressure your boss or manager is under and you get far less information about how things work because they won't be casually confiding in you at the water cooler. You don't need a NORAD display to show major events and weather conditions around the world to see what challenges your collaborators will be up against in getting things done the coming day.
Remote work kind of sucks. Where do I take the survey? ;)
Nobody can reach me after work through work channels. I simulate leaving the office.
Trust me, most engineers are not THAT good that their code writing contributions alone would justify high career leaps. Even the highly technical leaders need to do a lot of brain work thats not necessarily coding - like architecture design and whatnot, and most of that requires a lot of interaction, discussions and other soft skills.
> I have a little room that I use as my office, homelab, and to home a few other hobbies.
That you have a spare room is entirely my point. That's a luxury that not everyone has. If you don't have this, then you are at a disadvantage for being successful with remote work. A workplace is a sort of equalizer, though certainly not perfect. Rich or poor, all you have to do to work at McDonald's is show up. The workplace provides everything else. Sure, your employer may provide allowances for your home setup, but not all will do that and they certainly can't create a spare room in your house. The closest they can get is to pay for a co-working space.
> Of your examples of "lost communication," none of those are things I feel I would be missing out on and I've never had issues communicating with my coworkers remotely.
It's undisputable that you lose information with remote communication vs face to face communication. We communicate with body language and emotion which doesn't carry over well even in a video feed. People are more willing to share certain things in different modes of communication. Some people don't like to use messaging at all. Remote work is still "good enough" but you do lose information. Losing information doesn't necessarily create "issues communicating with my coworkers remotely" but it does have an adverse effect.
Ironically I spend most of my time wondering about this WHILE living inside the big city and how my money would go so much further and I'd be far happier on quiet land somewhere than packed like sardines with tons of foot and car traffic constantly looking down 15 blocks for "an affordable place to live" where I have to give a days notice about moving in before it's scooped up by someone else..
> there are a ton of assumptions in this argument, and you seem to be projecting a lot of your personal beliefs and feeling as well
I agree and I wanted to walk through the differences in my life (as I'm 80% remote):
> If you don't have a dedicated quiet office area then it gets real difficult.
I agree, but it's not hard to create this environment at home. Buy a house with one more bedroom than you need and make it an office. That's what I've done.
> Pets are a distraction.
Our dog doesn't come into my office when I'm working.
> Other people in the home are a distraction (and it's not their fault, they have the right to "be at home".)
I've got three kids. My wife homeschools our children, so they are home all the time. They're all elementary and middle-school age. They are going to be kids and do what they do, even if I asked them not to. And yet this is almost never a distraction for me. Even on calls 90% of the time my audio is far cleaner than my co-workers who are in an open office.
This does require understanding and support from my wife, but she's an adult and we're on the same page. This is what we, together, want. When my office door is locked I'm "at work" and she and the kids don't bother me except for emergencies, just like she wouldn't call me at work if I was in the office except for emergencies. On the other hand, I get to "come home" for lunch every day.
> If you have a significant other living at home full time and that person is in a grumpy mood, then good luck.
As mentioned in the last point, when I'm in my office I'm "at work." Grumpy or not my wife isn't going to bother me. This isn't something special about remote. It's a normal part of maturing in a relationship. Being grumpy is not a good enough reason to call your spouse at work in the middle of their day. It's no different if I'm remote.
> I feel that people who can make it work are those who either live in a cave with no other living creatures or they have the bread to get a big enough house and funds to create an operations center in a dedicated room.
OK, snark aside, having a dedicated space does make everything easier. But first this isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things if you are intentional about it. The cost of housing can vary quite a bit, but being remote gives you a lot more flexibility to find an affordable, comfortable home that has space for a dedicated office.
Second, even without a dedicated room for an office you can make it work. For several years I worked from my bedroom. I had a corner where I setup my "office" and during the work day the bedroom was my office. I will concede that there are many things about this that are not ideal, but it's not as black-and-white-bad-idea as you're making it out to be. It's not like the office is a magically ideal workplace without its own drawbacks. Personally I would much rather deal with the inconveniences of a less than ideal home office than those of the open plan office that is common nowadays. It's not even a comparison for me.
> The communication you do have is much more mercenary.
This just doesn't match my experience at all. Communication does require more effort in a remote setting, that's true. But in my experience being in the office is not a guarantee that healthy communication with happen. Putting in the effort to communicate intentionally (not just a byproduct of co-location) is valuable either way.
I will concede that face-to-face is the king for building relationships. However, this is not a daily need. Also I don't need work to provide a social setting. I've already got more than enough friends and family to "socialize" with outside of work. I do value good relationships with my coworkers and I do like having a chance to meet them in person but we don't need to be BFFs to have a good and productive working relationship.
> you don't get to see her world class key short-cut skills from which you could open up a whole new way of thinking about your own operations.
1. No but I can read Tim's blog post about the same subject.
2. I find it a bit rude to be watching other people's monitors as they work so I wouldn't see this anyways.
> You don't see the real pressure your boss or manager is under and you get far less information about how things work because they won't be casually confiding in you at the water cooler.
1. Intentional communication addresses some of this.
2. Being in the same location doesn't necessarily get you this. I'm thinking, for example, of the time half the engineering team got laid off on a Friday with no warning. This was a "collaborative open office" company that didn't offer remote.
Communication is always critical for a healthy and productive organization. Co-locating provides enough chatter built-in to obfuscate poor communication patterns. And yet poor communication remains one of the main causes of failed and over-budget software systems, even in co-located teams. Remote just makes it more obvious when teams don't know how to communicate.
> You don't need a NORAD display to show major events and weather conditions around the world to see what challenges your collaborators will be up against in getting things done the coming day.
What? I'm not even looking at the weather for the city I'm in. If my coworkers have a challenge we just talk about it.
> Remote work kind of sucks.
Work in general these days kind of sucks. In my opinion remote is the saving grace of our industry. I'm at the point I won't even consider a job unless it has either a private office or allows a minimum of 60% remote.
I was partly just taking the part of Devil's Advocate to at least represent the cons of remote working amid all the sunshine and rainbows of this post and the replies.
A key element of my comment (maybe not well communicated) was that remote work also includes people who are struggling at the living wage mark. When you create a thread on HN, the assumption is that everyone is making significantly greater than the regional median household income. People who are struggling may be living in a location with a single bedroom or studio and can't afford anything bigger. They may be living in a home in which the spouse is abusive or doesn't respect the need for a quiet place to work. If you're in the position of "any emergency is going to drown me" then there's no easy recovery from equipment issues.
As I mentioned before, if you're working for McDonald's, all you have to do is show up. Even showing up is a big obstacle for many (lack of transportation) and if the employer required much more than that, then they might not find any workers.
> 1. No but I can read Tim's blog post about the same subject.
The point of what you are replying to is that you learn things from working with others that you won't learn by following their online activity. I can't believe this would even be a point to argue. I learn things by being around co-workers in person. I would feel sad for anyone who wouldn't. I'm regularly floored by what co-workers can show me and I do the same for them. The "WTF, why didn't I know about this before?" moments from them casually showing me something which was never a big to them.
The same goes for speaking with the boss, management, or anyone else outside the people you are working right next to. The information flow is massive compared to the peephole you get with remote communication. People "say" things they don't even realize they're saying. They don't have to say ANYTHING and they're still telling you a lot. Maybe I just pick up this more than other people do?
Here's an idea. Try recreating the experience of "let's go out for a beer" with a co-worker online. You can't do it. You both have to be experiencing the same environment, seeing body language, reading emotion and all that is before you even get to the point of actually speaking.
Take all this away and we might as well be robots communicating because by removing these things you are removing what makes us human.
That said, remote communication still works. I did say that in my comment.
Working from home reminds me of the isolation of being homeschooled. I love having the flexibility to work remote on certain days, for example when I need to bang out a bunch of code. But, having a place to interact with people is invaluable for me.
I imagine countless others feel the same way, hence why companies still see offices as having value. So, for all the remote work evangelists on here: what do you do to counteract isolation?
That being said, sometimes I do still find myself feeling a tad lonely at times and is something I still am figuring out the best ways to manage. I still believe that the benefits of remote work still vastly outweigh a typical office job and it would be very hard for me to give up my current situation.
I love working remotely. I've been working remotely for a bit less than a year now. I had some few months break at the beginning of this year where I was working on my own product, but I was still at home.
Why do I love it? Well, my wife is staying at home with me and we get to spend so much more time together. I think over that period of time we've got closer together. We can chat during the day, eat meals together and stuff like that, it's super cool.
More reasons? If I can work asynchronously (not being dependent on the rest of my team) I can schedule my day according to my needs. Need a one hour walk outside? Well, why not:) Even though it's not my company I'm working for I kind feel like I am the boss. I don't have people staring at my screen, I don't have people talking next to me, I can go to a shop and prepare a nice breakfast if I want to. It's really good.
I do agree that it gets a bit boring without a chitchat with colleagues. But I try to compensate for it by meeting with my friends and family regularly.
Given the Right Set of Parameters™ (omitting for brevity's sake; much has been written about them), Remote Work can be the "panacea", and a path towards a more serene approach to work and life. FWIW, I'm a long-time remote worker myself, and won't nonchalantly say "would recommend it to a friend" without having a serious understanding of the said friend's propensity for it—lest I would lead them down a steep slippery slope.
The boring truth any reasonably experienced remote worker knows is that to be able to sustainably do it in the long run—which is the critical bit—requires a certain "psychological profile": ability to tolerate spells of solitude, having the discipline to do the Right Thing when no one is watching, and so on.
So, saying "everyone loves it" is reckless. Not least because the article's sample size is a paltry 486 people.
I'm currently in a cube, which is miles better than open office. I say I like working from home, only because I don't foresee getting my own office anytime soon.
In practice, this also covers data points such as status or style of shirt, whether I’ve showered that day, where on the planet I happen to be, whether I’m actually in a pool, how far from civilization I am, or whether I’ve injured my leg and didn’t tell anyone because it’s not a big deal and I don’t mind typing while my leg hurts, or whether I have loud death metal playing at top volume.
I’m content with all of those things remaining a mystery for my coworkers because none are correlated with quality and timeliness of my work.
We are social creatures. I don’t understand the complete lack of addressing the issue: 8 hours a day I’m cut off from people except virtually. Prisons that force virtual visitation are criticized for this exact issue.
We are cramped up like industry workers in 1880.. Yes we are social creatures and we need DIFFERENT levels of interaction with others. BUT we are not cattle to cramp us up desk to desk.
More like, complaining that the whole design of modern city life is around work. As more and more people work remotely, cities will change, habits will change. People who work at home have been largely neglected for decades; we feel out of sync with cities and other people, almost marginalized. This has to change.
1. If you have any family members that will be home throughout the day you can see them
2. You can step outside and talk to your neighbors
3. You can take a 10 minute break to walk to a local store/park
4. You can go out to lunch at restaurant
5. You can invite anyone to come over at any time
6. Before and after work, you can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, and see anyone you want as well as on weekends
So it seems it's not quite like a prison... not to mention you can also call, text, video chat, IM, or communicate virtually at any time rather than only during certain periods of time with certain people as told by the prison.
Also, if you're working in an office, how much time are you actually spending socializing and interacting with coworkers vs getting your work done?
I understand that some people have a need to interact with people daily, but many of us prefer the quiet/isolation while we work, and comparing remote work to prison is ridiculous
Been to a park during the day? It's nanny's and mom's. How many are going to be like, "yeah, random dude approaching me and trying to chat me up. Great!" Most are sketched out unless you got a kid with you. I've been in this situation and they look at you very weirdly. (How desperate must you be to go to a park to chat with moms?)
Lunch requires friends who also can do such a thing. I go out to lunch with coworkers very often.
You can invite anyone who isn't working or can work remotely with you. Sure, I did do this for a bit. I'd drive 30 minutes away to see my friend and we'd work remotely together about once a week. But then I was actually going further than my commute to work! Hah!
And so can anyone with a non remote job.
You can have the quiet and isolation while not working remotely. It's just that it's not valued in many workplaces anymore.
BTW, I don't get how people think that working remotely means isolation and quiet?? When I worked remotely, there were plenty of days where I had to take tons of long Skype calls, had to chat endlessly with people over IM, and then send more emails on top of it. I barely got any "work" done and didn't get to focus because everything required my attention.
Isolation and quiet is more than an environment. It includes details around a culture around workplace communication styles and how much you prioritize immediate responses.
Well, yeah, there is a difference between forcing everyone to do something and letting people choose to do something.
I also absolutely hate working with people who think that work is a place to get all of their social engagement. I don't need any more friends and I definitely don't need any out of work socialization with my co-workers or during work time that looks like socialization (parties, events...).
Right, and 97% of current ferret owners say that ferrets make great pets [0]. I'd like the survey to include people who worked remotely in the past and no longer do. Count me in that group. I worked remotely for a six months at a remote-friendly but not remote-first company and here were my findings:
* It was lonely being at home. And I wasn't as productive. After a month, I rented space at a WeWork, which helped with both problems. But it requires that you be outgoing to meet people who work in your space but aren't your coworkers.
* I didn't like being physically separated from my colleagues. It meant that I wasn't privy to many of the important conversations in the company.
* I was always afraid that come a round of layoffs that it's easier to fire the folks who work 1000 miles away.
* In a company that isn't remote first, it limits your career growth (most of the time).
* Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to explain difficult technical things in person. Yes, screenshares are very helpful, but sometimes a hard problem involves going back and forth between monitors, for example. I also like being able to use a whiteboard [1].
* As a software engineer, it's easy to get siloed into only communicating with people on your team and remote work only increases this tendency. If you work in an office, you meet people from other parts of the business in the cafeteria/break room/etc. and that allows you to have a more full understanding of the company. And it's my belief that if you don't understand the business, then you don't understand what your software should be doing.
Overall, I didn't hate working remotely but it wasn't great either. I would do it again for a short period of time (e.g. a year while my wife is on sabbatical) without hesitation, but I personally didn't like it for the long term. That said, the ability to work remotely on occasion is something that's very important to me.
I personally wouldn't apply to jobs at remote-only companies, but I definitely think this is the way to go if you want to make a career out of working remote as it solves a few of the problems above.
[0] Not saying that they don't, for some people. Just saying that asking people who currently own ferrets means your sample is biased.
[1] Sometimes old fashioned is best. One of my companies moved to a new office and was thinking of installing "smart boards" at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, thinking that the engineers would love them. To their surprise, the engineers protested and asked for good quality "dumb" boards instead.
To an extent I can see the issue, but when screen sharing this usually ends up with the other person then showing their screen and how it's working.
I am at a remote-friendly place currently, and depending on the project I prefer to work in the office, but longer term I may consider more remote work due to commute.
We are but one of many offices throughout the country too so it's not a huge deal if I don't meet everyone in the company, so long as I know the people part of our division.
Being able to work remotely on occasion, or perhaps the ability to not work remotely on occasion (e.g. work remotely from a coworking space 2 days a week and from home 3 days a week, or work in the real office 1 day per week) would be ideal.
Being able to work in an office one day a week makes a big difference. Some things are easier in person, but they can be delayed until that day you are in the office. I had a boss at a previous company who did two days at home and three in the office and it was an ideal mix. He could get the benefits of being able to do things face to face and the benefits of being able to do deep work at home (personally, I do deep work better in the office, but I understand why many people do better at home).
That said I have lost multiple (mostly younger) employees due to several of the reasons you mention.
I think you nailed it as far as the biggest challenge at traditional cos - remote will definitely kill your career path. It really is only good at those cos once you are an expert in a niche and don’t care about the Corp ladder. Definitely try to find remote first cos if you are not at the zenith of your Corp climbing.
But without being in the office a couple of days a week for collaboration, a lot of stuff just wouldn't work. Conference calls, slack and email are no substitute for the face-to-face conversations that can resolve blocking issues in a few seconds versus a few hours.
I'd definitely recommend partial remote working. Not sure I'd want it fully.
I don't doubt this is a real challenge for certain teams or types of work. However, in 5+ years of working remotely at fully-distributed orgs I have never experienced this. Not once have I encountered a scenario where being in a room together would have dramatically changed/improved/whatever the discussion. Perhaps it just comes down to having a team that can communicate effectively without being face-to-face, but this always interested me as a common criticism of remote work.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if you are working in a more functional team than the one I'm consulting/contracting with right now. I'm not going to name the organisation when I'm bad-mouthing them so much, but there are systemic problems going right up to the top.
If you asked me to name somewhere with smart, competent people throughout the org, working well within a lightweight but functional agile delivery process, I wouldn't name the folks I'm with right now. There are a handful of competent developers (all the devs really) and one or two decent ops guys, but everyone from the PO to the Security Architect, to the QA folks is a walking disaster zone, poor communication being a big part of the problem.
I'm just glad delivery comes relatively soon and I'm not trying to build a career with them...
I haven't found this to be the case
Tem minutes in a room discussing an issue with all interested parties can sort things out far faster, in my experience.
Which may not be universally applicable - I'm not claiming it is, or that fully remote working doesn't work for others. Just that I've seen it be less than perfect on a few occasions.
I absolutely love it. I used to work at a very chatty office before they let me work remotely. My productivity and ability to think deeply about problems has skyrocketed.
Remote work isn't a catch all solution but it can be really effective if you match it to the right job.
Hmm, I don't believe this number. According to the SBA [1], there are over 30 million small businesses in the USA (averaging just under 2 people each). These constitute the vast majority (99.9%) of US companies.
You probably can't do "an online survey of 1,005 workforce hiring decision makers obtained through a third-party, independent online sample" and get useful information about 63% of all companies. This sounds like Sample Bias galore. There aren't even 19M (.63*30M) companies with offices in this country.
[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...
When someone has to put a request in writing on Slack or with an email instead of just going to my cubicle and bugging me, it makes it less likely they will bother me with stuff that is not important.
In terms of a daily standup, they work just as well using a video conference call, or, better yet, as a written report posted to Slack every day.
I say this because this company has no office space anywhere. EVERYONE works from home. We're small (~10), but spread out over the whole US. I have coworkers I've never actually seen in the flesh, and I only see my boss a couple times a year.
This works very well for us. I'd have a hard time going back to an office. But it's not "remote" in the sense that some folks are in an office and some folks aren't, which I think makes our WFH different from "remote work."
I enjoy the trust I am given to get work done that I promise to get done. I'm in a different TZ, so I enjoy the quiet time I get when the others on the team aren't working. However, as hard as we try, I still miss conversations that happen away from a computer or phone. Also, I do sometimes miss working in person with the people I work with. Finally, I do miss having a proper lab. I look around at the RF equipment laying around my home office and get a bit depressed.
Remote work works. Anyone who says it doesn't has an agenda. Like non-remote work, you just have to hire the right people.
I think the caveats people bring up are serious and require careful consideration. They are part of why I am trying to find a company that is "remote-first" and I would prefer to avoid companies where I am one of a handful of remote employees while the rest of the team is co-located in one or more offices.
My major fears are:
* I suffer from isolation and loneliness and it impacts my mental well-being
* I find my career progression stalled
* I miss out on more lucrative compensation
* I find my coworkers making decisions without consulting me
* I experience an increase in general anxiety
* I find my productivity and focus to be significantly less
* I am unable to balance work/life when they are combined in the same place
The worst case scenario is that a combination of my fears being realized forces me to recognize my unsuitability for remote work. I would then be stuck in a smaller city with less opportunity, potentially with a mortgage. I might be forced to sell my home for a loss, to move back into a bigger city and to attempt to find a normal job to rebuild my retirement savings.
My plan to mitigate these is to be aware of my fears and to put into place strategies that can deal with each one. I believe that companies that plan to be remote-reliant in the future will need expertise at the management level to deal with those issues throughout their workforce. Where there is legitimate fear there is also opportunity. I believe that all of the problems associated with remote work can be handled if they are openly discussed.
That being said, if my job was, say, a 20 minute commute, I'd go in probably 3 or 4 days a week, assuming the office was nice. I prefer working in person at times, it really depends on what I'm doing, but the option is what makes it work for me. 100% remote would only make me happy for so long, I think.
Also, rarely discussed in these types of posts is that your social abilities definitely diminish if you work from home a lot and rarely interact with people. I've noticed it in myself and made a conscious push to get into the office more often to offset that.
- It’s not all positive, but the upsides can be bigger than the downsides.
- If you have kids age 1-9 say, that need to be dropped off at school/daycare then WFH is fantastic. The commute time I instead spend working means I can drop kids off at 8 and pick them up and have dinner on the table at 5.
- I’d not want to do it full time if I did not have family. The isolation is real even though I do video calls a large part of the day.
- If had a choice I’d do 1-2 days in an office, but unfortunately it’s too expensive to pay a full time desk in a co working space and use it just part time. If I didn’t need a big screen etc I’d probably go for a part time seat in a coworking space.
If you have kids to take to school it might not change that much, but if you can take them close to the start of classes it might mean an extra 30 minutes to one hour of sleep a day.
No wonder people work and feel so much better, even if its due to that simple factor alone.
But of course, there are other things that come to play like the ability to concentrate, limited interruptions, being able to eat proper food, etc.
1. Those that WFH mostly prefer to WFH. Not really a surprise. Akin to "Those that like cooking enjoy making food at home".
2. Plenty of personal reasons why WFH working habits should be generalized across everybody because someone prefers it for themselves.
3. WFH works out better when home is already a convenient place to work; not necessarily if someone lives in a 80 sq ft room or wants to meet people/do things in a certain place.
Most of the complaints such as isolation and disconnection are because society has not adapted to remote working rather than the merits of RW itself. Imagine a world where everyone whose job allows it works remotely. That 's basically the majority of workers[1]. Imagine the change in the pace of life and thousands of people feeling as lonely as you. The precipitous fall of real estate prices as commercial properties become vacant. The empty roads that don't need more than one lane. PEople reconnecting with their neighbors by spending a lot more time in physical proximity. Preschools and even schools becoming obsolete and replaced with home/small group schooling. Our current lifestyles are hostile to remote work. We don't want to return to the closed societies of small villages, but we also want to make working at home humane. We should be able to work on this problem and i look forward to the things that people will invent in the next few years. Changes like this have happened before
1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/7825806/IMG+...
(shameless share, but please let me know what do you think about it if you want ;) )
> People like to harp on the failings of remote work. Loneliness. Distractions. Not unplugging. Lack of collaboration. Dog hair.
> But in reality, people love working remotely. And they’re willing to forgive its failings because it’s just that good.
does not follow from a survey asking remote workers if they like working remotely.
I'm all about a workers-first mentality, but workers and managers' perception of remote work could be vastly different.
If I ever change jobs, the ability to work remote is going to be very high on my must-have list.
Yeah, you can slack off at the office as well but why? I obviously can't do any meaningful leisure activities there. And yes, it's a tooling and management issue but I haven't come across a single organisation where it's not possible to game it unless your job output is extremely easy to measure.
I believe this is way more common than people think.
While I don't want to flame you or attack you personally, I probably wouldn't want to work with someone with your attitude on either a distributed team or in an office.
It's not as simple as "don't hire/work with those people" either, because we don't always have full control over that.