Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?

I absolutely think you lose something from lack of face-to-face contact. Some of the most productive leadership and decison-making sessions I've had came from sitting around a table or sharing a meal or a drink with a team, and going back and forth about something.

Additionally, casual contact helps too. I put a couch in my office, and people would come just sit down and talk. The setting set the vibe. I had some great conversations with people just kicking back that I would have never otherwise had.

I absolutely realize people will disagree, but this is my experience.

It fails with respect to growing junior team members. It’s impossible for junior team members to observe the day-to-day patterns, habits and general implicit knowledge of senior team members that they would pick up (mostly not consciously) in an office simply through observation.

In my experience with very early stage teams, a lot of creativity and innovation occurs as a byproduct of spending a large amount of time together in close quarters discussing a range of topics (work related and not.) I’ve managed remote teams as well and while there are ways to replicate certain aspects of this dynamic, overall it’s much more difficult.

Wow, so many people here want to date their coworkers. There are other places to meet women than the office. In fact it is probably better that you meet someone not in your office.

Managers are going to be PRO office work because without a venue for all manner of office politics, their effectiveness is diminished, particularly in age-identity politics. They will say something like "we are unable to foster a community of communal idea sharing and mentorship of younger employees." What they want is to use their new hires who are going to be college age to ostracize and push out more experienced workers they want to replace. The whole kumbaya campfire thing does not work if no one can see what the other looks like or if they are in their peer group or not.

Assuming the work _can_ be done remotely:

- Connections with people are easier in person.

- Getting unblocked by talking to someone is easier in person.

- Collaborating with materials is easier in person (shared whiteboard, post it notes, no delay in comms)

- Meetings are easier in person as video conferences can have audio delays, people talking over each other, etc. No worries about people leaving their mic on while blending a smoothy or other tech issues.

- In a meeting, it is easier to keep distractions low when on site (everyone close your laptops and leave your phones in your pocket is easier at a location).

- Work socializing is waaaay harder when working remotely.

I say all these as a full time remote person before this whole COVID thing. That said, each of the arguments above are able to be mitigated and can we can learn cope with them.

I've been full time remote for several years. What I've found is that it can ever so slightly erode some people's ability to communicate clearly with each other, or be sure that they have. This leads to meetings that go on longer as people feel a need to restate and reconfirm, code reviews that go on a bit longer, some duplicated effort as people look over each others' shoulder to make sure they "got the message", and so on. Nothing major, but it kind of builds up. A little small talk can go a long way toward rebuilding that confidence, and it's harder to do when latency and VC annoyances are in the way. I've seen this play out many times even on long-term fully-remote teams BTW. Getting together at conferences or "summits" is often the glue holding them together.

I know that's still not a strong argument against remote work. It's pretty weak, but it's the best I can do. Overall, I think remote work is at least as good as in-person work for many people.

The most annoying thing I've run into while working remote is that whenever I have an unproductive day due to random interruptions or little things that aren't tracked in JIRA, to my boss it just looks like I haven't been working all day.

But when I was at the office, sitting in my chair, he could see that I was working hard even if the stories weren't getting completed.

I haven't figured out how to solve this, other than by spending a lot more time and effort documenting the numerous little things that cause distractions and exposing that in my daily status updates. I can tell that it's still not as convincing to him though.

So I often end up finding myself working late in the evenings just to finish the actual work that was scheduled to be done that day, even though I've already spent 8 hours dealing with random issues and helping other team mates with things.

I need to find a solution soon before I completely burn out.

The strongest argument against remote work (generally speaking, not specific to the current coronavirus) is that a company is not disciplined enough to communicate well, especially across teams. This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.

There's also a case where some jobs need to be done in-person. A good example is a restocker for a grocery store. You can't move boxes remotely. Similarly a surgeon can't do a surgery remotely.

Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office. It can be difficult to identify those who will actually perform well in that environment. It takes some degree of maturity and responsibility to provide value as a remote worker because there's always that temptation to do something else.

That said, I wouldn't trade this lifestyle for anything. The only complaint I've ever had is that coworkers not capable of performing in a remote environment sometimes last too long at the company.

Rural Broadband.

I will be taking part in a county task force meeting on Tuesday where we'll be looking at applying for grant money as well as looking at doing more problem solving. This still holds us back in 2020 and really shouldn't.

Remote work could be perfect for individual contributors, but it's still full of challenges for people who work on teams.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about remote work. I have been working remotely since 2012; the challenges of remote work are not new to me. I work with 30+ people, and our clients are in different timezones. Our team includes full-stack developers, designers, product leads, and other support staff.

First Challenge: Schedule of work hours or team availability. Back in 2012, each member of our team started working from our respective homes. We started with seven team members; it's a small team. Initially, people are productive while we work as individual contributors. However, efficiency and productivity dropped very low when we started to work on the same project because everyone has the flexibility to choose when they want to work as long as they complete the required hours per week. We partially solved this by setting standard work hours that everyone in the team will follow.

Second Challenge: Quality of work is affected by many factors. Working alone remotely is initially fun, but eventually, employees feel lonely. Keeping focus at work is also hard due to distractions, like games, social media, house-related errands, etc. Monitoring employees' honesty on work hours and work done is also a challenge. Since our team mostly live in the same town, we decided to work in the same place. We converted my whole dorm into an office, removed the walls, joint the rooms, and made it look like a real office. Centralizing our distributed team to work in the same place doubled or tripled our team's efficiency and productivity. You can imagine how it made it easier to do daily standups, do design planning, pair programming, code reviews, etc. Employees became happier, and the bond between got stronger; we also eat meals together, we go on retreats, we play games together, our employee retention rate is 90% since we started. Over the years of working remotely, we have also built a tool that we use internally to manage and monitor employees and projects.

Now with the Corona Virus, our team is back temporarily in working from home, and most of us can't wait to start working together in the office again.

I've been working remote for better part of a year. It works well as long as your team has good systems in place. However, you do miss out on deeper relationships with your coworkers if you start remote. People try to counter this with on-sites, but still, it's not quite the same. Water cooler conversations don't happen as often and though you would think that doesn't matter, it does. There's less serendipity. I have less random interactions with people who are not on my precise team.

All that being said, I think remote is here to stay.

Just like a traditional office setting, remote work isn't for everyone. At our company I've seen that it is particularly difficult for:

- extroverts

- some of our more junior engineers

- workers with families

I think having a good mix of traditional, partially-remote, and fully-remote businesses is the place to be.

I suspect loneliness/isolation is the biggest issue for most.

At the moment it's great because I'm at home with three housemates/friends. But I think I'd get lonely pretty quickly if it was just me. Co-working spaces might solve this a bit (never worked in one so don't know how much people socialise).

After years of working remotely, my only argument against remote work is that it requires that your direct team members also be working in the same manner to be most effective. It's all or nothing if you want it to work long-term.

Whenever you have a case where some team members work in an office together, and others work remotely - it creates undue stress on personal relationships. Even if your team makes a great effort to be inclusive, there will always be times (lunches especially) where important conversations will happen in-person, and the remote person will be left out. In the worst case scenario, it can lead to being intentionally left out of even important technical conversations (Example: I had a remote coworker on a sibling team who scheduled a meeting about a technical architecture issue he wanted to have input on. The in-person team didn't show up to the call, but then had the meeting in person without him and told him the outcome of the decision.) The remote workers will end up feeling hobbled from a relationship building standpoint - and their growth opportunities will feel limited.

Those issues can be easily avoided by keeping teams either all-remote, or all-in-person. When you are in an all-remote team, everyone is on the same level communication-wise. So you'll see real effort go into using slack and other tools to build up comaraderie. With a mixed setup, that effort is usually asymmetric - causing the remote workers to bond and develop trust with other remote workers, but not with the in-person teams.

Pros

- Depending on at-home situation, you may be able to focus on work more

- Time flexibility. You have the luxury of doing errands / tasks at home

Cons

- Difficult to build deeper connections with co-workers. Unless there are other processes in place, I've noticed that communication becomes increasingly work-related and less about just catching up

- Accessibility to distractions. It's easier to get distracted when you have access to TV, books, video games, etc...

- Separation of work and leisure time. Physically leaving the office used to be a forcing function to stop working. Now, it can be easy to just keep working.

- Collaboration becomes more difficult. Your coworker may have stepped away from their desk and you're kind of left hanging until they get back.

I work from home and am a big advocate of doing so.

One thing I find difficult in remote teams is the ability to ask a coworker a question quickly. There can be a fair amount of lag time over messenger and this occasionally blocks the completion of work.

This article is entitled "There's No Such Thing as Quality Time."

It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter.

https://ryanholiday.net/quality-time/

When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose something there.

I know it can potentially be controversial but a lot of outside of work relationships start at the office. Some can be romantic and may even lead to marriage. Others can be friendships that last job changes. It can even be as simple as having a great group of people to chill at a bar with. While I love my wife and kids, I think most others are like me and want to periodically get out and meet new people. Work is often the best place for that.

There was a really interesting freaknomics podcast discussing remote work. There was some study on a large sales company in China that experimented with half of employees working remotely and half not. At the end they found that remote workers were more productive in terms of sales numbers (less time on commute, office socializing) but they got promoted at lower rates (less facetime with superiors, not on peoples' radars)

It seems to me that there is a use case, or model, for remote work, and is situational in nature. It mostly comes down to a pro/con list, and for me it really boils down to some 'risk assessment' and 'mitigation strategy' in dealing with various levels of Aptitude, Communication, Organization Culture, etc.

As with all jobs, it tends to come down to the individual, are they the correct fit for remote work. Do they have 'non-in-person' communication skills? Do they have the aptitude for self direction? Can they work independently, from their remote environment? Can they contribute/collaborate with a team, from their remote environment? Does the organizations culture accept, and work with remote workflow?

The strongest argument against remote work is: Are you trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

Inability to form genuine social bonds with colleagues, thus artificially limiting trust.

Hey there, I worked remotely for 4 of ~7.5 years at a medium-to-large tech company (I left in February). I'm very thankful I had the opportunity, since 99% of the engineering team was either onsite or in satellite offices.

In my experience, it was far easier for me to get burned out when working remotely versus in an office with other people. And when I did get burned out, I found it harder to get back on the other side of the hill when I didn't have a community around me.

Also, if I look at the ~7.5 year tenure at the company — my most productive and happiest times were when I was located onsite at their HQ.

Just my $0.02; happy to talk more in detail over email (in profile).

Lack of engagement is the strongest argument I can think of.

Immersion in problems is a really cheap way for product managers, engineering leads, and data scientists to engage with problems. When you're in office it's easier to get that engagement, thereby getting business-relevant exposure and feedback on your work.

Remote work can also confound lack of skill for communication difficulties (another form of lack of engagement). One of the weakest leads I've ever worked with was remote. He was ineffectual and effectively invisible to execs, except when they wondered why his team wasn't delivering more value.

Fully remote work does not permit the community that research requires to progress. So fully remote isn’t an option for me. Flexible time, of course, is.

Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"

Hamming, “You and your Research”

I need human contact. I'm fuelled off of the energy of others. What I love about my current job is my bosses drive, vision and enthusiasm. Don't get me wrong the hours are terrible. The work is closer to IT grunt work than the programming I love. But I get to solve real problems and be a key part of driving a business forward under a highly motivated boss. It's great. I don't know if that would be possible with only remote interaction.

Some people are just as productive at home as in the office. I'm a remote worker and I'd put myself in this camp. But some people self-report a decrease in productivity and I'm inclined to take them seriously. There are workers who aren't shy about saying, "I get less done at home" (e.g. [0]).

I recommend believing them.

[0] https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/125374860767884492...

Isolation both physically and mentally.

As a serial entrepayneur in Saas and a degreed software architect I find little disruption and absolute silence a great benefit to be able to create in the confines and silence of my home. I have been working remote partially since dialup and full remote in the last 10 years. One must self motivate and while I can say that easily since my efforts result in my own success working for someone else is likely more difficult if you need constant feedback and oversight.

Stay Healthy!

Alignment and coordination suffer, in my experience; on the other hand, the productivity at large is increased. It could be that remote work is more suited to some stages of the product / service life, notably the early stage (brainstorming, early design, early tests) and the sales / post-sales stage (business development, due diligence, customer care)?

Hiring - People who are great remote workers are a small percentage of the available talent, so you often end up either with talented people who don't do well remotely, or less talented people who are great at working remote. There certainly are people out there with both traits, but it takes a ton of effort to find them and build a team of them.

So. Hear me out. I had my eyes opened a little bit last weekend. I was going through leadership substitutes theories and spatial distance from leader ( or manager ) is listed as one of the neutralizers. Naturally, it is not an argument management would openly make, but all of a sudden I understood why they were so unwilling to make remote happen. It undermines them.

edit: added openly

Online meetings seriously suck still. It's harder to form real relationships with coworkers (some would see this as a plus, but I think it depends on the company/team culture). But the biggest change is forming trust. How do we come to trust in each other and in the mission if we never interact physically? It certainly takes a different kind of leadership.

Audio/video chat is atrocious for relationship building.

- There's the speed of sound/light delay. - You lose all the physiological feedback: Body language, tone, facial expression. - The barrier to start a conversation is way higher too. Some would argue that is good. - You cannot go for a walk with a peer.

I think for established companies it's that there is a big risk and time commitment to realign company process and organisation to support remote work.

Definitely less of an argument for starting something new but if you've not done it before then it also carries some risk you might not be willing to shoulder.

I'm stuck at home with a dog/puppy and no way to escape without having to tend to it every 2 hours. Personally I don't mind it, because I enjoy spending time with my dog, but the business might.

It breaks concentration and deep work.

By my own estimates, I'm about 40-50% as productive as I was in the office.

You generally miss the out of band communication, i.e. the conversations between other colleagues that you overhear, as well as the 'waterfountain' chat. Sure, these spaces can be created online, but in my experience the threshold is too high for such spontaneous things to happen.

Number one is: You need to be cut out for it. You need to be self sufficient and be OK with working alone. Not many people can handle that and will want to go back to the office.

I love remote work and get really stressed in an office (especially open and cubes) but I feel people like me are a minority.

I used to be strongly against it. I felt like I would never be able to be productive or efficient from home with a pile of books sitting on one side, a tv on the other and so on. Boy, was I wrong... As a matter of fact things have never been easier. While on-site you constantly have people around you, and countless distractions and annoyances, this is not the case at home.

This isn't the case for everyone of course - if you have kids, families, pets and whatnot, I'm sure that changes.

In addition, since I am a really die-hard linux user and I know my way around a system and networks, it's safe to say I do most of the work locally on my computer. rsync, mounting small partitions over sshfs with just the files I need, tunneling and so on, I honestly can't tell the difference after spending two hours writing a few shell scripts for common stuff. Generally I am a command line guy, I rarely bother with fancy IDE's and vim is often my first weapon of choice. With a couple of macros I've been able to simplify just about all common tasks to a few keystrokes. And being really familiar with the code that already exists, I rarely need reference. As long as I have SSH and the most basic of tools like vim, grep, git, find and whatnot, I feel right at home, no pun intended.

But for people who are used to more modern, fancy stuff(coming from a 30 year old...), this might sound like a nightmare. Also if your work involves a lot of graphics, it's probably a nightmare. Looking at people using rdp... Them poor poor souls...

The only drawback I initially saw was the absence of physical movement for me. This worried me a lot because until several years ago I was a bit overweight to put it mildly(185cm, 110+ kg). Before the lockdown I used to walk to and back from work, exercise and all of a sudden all of that went away. But there was another strange side effect of the lockdown - I started exercising on daily basis(having weights, pull up bar, yoga mats and whatnot and 5 minutes every couple of hours). To my greatest surprise, in the last month and a half I've gotten in a better shape then ever. In terms of body fat I'm certainly in the single digits without loosing muscle mass.

So in the case of people who have the chance to work in solitude, have a good working ethic, can handle their work efficiently over the internet, don't require social interactions and can take care of their physical and mental health(highly specific demographic, I know), at this point I have 0 arguments against remote work. If anything, I absolutely love it.

Is this about remote or all-remote?

Does anyone else do this thing when they work 90% of the time remotely and sometimes travel for a day meeting? This addresses some of the issues discussed.

This can also work for informal communication, to a degree.

My strongest argument for remote work is that I find typical offices almost completely useless for getting work done, because of interruptions, distractions, noise, required in-person activities, shared physical space, and general lack of privacy, so I end up doing most work at home anyway.

Many physical offices seem to be designed largely to enforce social pecking orders (sustaining and visibly rewarding high status while punishing low status) and/or to cram more people into fewer square feet, rather than to facilitate sustainable productivity along with physical and mental health.

Private, walled offices with closed doors can help somewhat, but most workplaces I'm familiar with seem to have switched to productivity-destroying open plan offices to save on facilities costs.

A lot of things have been said, how communication is easier in person. I would simply add I miss socialization, chatting to colleagues during coffee break, extremely productive brainstorming during lunch and so on

People managers are the gatekeepers. As a developer its much easier to account the time. But its hard for people managers to account for time. That is only reason, nothing else ?

Personal growth, learning group dynamics, interactions, etc. Same reason I would rather my kids to go to regular school and college instead of remote ones.

Remote work doesn't work well for certain jobs that require dealing with physical objects.

This may change with advances in robotics and remote control.

On average, people are bad at it. Even if you are convinced that you are much more productive when WFH than in the office, most people aren't.

Solitude in the long term will make you miserable

It's impossible to have a company potluck.

It's hard to train people remotely. At least it is in my experience anyway.

I don't like my private sphere getting invaded by a public sphere.

The crushing loneliness

it doesnt foster competition between each other ?

Gossip and social interaction.

It can seem pointless but when you find out that the random co worker shares an interest/friendship with a senior figure in the company, as you witness a brief exchange. A major mistake many make is not realising who "knows of" others in the workplace, they may normally never even greet one another.

The mail/parcel facilities guy mentions he is helping set up that new set of desks or has to come in early for a major delivery. Small things but can be very insightful.

On nodding terms with the help desk person who then happier to help you when you need urgent help.

Making polite small talk waiting for a meeting or con call to start. About some minor incident, feature or event in the office you both use. Even just waffling on about the carparking situation or the local supermarket or sandwich shop you all end up at when visiting the Office.

When you send that email to the team and whoever else. But you get that brief bit of feedback (it might just be a glance and a grin) across the desk that you just won't get via remote messaging services.

Overhearing or partaking in random conversations in the office which a snippet of become useful sometimes months or years later.

Having impromptu training sessions as either as teacher or pupil because well we are all there and now is as good a time as ever.

Opportunities as the person speaking to the person who is first asked.

I got offered an internal extra role which involves little but ensures I get an additional payment monthly on top of my wages and useful on the CV. All because stood by my then managers desk . I have changed my main role several times in the 9 years or so since but still have this little extra role and the payment.

Hosting and receiving guests on behalf of others or the department as in the Office. Over the years I have made a lot of contacts this way and got involved in a number of projects and ongoing operations simply from being the stand in host or dragged along by a manager/director as their person who understands technology or simply for a second opinion..

Plenty of times sat in the office and become the resolver (even if asking those working remotely) in the eyes of those that need help. Even though credit given to others the person helped remembers your face and name.

Getting offered the extra tickets for a event the company sponsor as others pull out and well your there.

As I look back over decades of work it's nearly always meeting people in person even in passing where things happen. A quick interaction which I have forgotten may be remembered by someone who comes back into your working life decades later. Much less likely your recall those you once called or emailed in passing years later.

I work at home regularly but would be extremely concerned if unable to regularly visit my employers offices.

Never be in the office to often but been there regularly enough.

There isn't one, for our industry. You are right now remotely asking for help with how to manage a business. We can do everything remotely, and many businesses in our industry have done so. The fact is that, if you don't have co-located capital (a data center), then you don't need co-located labor (employees to maintain the data center).