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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

One thing I found quite striking was that they started allowing "optional WFH". Slack, which not only makes one of the main tools used to enable distributed work, but the most popular one, didn't allow remote work??

It'll be interesting to see what changes come as they start eating their own dog food.

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I'm sure WFH is allowed. However in companies I've worked for, it's usually expected that you're in the office most of the time, and that if you want to WFH it's either ad-hoc (package being delivered, home repairs, doctors appointment) or it's some scheduled day (eg. our team works from home every Wednesday, or Sally works from home on Thursdays).

The optional here is probably just allowing for individual freedom. My company also had 'optional' WFH, then 'recommended' WFH, followed by total office shutdown on Tuesday.

I'm not sure you could attract top tier tech talent if you forbade working from home. It's a perk that I really enjoy because it's very convenient, and if I don't feel like going in to the office for whatever reason I don't have to. If I interviewed at a company that forbade working from home (or had very strict rules around it) I'd have to really think twice about whether I would work there. To me, it speaks to a culture of valuing employees based on whether they're merely seen to be working, rather than their actual work output.

Slack is surprisingly anti remote work. They only offer it to incredibly senior roles. Everyone else has to jump through hoops and get approvals from many layers of middle management - it's one of those ask Mom / ask Dad policies that's designed to make sure no one gets an answer.

Genuinely curious: what's your source for this claim? Are you a current or former employee, or did you hear this from one? If so, what position(s)?

confirmed with friend who works there in middle mgmt...

I'm also curious about this. As a data point: we're fully remote and are in a similar product space @ Guilded (http://www.guilded.gg). One of our best early decisions was to use our product exclusively for all of our work communication.

For us, this degree of dogfooding - which is really only possible at a fully-remote company - has been directly responsible for too many features and improvements to count. There's no better way to develop empathy for your users and a deep care for your products than to have your entire team rely on them for their most critical communications every single day.

Not all companies build products that facilitate remote collaboration, but I think that remote work presents some unique opportunities for those that do.

Most companies aren’t fully remote, so dogfooding the common use of Slack seems smart, where it is still a useful tool even if you are slacking someone 5 feet away.

This is very true. I recently moved from a mostly on-site company, where I thought we used Slack a lot, to a globally-distributed, fully-remote one where Slack is the primary form of communication. We use it very differently, as the volume is far higher and we have to deal with timezones. e.g. in my previous job, I found threads annoying and rarely used them as I found they meant messages got lost. In my new one it's a faux pas to not use threads except for in very low-volume channels, because otherwise its tough for people to catch up on channels.

Yeah, that's an interesting point as well. Our product is for gamers, who are usually "remote" (if you can call it that), but Slack may trend towards over-fitting to highly-engaged, fully remote work if they were to do this.

I was more surprised to see a major CEO hanging out with friends in a restaurant after the pandemic was declared. I’d been in isolation half a week by that point, and was wondering what “the masses” were still doing going out.

I’m astounded to see that smart people were still out socializing by then.

I think startup CEOs in general have a different risk tolerance from other smart people...

I have to assume they also have access to health care that most of us (Americans) can't imagine.

And, if the only people they were putting at risk by being out and about was themselves, that would be fine. But that's not the case.

"Sell shovels, don't dig for gold."

From one of the tweets:

> In some senses, we were made for this. Slack’s not specifically a “work from home” tool; it’s more of a “create organizational agility” tool. But an all-at-once transition to remote work creates a lot of demand for organizational agility.

I’ve never thought of Slack as a tool primarily for remote work. I suspect the vast majority of their customers are non-remote companies.

Most remote companies use Slack or some other IM message.

But remote companies tend to have cultures of async communication, so they don't suffer from the problems described as much.

We did the same. We normally have "office days" on Monday and Friday, for team meetings etc. and the other days are for everyone to decide what works for them. Most have one or two fixed WFH days.

Due to Covid-19 we changed it first to "optional WFH" (but with a hint that it may be a good idea) on all days, then "please WFH", and now "mandatory WFH, unless absolutely impossible"

In my (limited) experience, companies are initially resistant and look down upon people who dial into a meeting as opposed to attend in person. Having an official policy of permitting/encouraging WFH eases the pressure on employees to come into the office to attend meetings.

> It'll be interesting to see what changes come as they start eating their own dog food.

They use Teams, actually.

Zoom didn’t allow any wfh at all before this either and now they’re 100% remote.

That’s what surprised me as well.

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