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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

It's odd how HN does not reflect the reality I see.

I'm at a big (Google/Microsoft/Amazon) workplace and WFH has always been a last-resort thing. I can't even imagine my team moving toward this. Every day I do too many things in the office that are face-to-face. Drop by the architect to get an opinion about XYZ, drop by a PM to ask about their functional spec, drop by a coworker to ask about some comments they left on my PR. Get three people in a room to go over an ongoing incident that's impacting a major customer's operations.

All these things could be pings/video calls, but having done that for a few months now, it's just not as effective as being there.

I wonder if the "WFH" discussion on HN is simply silicon-valley wishful thinking, if it's only possible for highly independent contractors and startup-hopping tech bros, and if it will never actually work in a large workplace environment.

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I wonder how those other folks feel about their own productivity with teammates always "dropping by". :-)

As someone who gets dropped in on a lot.. it's not great. Even when something productive comes out of it it normally has made some other work unproductive.

I don't mind when people drop by to discuss things. I may take a small productivity hit in the short term, but I gain a lot of insight into what others are working on, and get a chance to point someone in the right direction before they file a PR that I then have to review and ask them to re-implement things in a different way, which is way more frustrating than just having a quick in-person conversation.

The added friction of having someone jump on a call vs sending a slack message and stopping by my desk has resulted in a lot more tedious PR reviews where you end up having to explain your approach with a wall of text and then still having to jump on a call and re-explain the same things in more depth.

An architect's job is usually to work with folk and have those opinions, it's the crux of the role.

I work at an old fashioned, conservative, fortune 500 finance company. Our CEO recently had a town hall in which he said he'd done a complete 180 on remote workers. Before, he thought it didn't work, and that those workers weren't as effective, but that being forced into the situation proved to him that he had been wrong all along. He stopped plans to purchase new real estate and was expanding remote opportunities for the foreseeable future, covid or no covid. That's just one anecdata, but it's definitely not just tech bros.

I don't understand why you don't just use slack or email?

Other users have mentioned white-boards and brainstorming sessions .. those are harder to replicate but still.

I am architect and preferr slack/video - yeah it's more demanding for people like you who would like to jump in and break my focus anytime.

I encourage even stupid questions but in written form. Myself when writing questions half of then doesn't make sense (I find answer when formulating question). From other ones at least whole team learns.

To make remote/async work one needs to discourage priv communication but encourage threads.

You do all of those things because you can not because you have to. When I worked in the office I would routinely do those things as well, but I knew I just wanted to get up, walk around, and shoot the shit with whoever else was bored of their 3 grey walls.

It's not as effective because we are in a pandemic. People are working at home but also worrying about the future, looking after at-risk people, looking after children during the working day, not properly set up for WFH, dealing with neighbours being at home too during the working day, dealing with not working out, not playing sports, not watching sports, not doing hobbies and not socialising with friends.

There is a point where frequent interruptions are counter-productive. The good middle ground between productivity and socialization that I found was to be heads down except for meetings and lunch. I get long stretches of focus time, and also get to joke around with colleagues.

If this transition does happen (and that is a big if) then I can see winners and losers. Some people that currently thrive in an office environment may well struggle and others that have been suffering could see themselves become more valuable.

Maybe it's not as efficient, but:

1/ The tools/processes/humans can only get better at it

2/ It will cost the companies much much less to have remote employees, so even if each individual employee get less done it is still worth it.

Maybe people need to learn to do this better virtually? In theory it should be faster remote than in person. You are communicating at the speed of light, if someone is ignoring you that’s a different issue.

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