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(I posted this in another thread, but it's also relevant here)

As a new grad, I'm terrified of a transition where WFH is the default. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and that I can't do it all on my own. Casual interactions with coworkers and the ability to passively absorb new information in the workplace are essential for entry-level employees like me. Plus, personally, I find the social aspect of work to be crucial to my mental well-being. I feel a stronger sense of purpose when I can see that the people around me are all invested in the same project I'm working on.

I would argue that absorbing new information would be much easier in a remote-first environment (such meandering conversations would be available for everyone to see, not just the participants of a given conversation). The rest of what you said is not unique to new-grads in any way. Also, a remote-first company could still have an office - albeit reduced. If all your friends were at remote-first companies wouldn't you have a better time working in a coworking space with your friends?

In any case, remote-first doesn't mean WFH-only in any case, so you could just go into the office, no?

New grads, almost by definition, have absorbed whatever they can from reading, the internet, and education; what they need is attention. How to interact in a professional environment; the details of the company, industry and role; the office politics... all are "unknown unknowns" to a new grad. I learned about them from mentorship, 1:1 conversations, and by reading the body language of people around me. It would've been a LOT harder to do that over Zoom...

(That said, anyone smart enough to be concerned about it is also probably smart enough to seek out what they don't know so I'm sure the author of the parent comment will be fine.)

I don't understand why all of that can't be conducted over the internet. I mean, we're having this conversation over the internet, right?

Plus, again remote first does not mandate working from home. One could still go into the office so the qualms are moot.

Because nonverbal communication is very important. There is a reason why people have to put /s on some posts [to indicate sarcasm]. In some ways emoji/gifs try to fill that niche, but I don’t think they are a sufficient replacement.

One big issue is that more experienced employees will be the ones to choose work-from-home as their default, while the newer employees seeking to learn the ropes will opt to come to the office.

Perhaps a solution is to somehow formalize some of these implicit knowledge transfer mechanisms in the workplace. Explicitly assign mentors to new employees, etc.. But I just don't see how it could possibly compare to a normal working environment if I have to do it all from home.

Some other complications:

> A lot of the benefit of in-person work is asymmetric (I benefit more from casual conversations with my manager than he does).

> I learn a lot by observing my coworkers interact. Remote work makes this very difficult, because it's not really possible to "overhear" workplace conversations, or to casually drop in on water-cooler chat. It's also not really possible to have brief side conversations in a team-wide zoom call, which is one valuable aspect of in-person communication.

> New grads tend to live in small apartments rather than a house in the suburbs with a spacious home office. I started my first full-time job remotely this week and I'm working from my dining table. Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.

> Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.

How is an open office any better?

For one, I can ask my coworkers to keep the noise down and they will politely oblige. Offices have pros and cons. My stance is that the pros outweigh the cons enough that we shouldn't eliminate offices entirely.

I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.

I understand that stance, but the current trend in tech companies, at least in the Bay Area, has been almost exclusively open offices. Saves money for mgmt. and so forth. Perhaps with WFH or at least mixed-WFH policies, with fewer people in the office there could be more available space so that there can be more individual offices?

At any rate, I brought it up because the fix for both noisy neighbors at home or in an open office is the same pat answer: get noise-cancellation headphones.

Again remote first does not mean offices do not exist. Once you start working you’ll see that there’s already a lot of collaboration over the internet. It’s nothing like school

I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. When I was a new-grad (6 years or so ago now), I really appreciated being part of a really excellent work culture and environment, and built a lot of strong relationships and friendships that I hold to the current day!

The impact of these kinds of things seems to get lost in the convenience of working from home / remotely. Don't get me wrong, I like working remotely, but only for 2 days a week at most. Now that I've been forced to transition to full work from home for the last 3 months, it's been a much poorer experience overall and has severely hindered or completely stalled my relationships with pretty much all of my coworkers, despite frequent zoom meetings and the like.

These are also former coworkers that I've joined at other companies because we like working together. I really believe that this kind of relationship is impossible to build if you're remote-first.

While your feelings are valid and I too would feel terrified to begin WFH as a new grad, I have faith many companies establishing good remote first working cultures, especially organizations that hold their engineering organizations in high-regard.

Having worked full time remotely before this pandemic, I struggled with the social aspects and being left out of casual conversation and left for a job with a dedicated office space. Now that I find myself again working remotely, but with a forced remote-first attitude, I prefer it. It's a different ballgame when all workers are working remotely.

Best of luck in starting your career.

i feel you. it's definitely easier to absorb things when your coworkers are right next to you, more so if you're new on the job or new to the industry as a whole.

but, if you do find yourself accepting a remote position, perhaps renting a coworking space would mitigate that downside a little? i've never used one, because i've never worked remote before now, but i do see the appeal.

Take an extreme example: consultants, in order to be colocated, routinely travel ~8 hours twice a week AND convince their clients to pay an extra ~2k/person/week. Why? Shouldn't firms that don't require travel have outcompeted firms that do, if it's such a costly activity? why has the industry standardized on crazy levels of travel?

(1) Personal relationships & trust - it's very, very hard to build strong personal relationships without face-to-face contact. Impact often requires trust that's hard(er) to build remotely.

(2) Casual serendipity - New projects (innovation) are hard to identify in a vacuum. It's the lunch-conversation "huh, maybe that could work" that often drives impactful change. MUCH harder to do that remotely. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323798104578455...

(3) Fewer meetings - if every interaction of substance (read: not an easy slack message) has to be a scheduled, there are a lot more meetings. Admittedly, this is just my experience, but I've seen it more than once.

Note that all of these are long-term trends. Maybe they get resolved as people get used to working remotely and new patterns emerge. But at least for me, this is why I wouldn't think most companies should go remote.

Consultants are forced to travel primarily for marketing value rather than for productive value.

Yes, you want to travel to meet your client in person, maybe to do some big planning/milestones, but for every day work, the consultants are in person to give the clients the perception that their money is being put to good use. This is especially important as the top consulting companies hire undergrads fresh out of school (who don't know anything except how to put in the hours and do powerpoints/excel) and bill them out for several hundred dollars an hour.

Yes, definitely some marketing there too. But there's a reason that even ex-consultants (who, presumably, would be "in on the secret" if it were empty marketing) pay for THEIR consultants to travel too.

I may be wrong about the reasons, but I still believe the example of consulting - and entire industry built around paying a high cost to colocate - suggests a value to colocation.

Imagine being the only employee on the team who wants to work in the office. That could be a problem. You’re young, maybe just out of college, and moving to a city hoping to form new connections with people. Yet, everyone’s now working from home. You don’t have any real opportunity to build relationships with your coworkers. Work becomes a much more dreary experience at that point. No one to each lunch with. No interpersonal culture. You’re just there to output a product and collect a paycheck.

It’s hard for many of us to say we need other people, especially when you compare it to all the confidence benefits of working from home, but it’s absolutely true. Being alone for long periods of time really really sucks (that’s what I’m going through).

Maybe we’ll see a rise in social clubs that will revitalize everyone’s social lives. But even with that, most people who are working remotely are going to be alone for 8+ hours per day.

This is literally the top selling point for getting a WeWork or some other co-work locale.

We don't need a rise in social clubs there are already plenty. Find a hobby to share with people works fine.

I live in a tiny, crappy, pre-war apartment that gets cold in the wintertime, next to loud, obnoxious neighbors, and I prefer working at my company’s spacious, modern Manhattan office.

If you don’t need to be near Manhattan you don’t need to live there. Or maybe your loud neighbors won’t need to live there. Ceteris paribus working from home kinda sucks, but if you think about how many systems will change, I think it’s gonna get better.

But presumably you live in that apartment because you needed to be within commuting distance of the Manhattan office? If you don't need to be so close to Manhattan I would guess (not really knowing anything about your situation) that you could afford a mansion in a town or village instead.

Some people like living in big cities, and are ok trading off a bigger living space to make that happen. I love being able to walk out to a bunch of different restaurants, having easy access to entertainment venues, etc. The idea of having a giant house in the middle of nowhere has very little appeal to me. This is especially common for younger people and those with no kids.

There's a whole world between big city and the middle of nowhere. You can live in a small town with restaurants, culture, coffee-shops, a theatre, social life.

You're saying I should move to Jersey?!

I suspect if WFH becomes the norm, then people will flock to big cities even more, because suddenly you live in a massive suburban house but can go days without ever seeing a new face.

At least when you had a central office there was a place where you would meet some people and be in the middle of some sort of hustle and bustle.

Big cities might become even more attractive in a WFH future .

Don't you have towns and villages? Like a sub-urban area but only a few miles across and then you have shops and community in the middle within a walkable distance? I live in a town and I work from home but there's a coffee shop, a sandwich bar, a pub, a little club, a theatre, a gym, and I meet people from the community here. I'm married but I'm sure people date here as well. I thought 'small town America' was a big part of the culture?

I used to do something similar when I had to go into an office. Then I started working from home and moved to a quiet neighborhood with a high walkability and bikeablility score (sadly, our transit score is still terrible, I wish I could have gotten all three; this according to https://www.walkscore.com/). I wouldn't have had this option if I had to live near the office.

The whole argument starts with a definition of what "work" is, obviously.

For people that use a particle accelerator or make scrambled eggs work from home is nonsensical.

For people who produce computer code as their entire work output and rely on very sophisticated digital collaboration tools already work from home is mostly interchangeable with work from an office.

And then there's a really vast grey area in between. What about lawyers, or architects, or film and television executives, or whatever else you can imagine?

The answer is that it depends. But, even limiting ourselves to the subset of work where it's even plausible that it could all be distributed there are some important things to note:

A pretty relevant data point is that when there has been a genuine choice between fully remote and mostly in offices the mostly in offices approach was way more popular. To the point where Silicon Valley real estate spiraled out of control, or literally everyone with deep knowledge of cutting edge electronics manufacturing ended up in the Shenzhen region.

In any another context we'd call that a "market" and say pretty definitively that the invisible hand of that market decided that this is a more effective way to build companies.

It seems we're going to get another experiment, whereby many companies begin the experiment all over again. Perhaps something has changed, perhaps virtual technology has advanced to where this makes more sense. Perhaps the culture is at a tipping point.

Or, perhaps there's some advantage to people all being in the same place that will make companies that do it outcompete companies that don't.

It's quite plausible that this is what the market will decide, in the future. It's also a really important data point to note that it is not, in fact, what the market had decided up until now.

Your estimates are even a bit low - we don't have a grid and drop employees in from above.

With each 8 s.f., there is additional overhead for hallways (minimum width prescribed by ADA in the United States), bathrooms, and other necessary fixtures. If you counted everything in an office, it's probably at least 25% higher than that.

It turns having an an office space into a gig like economy where the burden of maintaining the benefits of an office space is on the worker. A possible result from this would be having an actual company office in a desirable location to work from turning (if it isn’t already) into a perk.

I feel like this would also bring about an increase in coworking spaces

So all of the negatives of working at an office (distractions, commute, etc) with none of the perks (free food, good tech, access to coworkers). I enjoy the office as a perk (with wfh an as needed thing rather than a regular thing) and consider it part of my comp. I'd would want a substantial raise if Im going to be expected to outfit space on my own to serve the same purpose.

One of the biggest challenges with Remote-first are Tax and Compliance issues. In the US for example, the moment you have out of state employees even if within US, you need to do a lot more paperwork in terms of taxes, payroll etc. How will we handle for example Workers Comp. A lot of questions need to be answered.

Also, Remote domestic or Remote International ? That changes things drastically as well.

Bingo. Remote first favors larger companies over smaller ones, partly for this reason.

a few points

How will local governments adjust for loss of tax base as it is likely real estate values for office properties will drop and in turn the cascade effect on businesses which serve them; from restaurants to small services.

Companies that own their own head quarters and other facilities may be less willing to have people work from home. Some companies put a lot of pride in their head quarters and other facilities.

How many companies who do swing to this type of work will expect reduction in salaries as compensation? Would you trade a percentage of your salary for the guarantee of working from home? How many days would you be willing to meet at a central site or would they even be a thing?

Personal experience, it took till COVID19 for where I work to make quarterly meetings available to those who are remote. For the most part they have done pretty well in this regard to even offering streaming of past events and presentations normally done by phone to using survey monkey to gather questions to be addressed.

Maybe they can turn the buildings into green spaces or affordable housing?

> No one is forcing you to work from home.

> And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.

It does seem like they plan on forcing their employees to work from home in this case.

I think that's the problem that most people have - not having the option to work from work.

> fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party

Please don't! I love working remotely; but I don't want to travel for work. I don't need a party. I don't need a fancy offsite. I don't want to spend a week with colleagues in some ridiculous tropical destination.

I want to quietly work from home, deliver quality work, get paid for it, and enjoy my life. Being forced to travel is the opposite of enjoying life.

This was my stance before the era of COVID-19... Now, I'm definitely not boarding any kind of airplanes.

Because it will destroy the real economy in cities.

NYC office space is not $100/sqft/month. You are off by more than an order of magnitude. Please avoid fake news.