Remote work has its perks, until you want a promotion
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My ex-girlfriend described herself this way to me once and I thought it was funny, but it's in fact true of people in general: if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer. It's unfortunate but it's true: you are going to naturally think more about and have better feelings about the coworkers you see every day in person. No, VC doesn't count. I think this is pretty much a human universal; the only exceptions I know are quite far on the autism spectrum. (Even I notice myself doing this, and I'm definitely somewhere on that line.)
Given that, I want to be in the room with my coworkers. I want them to unconsciously think of me as part of their tribe, and I want to feel the same way about them; that means we need to be able to perform regular in-person social petting. This is doubly true of my bosses. It sucks, but there's no way around it.
(Also, while this is less universal, there are plenty of extroverts, even on HN. I'm one. It's ironic, in that I also suffer from pretty nasty social anxiety; large rooms of strangers scare me and choke me up. But lock me in a room by myself for a month and I go crazy. I am happier, by far, when I can be in the same room as people I like.)
Years pass without you never seeing them, yet a lot of time spent in virtual proximity makes kindred spirits.
Out of sight out of mind is a function that takes a parameter that is not a Boolean. If the person was important enough to you they won’t leave your mind easily.
If anything, the adage exposes the strength of your relationships. In the business case, it will expose the value of physical coordination vs virtual coordination. It’s not going to be clear cut.
But you are probably right in a business context, where the number that’s going to get passed into the out of sight out of mind function will definitely be low enough to return true for just about all of us.
It’s not exactly the world anyone wants to live in, but what are you gonna do.
Dislikes, anxiety around large groups of (mostly unknown) people, preference for people we know like work colleagues and family.
To your main point, I think it depends on the previous relationship. Most of these folks had months or years to form bonds with coworkers such that I don't think it'll be so easy to reduce them to the concept of a human just from a few months or a year apart.
It's hard!
But it's exhausting. Groups larger than a few can only be handled in deep conversation for an hour or two tops. Also I get crippling anxiety before entering certain social situations, especially phone calls to support lines or in foreign countries where the cultural taboos are potentially around every corner.
Leave me with one person though, especially one I know well, and I can talk for hours and hours at full speed.
I chalked it up to the stress relief that consistent paychecks can provide, but perhaps I am anxiety-disordered.
Others have mentioned similar traits: being a leader or mentor, doing thing on your own, tackling new projects...y'all have turned on a lightbulb for sure.
agreed - it is hard.
So many opportunities in my life have come from casual interactions with my bosses, i.e. they spot something in an email and because I am sitting nearby, they propose it to me or they are coming out of a meeting and mention some corporate goal.
Working remotely, I do not even speak to my boss every week now. I am a microservice outputting work.
We had a sprint planning (he isn’t on the development team for that), we completed the sprint, we did it again. Nothing to report.
In the office, it is a nice amount of autonomy to not have to provide yet another status update all the time. The project team already has enough Scrum reporting requirements so it works well to keep the admin burden down.
You just have to wonder if you are forgotten when working remotely.
1) Providing updates on things going on with the rest of the organization that may affect you. Technically this doesn't have be in a 1:1, but is often a good venue. 2) Learning more about any problems facing the team, and discussing potential solutions. 3) Giving feedback on both what the employee has been doing well and any areas they could improve. 4) Helping to set goals that will advance the employees career goals.
While you might be able to get everything done well with lots of autonomy, you're probably still leaving value on the table by not meeting more regularly.
I was under the impression that the less your manager needs to deal with you, the better you are doing.
> you're probably still leaving value on the table by not meeting more regularly.
Am definitely going to think about this over the next little while. Thanks.
From what I have seen over the years theres the top performers who communicate a lot with the manager in the way described above. Also bottom performers communicate frequently with their manager, but for negative reasons. The middle performers often hardly communicate with the manager, and they are likely not going anywhere (which is fine too, if thats what they want).
The comment that started this thread was making the claim that people have difficulty comprehending others as people that they don't directly see in person. So managers (everyone really) should be checking in at least once a day, even if it's just to ask "how's it going" (generally, not a work status report), have a conversation about something non-work related, crack some jokes, whatever. Basically, maintaining that human connection sometimes needs to be forced a little bit, because it's so important and leads to a tighter knit team.
And I must say I'm loving this whole pandemic forced WFH on everyone - it means all of us are on the same level, no more speaking with managers/directors over a cigarette or at lunch/coffee. A great equalizer of opportunities and pure work :)
> if you aren't speaking with your manager weekly, or really almost daily, then something is very wrong.
I am someone who likes a lot of autonomy.
In-office, beyond my Scrum team, I am otherwise trusted to deliver what I need to deliver. That leads to few check-ins and mostly social banter with my boss as I will be in touch if I require anything. No news means all is well.
It is just that remote removes most of the social banter and problems don't pop up for weeks.
Our larger department has a Monday check-in and a Friday check-in wherein our boss's boss speaks to each one of us—checks in with how we're doing, whether we need anything, if we're stuck or whatever, and also raises questions to us that have come up in their own work. That is often mixed with more congenial banter and chats. Sometimes we throw in a game of Jackbox or something.
My own team has taken to at least a round of something like Counter Strike for the last hour of the day each week. Sometimes almost every day depending on our work load.
Combined with Slack my immediate manager and higher-level bosses are as reachable as ever.
I'm sure once things can safely open up again there will almost immediately be some kind of meet up for drinks and whatever because of course that can't quite be replaced, but I don't think being remote most of the time has to be such a social handicap.
Out of curiosity, why? I have this kind of discussion in Slack fairly often, sometimes in a (smaller) channel, sometimes in direct messages (occasionally with >2 people in in). A quick conversation about an idea, where people can respond as time permits, seems fairly optimal for Slack.
[Edit] The above applies to office environment,where I could see all my team in one place and there were lots of 'hints' that could tell whether I need to have a chst with someone: difficult call, challenging situation, too much work,issues at home and etc.All this is almost invisible when working remotely. Casual calls are necessary to check on people and to make sure they are fine.
I use it with my manager to asynchroneously share updates and todos. It's in reverse chronological order, with a big heading for each weekly 1-1. We both write directly in the doc, and tag each other with comments for updates.
An extreme of this, is that some teams (was it Netflix?) basically use google docs as project trackers. The project is described in the google doc, and you talk about it via comments - whenever you want, and as a replacement for meetings (who doesn't love getting rid of meetings?)
In general, the idea with a gDoc is of a central repository of useful knowledge, an improvment over searching through chat messages and endless meetings.
And the best way to figure that out is to get to know someone.
A lot of my promotions have been good reviews but some have been grabbing beers with the boss.
That will often mean "would make the same choice I would", but I'm happy if they merely use the same rubric.
If your subordinate thinks the best way to make a client happy is to always deliver on time and budget even if they have to cut a bunch of corners and deliver a buggy product, are you still going to be happy about that?
Are you going to stil be happy with his decision when you have to justify to the client and your boss why it was a good decision to release a buggy version early than a more polished version late? Despite the fact that if you were put in that exact same situation you would have made the opposite choice.
There are plenty of other examples too. You both believe that company goals are driven by great effective teams. You believe effective teams are born out of great morale and shared goal. He believes effective teams are the sum of their parts. There is someone that isn't pulling their weight. You would mentor them because they're always upbeat and positive and it'd be crushing to morale to fire this person. Your subordinate fires them because he believes he's slowing down the team.
I’m also confident that I can work with those hypothetical leaders because they share a common foundational compass.
I can talk about the trade offs of time/budget. I can talk about the trade offs of morale vs peak individual performance. Most importantly, I can be sure they have a guiding framework that pulls us in the same direction, even if the near-term paths are different.
I have two leaders working for me today (one of whom may well read this) who make markedly different decisions than I would. We talk openly about it; they get great results for the company via a different route to the same destination and I don’t try to make them into mini-mes. (I lead quite differently than my own boss as well.)
There are many paths to Rome.
Inherently nothing. I could call him, but I have little reason to beyond a social chat as there is nothing to report, so it would be a "hey boss, how is the new baby doing?"
I haven't given much thought to the career implications of remote as I expect it to be relatively temporary in my case so I do not feel pressured to solve the problem.
> However, having said that, it's harder to pull out the information I want when on the phone versus when face to face.
I don't envy our business analyst.
This can actually be a blessing in disguise for him as long as he sticks to 'put it in writing'. Here's what will happen: some won't write and won't ask again because they have no clue how to put what they want in writing.Some will write some incomprehensible thing and it will require 20 more emails to find out that all they want is Comic Sans in Word and etc. Also it will tame some 'motivated ones',who could go on for hours about what they would want.
I've spent this past week rubber ducking with my boss. I think we've spoken MORE since we both started WFH because he's got less distractions now he isn't in the office.
My team and I are mostly remote, doubly so since pandemic, we are all chatting and vidconfing with our boss and each other daily. It's a nice well connected environment.
No thanks.
That said, I can imagine negative relationships developing in many (or most) work cultures, since it's very easy for every interaction to be adversarial.
Since I enjoy video games, I've before wished to play team building video games with co-workers. Perhaps doing so would be worth while?
I don't think that all in-person relationships are better. There are people I see in person ~regularly I loathe. (Obviously, most such people I try not to see anymore, but you can't always control your friends' friends, or your coworkers, or who goes to your gym, or...) But they're all more real.
I’ve had some great online friendships as well but they always fade when in person life friends start using more of my time.
The key question for work is less whether you boss will value you and more whether if you can effectively compete with Joe Office who goes in every day for space in his mind.
Absolutely. This is a great way to think of it.
A perhaps more techie way of thinking of it is our relationships are in a mostly-LRU cache. The people we have interacted with most recently are the ones that matter most to us. If you aren't regularly resetting your place within that cache, you get bumped.
What that often means is there are people that you see a couple times and you think you are going to end up being significant in each other's lives, but then in a month or so they fall out of the cache and are effectively dead to you.
A thing I've noticed is we have a few friends that like to get right up to the point where I'm about to write them out of my life, and then they always find time for us and pop back in. Mildly infuriating, but I guess I'm glad to have them around either way.
Out of sight, out of mind is one of the key aspects of human relationships.
The people who are overjoyed at the prospect of WFH, thinking they are in the right, are a loud minority. Most people, being well-adjusted social creatures, would feel very alienated if they are not in close physical proximity with the people they work with and depend on for their livelihood.
There has been a massive uptick of WFH articles and how it will be the new norm in the future. I think Dang called it a "cliche". The tabloids are writing cheques basic human needs cannot cash.
This might be flippant to say but I wouldn't be surprised if people who espouse remote work/WFH have a very real lack of leadership skills, because you're cutting your own ability to influence those around and underneath you when you cannot look them in the eyes properly.
This won't sit well with HNers, and I get it, since one of the catch phrases around here is that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Sometimes, its not others who have a hard time understanding - its us.
The remote work group is very niche. People cannot wait to get the hell out of their houses, get back to what they want to do, and work with their colleagues.
>the only exceptions I know are quite far on the autism spectrum.
Too right mate.
During the lockdown, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of my house, but it was because I wanted go hiking, out to eat, to a ballgame, or just to visit friends and family.
The mistake people make is thinking they can make their work life revolve around their life life. As George Carlin quipped "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."
So you're there, working remotely by yourself, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It takes a special kind of left-field to equate this to being in an environment where you're surrounded by people of "your tribe", as the OP put it.
That's the thing, I'm not. Almost no one who is doing knowledge work is getting 8 hours a day of work done. Instead of driving to the office to get 4-5 hours of work in and goof off the rest of the time with a forced group of people, I get 4-5 hours of work done at home and goof off with whomever I choose.
I work a few hours in the morning. Leave in the middle of the day to walk the dog to the park, have a long lunch with my fiancee, or run errands. Come home do a few more hours of work. Or I work early and take the afternoon off to go hiking etc...
>by people of "your tribe", as the OP put it.
I don't won't my workmates to be the people of my tribe. I work to live, I don't live to work. Our economic system isn't set up to allow everyone to do this, but most of us on HN could if we wanted to.
I've done this for about 5 years now btw. I don't make quite as much as I could if I worked for a FAANG, but I live in a low cost of living area in a medium sized city near plenty of mountains. I highly recommend it over the rat race.
Ever since the "lockdown" started, a lot of people have found they have ample time, and so the thing that has been done en masse is to double down on work. This is mentally and physically (sitting on your ass the whole day) draining, and will lead to a huge burn out in a relatively short amount of time.
Your work schedule is atypical, and in most work environments would lead to eyebrows being raised from management down to your peers.
There is an unwritten rule that you are allowed to work some N number of hours every day that is less than the number of hours you're paid for. But you are there, within the ear shot of most people who depend on you, and if you step out for something they know you will be back relatively quickly in case the world around them starts to burn down.
With this kind of a "I set my own schedule" approach, people would have a hard time trusting you and depending on you. And if you think it's a good career move to let them know that hey I'll be taking a long lunch (every day), well, I've already addressed that.
As MattGaiser put it, it's as if he's a microservice outputting work. That's pretty much what remote contractors are. Nobody _really_ gives a shit about them. It's a hard truth to take in.
I get that there's a huge swath of people who mindlessly browse facebook or twitter or reddit or their favorite ethnic news site at the office, completely not caring about the work because they're mentally drained and it's not 5 o'clock yet, but they are there all the same.
>I've done this for about 5 years now btw. I don't make quite as much as I could if I worked for a FAANG, but I live in a low cost of living area in a medium sized city near plenty of mountains. I highly recommend it over the rat race.
Same, although don't think that it's somehow normal or that because everyone is forcibly remote-working, that it will become the new normal.
At every company I've worked for no one has ever cared. At all. I'm around to answer questions and attend meetings.
>in case the world around them starts to burn down.
I could be back home in 30 minutes if things really got that bad. But since I'm the principal engineer, it's really my job to make sure things don't ever get that bad, and it's pretty rare that they do. I also make sure that I'm not irreplaceable, so that if things go wrong I'm not the only one who can fix them.
>With this kind of a "I set my own schedule" approach, people would have a hard time trusting you and depending on you
Why? I can answer questions from my phone. What's the practical difference between our CEO regularly being out of communication because he's in a meeting that can't be interrupted and me being a 20 minute drive from my computer?
>And if you think it's a good career move to let them know that hey I'll be taking a long lunch (every day), well, I've already addressed that.
Again I'm not optimizing my life for work. It may not be the absolute optimum career strategy but after 5 years it feels like the optimum life strategy. I make plenty of money--several multiples of the median income. Could I be making another $50k a year if I worked 2x as much in an office? Probably, but that's not my goal.
>As MattGaiser put it, it's as if he's a microservice outputting work. That's pretty much what remote contractors are. Nobody _really_ gives a shit about them. It's a hard truth to take in.
I'm not a remote contractor, I manage the technology for the entire company, mentor developers, develop and design projects on my own, meet with leadership about product direction etc... If MattGaiser were working at my company, he'd be talking to me regularly. It sounds like he just has a shitty boss.
But since you bring up remote contracting, I did that for a while and I had even more freedom. I never worked for fewer than 3 companies at a time, so I never had one boss that was absolutely critical that I keep happy. It was great.
1) Is this an off-shore set up where you don't really have an in-house team so you're the principal engineer of a development team that is located another country?
2) What was your setup like at first, ie. before the last 5 years or however long you've been doing this for?
The reason why I ask is because Principal-esque positions often come with perks not available to prole Developers.
>What's the practical difference between our CEO regularly being out of communication because he's in a meeting that can't be interrupted and me being a 20 minute drive from my computer?
Not to sound snide, but the practical difference is - you're not the CEO.
>I'm not a remote contractor, I manage the technology for the entire company, mentor developers, develop and design projects on my own, meet with leadership about product direction etc... If MattGaiser were working at my company, he'd be talking to me regularly. It sounds like he just has a shitty boss.
It would not surprise me that some of these habits, fe. mentoring devs, meeting with leadership, etc, are best cultivated in a physical space before being done online. That's just me though.
Nothing to do with shitty bosses, but not everyone is exactly born with the qualities to check up on people regularly, ready to go out of the gate. Especially in a professional environment. A lot of people are very quiet, reserved, and are waiting to be spoken to, and it takes effort and practice to be a bit more vocal and proactive.
I'd honestly ascribe it to being the exception rather than the norm.
2. This company started as just a client and then they made me an offer that was too good to refuse.
>The reason why I ask is because Principal-esque positions often come with perks not available to prole Developers.
I definitely have a lot of perks. But I had even more freedom when I was a contractor, and I made plenty of money. If someone is a decent developer with good communication and business skills, a similar path is very achievable.
>Not to sound snide, but the practical difference is - you're not the CEO.
When I said practical I specifically meant other than the fact that he's the CEO. My point is that a well run company won't fall apart if the CEO is unavailable for a few hours per day, and a well run team won't fall apart b/c one developer (or their boss) is similarly unavailable.
>It would not surprise me that some of these habits, fe. mentoring devs, meeting with leadership, etc, are best cultivated in a physical space before being done online. That's just me though.
That's entirely possible. But my guess is that if there is an effect it's small compared to all the other variables.
>Nothing to do with shitty bosses, but not everyone is exactly born with the qualities to check up on people regularly, ready to go out of the gate. Especially in a professional environment.
I agree with you there, but I also think those people probably shouldn't be managers until they have developed those qualities, and I don't think this is a remote problem.
Years ago I didn't have those qualities. I was a retail supervisor and I used to sit in the front office and mostly ignore the cashiers until there was a problem despite the fact that I was only 20 feet away from them.
Remote work does require different skills, and managing a remote team probably takes more skill in general, but honestly I wouldn't want to work in house for a manager that didn't have those skills anyway.
I would expect well adjusted people to have family and friends out of work and alto to work well with people who are not in close social proximity. The customers or other team are often in another country or at least city. I would not expect well adjusted people to be "very alienated" in work setup that is not exactly just right amount of social for themselves, I would expect them to be adjustable to both work at distance and in person.
Moreover, if someones ability to convince people stands on him being flippant and implying that those who disagree are inferior, it is really preferable to deal with them on distance.
Well adjusted people dont rely on implied insults to make the point.
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Well adjusted people also have responsibilities and duties out of work or hobbies. They need to help to aging parents or their children or tend to garden. Well adjusted people around me like the saved time from traveling to work and back, like more time with the family or fixed stuff in houses they had no time to fix before.
Preference for work from home does not mean asocial, it may just mean opposite - the work is not that persons sole social/emotional outlet.
I agree that humans are social, but I'm not sure why you think we all need to get our primary social interactions at work. Even then, there is work social interaction literally all day long on Slack and other tools.
I think it is healthier for people to have their primary social interactions not tied to work. If a persons primary social ties are all work related it makes it harder if they are laid off or move to a better opportunity. I also find that looser work social interactions make it much easier to keep things completely professional. I shouldn't have to like to Joe in order to work with Joe and accomplish our goal.
I can't wait to get out of my house either, but it's certainly not to head back to an office after many years of being remote. I miss seeing friends, going to dinner with my wife, and rolling in Jiu-Jitsu.
As far as leadership goes, I don't subscribe to the dominate method of leading. If I have to stare someone down to get them to do something we have already gone off the rails somewhere along the way.
Most people, being well-adjusted creatures, do not rely on their workplace for their social needs, nor burden their coworkers with that expectation.
See, it's easy to say whatever you want when it's based on nothing.
My fiancee is an MD, so she has tons of very close friends all over the country from college, med school, residency, and fellowship that she only interacts with remotely. She's just as close with many of them as she is with friends who live in town.
Neither of us are autistic or on the spectrum.
I'd also bet your MD does most of her doctoring that depends on deep trust and emotional connection in-person; remote just fails at this in comparison
How do you figure?
Anyway you’re pumping out HTML, not making works of art. Most days don’t require an emotional connection to get anything done, and it just takes a little more effort on both to talk on video and get that connection. Anyway, it’s much easier and healthier to view coworkers like future friends than current friends, especially your manager.
You better double my pay to waste my time in person.
I'm pretty sure most artists do their work remotely, not in the office of whoever's buying the artwork.
She does, but it probably has less to do with needing an emotional connection than b/c she needs to physically do procedures.
>Are you saying that you still do fine remotely or that remote works better than colocated?
I'm have closer friends at my current workplace than I did at my last physical workplace. However, there are too many variables for me to say whether remote is actually better in that regard.
I doubt it is, but my anecdote was a counterpoint to the argument that humans require physical contact to maintain relationships. Not an argument that physical contact can in some cases be beneficial.
I am more toward your situation (grew up in multiple countries and, as things evolve over time, my closest friend group is a group of guys who used to skateboard together on the streets of San Jose Costa Rica) and remain excellent friends with many people from my past, and some I have not seen in person in many years. Maybe I'm fooling myself.
However, I feel like most people aren't like that, and if I care about advancing my career, I have to think more like OP and less like you and me.
So she remains close with people she underwent difficult, life-changing, character-forming periods with, who at the time, she was with for quite a few hours a day?
I mean, med school and fellowship people stay with you forever, even if you don't particularly like them. And residency? You're blood-bound, like it or not.
> if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.
Maybe just give them the benefit of the doubt and engage with what they were actually trying to say. If they meant something more extreme, they'll have every chance to double down on it, but no conversation is enriched by shooting down the least charitable interpretation of what folks are saying. Especially when "least charitable interpretation" means "I will take all hyperbolic and/or figurative language and read it literally." It's boring to read language written like legalese, and it's boring to see people getting criticised for not writing in legalese.
Of course I don't.
What you've done is to take the least charitable interpretation of my argument by believing that I was using the OP's language of "real human" literally.
The OP's argument is that "if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer."
My interpretation of that is that they won't see you as a real person with whom they can have a real relationship with, and that you can't you can't maintain a social peer relationship without physical contact.
To best way to describe what I, (and I'm 99% sure the OP) mean when they say real person: You read in the newspaper that a man was shot. You know he exists and you may know something about him, but he doesn't feel like a real person to you. His death doesn't cause you grief the same way the death of a friend or neighbor would.
Then, I have had jobs where we worked in office and for extended periods remote and I feel closer and actually have more of a relationship with them, sometimes for many years down the road when we don't even live near each other anymore. I still see them when I visit town and we talk on the phone.
I work remote with some folks in another project and I honestly feel closer to some of them than some on-site groups I have worked with. I guess everyone is a little different in this.
I have some non-work relationships that operate more like you describe and also ones that don't.
It is a little offensive to hear assignment of people who don't operate the same way as described as being far on the autism spectrum.
PS: Working with a largely distributed team, I trained myself to treat all of these requests the same. Even if someone walked from the other side of the building to ask me something. The priority assessment before I consider shifting my focus should be the same.
Why?
So the right answer is to answer calls etc from remote colleagues promptly - not to ignore local coworkers who walk over.
It’s not to make local communication less effective to prop up remote work.
At the company I work for, the norm at the office is to always ask first “is this a good time to discuss X?”. Not even the CTO gets a free pass to interrupt engineers. Actually he was one of the people who coached me to prioritize my focus first and to learn to say “No”.
If I’m coming to talk to you then I think it’s important enough to interrupt you.
You are in effect gimping local communication.
When working remotely think ahead and assume your issue/question isn’t as important as you think it is. Because most of the time questions for colleagues aren't as urgent for anyone except you.
Most of the time the communication is within the team and we do know the other team members situations (work wise).
And we have decided it is important enough to interrupt them.
And we are mostly knowledge workers who understand the cost of interruptions.
Yes, there are bad eggs who waste everyone’s time, but they are in the small minority.
What I find happens a lot is devs focus on their personal productivity ahead of the teams productivity.
Because at the end of the day most managers aren’t really concerned with productivity - it’s far easier and less emotionally draining to just proscribe blanket bans.
That’s one of the main reasons remote working hasn’t taken off more.
Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”. I work for a place in which the most “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year. I am not going to tell some dude who is probably figuring out a new way to pack data to save us thousands of dollars a day, to take a minute to listen to me. It better be a fire.
> Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”
> “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year
So the objectives of what you are working on are very clear and yet your very highly paid colleagues aren’t responsible or sensible enough to understand when it’s appropriate to interrupt you?
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/190891/programmer_int...
People want to be in the same space so they can have small, in-person interactions. Those have softer priorities than intentional communications.
Working in offices, people often do "swing by" and ask if it's a good time to talk about something. It's socializing the issue. If you say "no" and they come back later -- or you go find them, it has all worked out.
I think that’s how the vast majority of office communication works.
If you are properly evaluating the request then you are already knocked out of the zone.
It originally sounded like you were saying you would say the equivalent of “Mate, if the buildings not on fire then send me an email and I’ll get back to you”.
Because that’s how remote staff often get treated - with calls etc just not answered.
I’m not understanding how you can possibly understand and prioritise your colleagues requests for help in 5 seconds.
I’d say it takes me 2-3 minutes to understand the average request I get. And it’s 2-3 minutes of deep thought.
> if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer.
You nailed it. I usually work remotely, but always try meeting people physically at the start of a project. There is something uniquely uplifting about being in the same location to create something. That's when ideas congregate. When people meet in the same place, you can feel the energy. Physical meetings create synergies impossible to replicate when you only meet online.
>if you're not physically present near them, they will forget that you really exist as a human and a social peer. It's unfortunate but it's true
and the assertion that if you are different you must be autistic.
The much less inflammatory argument that all else being equal, you are more likely to bond with someone with whom you share physical proximity is probably not worth arguing against.
I honestly don't know if this is true. There are coworkers that I really like to work with, but I'm also happy to not have to spend 8 hours a day in the same room engaging in small talk, smelling their reheated leftovers, etc.
Given that, I don't want to be in the room with my coworkers. There's more to life than work.
I run a small company and for the non-technical folks we have lunches twice a week via Zoom. It has worked wonders.
Other than the medical and economic catastrophe that is this pandemic, it has been absolutely wonderful for my company. Hopefully we'll exist as a company in a year from now.
Take care. Some random bloke off of the UK worries about you and your firm, for a while 8)
The things we share are definitely many and another good thing is getting people to talk that wouldn't normally do that.
So, take care yourself, and thanks for the kind words.
Great insight. Depressing AF but good anyway
After 20 years remote (try getting remote work in 2000ish!), I have had any of the awful downsides people keep _predicting_.
If you're interested in remote work, give it time, get used to the differences between on-site and remote, and plan accordingly...
For instance, if you got opportunities because you sat next to the boss or were the first person he saw coming out of a meeting - 'ping' him with a status update email on something when he gets out of 'the big meeting' - this way, you're the first 'virtual' person they 'see'
I don't care if you use Loom, but, if you're on a team that is any % remote, do this for yourself + your fellow remote teammates. It goes a long way.
So, you're a psychiatrist? How fascinating! I don't know any programmers who hold a psychiatry degree.
Purely remote work can't possibly be the future for creative fields. Humans are inherently social, and I say this as someone who has crippling social anxiety. All of my salary expectations took this into account. If proximity to talent is being taken away from me, why not just look for a new company? I didn't come to the bay area to not be around smart and talented people.
I imagine if grade-school became fully-remote, that generation would just be much more lonely and have fewer friends than ever. People are meant to be together, work together, and do things together.
I think you should correct that to "the humans I hang around with / have met". There is a large online community that you may not be a part of and they are quite emotional about each other. Just go on twitch and have a look at how bent up or bent over people get about each other.
Your comment is made from a place of personal experience that isn't equal to that of others, and you generalize it to seem as if it were equal.
if this were true, I wouldn't have formed long lasting friendships with people I played videogames online. Long distance relationships would suck a lot more and everyone in the office would be happy.
we just need to accept that different people like different things for whatever reason.
I have never been close to any co-workers. I am friendly, I meet outside work et all, but they are co-workers first.
I love remote work. But I realise that in reality, full time remote would work only for like maybe 20% of the population.
Then it has a chance of working.
I've seen managers stuck in their level for years and years. Then a new candidate comes in for a Manager role, asks for more money, and (boom!) they're hired as a Director. Fuck everyone else who was already running teams successfully and trying to grow. Same for individual contributors. Best route is the insta-promotion during hiring negotiation.
You want a promotion but don't want to switch companies? Gee sorry your scope isn't wide enough yet. You're doing a fine job --a good job, even-- but you have to understand that this was already the expected job level... we need to "see more."
Every performance-review meeting I've been in, when one manager brings up one of their people for promotion, immediately some other manager will jump in and say "No I don't know about that, someone on my team had a bad interaction with them once... nope not ready for promotion" and that's that. Only once in a blue moon does the room agree that someone should get the promotion. Hallelujah!
Bringing in people from the outside (or leaving to go somewhere else yourself when you're ready to make the jump,) has its benefits for what it avoids.
My first job two decades ago didn't have engineering levels (apart from Tech Lead designation, which wasn't a formal level). People still fought for raises and the salaries/bonuses were sometimes not perfect, but there was no "promotion" per se and in retrospect it was healthier for everyone.
I imagine there is also some (likely several) cognitive phenomenon happening in the meeting where these employees are considered for a raise. If my boss were to ask me my opinion in front of everyone whether we should promote someone or not, as a middle manager I may be expected to have an opinion, even if it's helpful or not. I also may be tempted to share that one bad memory of that person (negativity bias could be at play here, as well) so that I appear to be insightful and observant.
It sure is exhausting trying to figure out humans, but endlessly interesting. It's just hard when I'm only an "armchair-everything" and lack the data and/or knowledge to figure us out.
This is the current situation I find myself in. In my current company, there's just no way to get a promotion whilst staying in my current team. I can probably get one if I apply for a role in another team, but this honestly feels stupid.
So the only other way is to switch companies.
But, it also seems that a lot of the actual effort people expend doesn't have very much to do with the business. For example, we had an executive whose passion in life was clearly just to speak in front of people. He never did real work, but made sure to take every opportunity to ensure he was speaking in front of people. It's clear that he should have been a public speaker.
I don't mean to pick on this particular executive, but it seems like there's a lot of this here. A lot of people, engaged all day in things that don't produce work. They're more about building some special, separate social hierarchy: determining who is in charge, who has influence, who matters. That seems to take up a lot of time in the private sector. I'm sure it's not universally true, but this has been my ad-hoc experience.
And, I get it: this is what people do, and what people value. We're social creatures, etc. But it sort implies that everyone's engaged in a joint lie. That lie being "we're here to work and we're all hard workers. We're primarily interested in advanced the business." It seems like a more literal truth might be: "We're here to take part in a social hierarchy, and forge friends and enemies, and do enough actual work that no one minds how inefficient our business is."
BUT, ever since I exited out of that game to start my own business, my beliefs have been shifting. Now I can see exactly how successful businesses come together and make enough money to fill payroll, and there's no getting around the fact that real, valuable work needs to get done. And that only once the real work has been done, do you then get to have the nice byproducts of success which is to do public speaking, culture building, and etc all those extra-curricular things. But the existence of these extra-curriculars are predicated on having a successful business in the first place. And no matter how cynical anyone gets, you won't have a successful business based on /JUST/ bullshit empire building alone- you gotta do real work and provide real value.
I can also see more clearly now that if society doesn't have the right balance between doers and talkers, we're eventually gonna have nothing valuable to show for anymore, and the fallout from that won't be pretty.
When /everyone/ DESIRES to be talkers, instead of just a small minority, it's a worrisome trend.
I feel it’s cultural though. I feel in Japan people are very much in a company to just have some sort of occupational therapy, but in the Netherlands people are very much together to do work.
If turnover rates start to match the fast food industry, only the best companies will thrive.
Maybe in another hundred years things'll settle down
https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/nuclear-weapon-producers/
(It seems to be an activist site, but it's what shows up when you search for producers of of nuclear weapons.)
Most of these companies are huge. They may be looking for someone to maintain their canteens' web site. Or something else not very exciting.
I have always wondered about this as businesses do not seem to care. Everyone knows devs are getting large raises to move but what business is working to counteract the problem? Not many.
Domain knowledge seems to not have much value as far as the people signing your paychecks are concerned.
I graduated in 2015 and at that point it was well established this is how you move up. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the overwhelming sentiment for most people in my generation.
Or you can wait around for an opening in your company and hope the right people know your name so you get it. If you prefer gambling. But jumping ship works better.
[EDIT] OK in case anyone uses this as a playbook, be aware you may need an intermediate step at some company desperate for [your new role] with below-average pay so you can have The Actual Title for a while before moving to a place with normal pay, but the good news is below-average for your next step is probably at or above what you're already making anyway, so NBD. Just be sure their pay's below average because they're a funded-but-not-crazy-funded startup and not because they're terrible, though. For whatever reason low pay also seems to go with shitty working conditions and overwork. Go figure. And make sure they're likely to stay in business minimum a year, with two being better.
Staying in the same job for longer than it takes you to learn how to do it is career suicide.
Unless you happen to work at the legenday ones that do care about you, don't play according to their rules. Those are here for their benefit, not yours.
Remote or not.
RSU refreshers might change the equation.
I put in my two weeks notice the day I received an offer from a competing company nearby that I'd applied to for a total renumeration package roughly equivalent to a $45,000 raise at my old job.
Shop around. Always. If you don't, you'll never know.
I like to think of it as someone losing out on free stuff. It costs nothing to write up an updated resumé and throw it into the abyss of companies that are hiring. Possible gain by doing this? A lot. Possible loss? Maybe an hour of your time that you spent applying to the job.
As we saw Jorge W Bush at the moment of crisis asking citizens to consume, I would not be surprised to see politicians asking employees and companies to reduce remote work for the good of this economy which is based on exponential growth such as this virus
Someone can strongly think "I don't want to interact with others via webcam and screens all day" without having ulterior motives.
It can however have several ecological advantages, and if well managed it can be a way to strengthen family and community ties. My point is that although it is more efficient, it is not as productive as putting everyone to work in big cities. It doesn't produce traffic, maybe people feel less need to buy cars, it doesn't generate so much real estate speculation, etc.
Some people will prefer more contact, especially face-to-face contact. Not less, as in no video.
But now I don't know which interpretation is what they meant.
(And, yes, it does force you to be a bit more present than an audio call does. But that's sort of the point.)
More engagement doesn't necessarily translate into more value.
For example, I can focus more on the task at hand if I’m not having to worry about everyone judging my video feed. Do you need to see me if I’m still adequately communicating? Cognitive load is a thing.
I admit that I'm more accustomed to the video chat thing than many. I work for a heavily remote global company and I'm very rarely in an office (even though I'm officially associated with one).
For me, keeping my hands engaged helps me follow conversations much better. If I’m at my laptop with the camera on, I personally find the urge to write or read (both of which are linguistically distracting) too strong.
My coworkers all know this about me and are totally on board with it. Maybe we’re not corporate enough for it to be a problem? :)
Then I started working from home and now I am very happy
I work on some interesting side projects at my home and this has improved my productivity on boring company tasks.
But why I don't get interesting company work? Mostly because boring task pays well.
If you're wondering what I'm doing in the Canary Islands during Coronaverse shenanigans, I was visiting when quarantine started, decided to stay here, and am still here. I felt Spain was taking Coronavirus more seriously than the USA.
Here's more pics from La Palma:
Mar 1, 2020 / Playa Las Cabras -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/j2o62tm5ECjn4eCY6
Mar 1, 2020 / Mirador de la Cumbrecita -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/A2DoNocGNVBnGsBd8
Mar 2, 2020 / Petroglifos La Fajana -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/qiBeHL95PTfjpNbM9
Mar 2, 2020 / Stargazing at Mirador Astronómico del Llano del Jable -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/oCamaWZwfH2HwykBA
Mar 4, 2020 / Snorkeling At La Bombilla -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/upfnrj4dED4eYkkU7
Mar 7, 2020 / Roque De Los Muchachos -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/XbGjsm5q1oSkmXG7A
Mar 9, 2020 / Some Steep Ass Hike Near Puntagorda -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/1z5NMgaheCkj9uXr8
Mar 10, 2020 / El Tablado -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/NWnJNcKa6uYuwiy68
Mar 11, 2020 / Mirador De La Montaña Del Molino -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/SRRnRhgUWSTVmUKZ6
Mar 12, 2020 / Observatorio Roque De Los Muchachos (including GranTeCan, the world's largest optical telescope at 10.4m in diameter) -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/JcD1bCUb1asU9VcE8
Mar 29, 2020 / Scenic Route To Returning The Car -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/Dgx9hTFsQ8HDa5sQ7
May 2, 2020 / First Walk Since Mar 13!!! -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/qMbUGGShiuEPSrQT7
May 3, 2020 / Walk Along The Shore -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/dxtfhDfo6VVKc8PN6
May 3, 2020 / Walk Along The Shore -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/RukczW1jXbf17AU46
May 4, 2020 / Morning Walk -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/RukczW1jXbf17AU46
May 11, 2020 / Morning Walk -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/ndwxKH4gZNdfzmRt7
May 24, 2020 / La Palma / La Fajana de Franceses -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/46PrYSdjKCMHQjECA
May 25, 2020 / La Palma / Roque De Santo Domingo -- https://photos.app.goo.gl/N1Z5PKWwESg7aTkC6
The key is finding companies that are entirely remote. Not hybrid.
Answering emails all day sounds awful. I’m fortunate enough to be able to almost entirely ignore email. Out of curiosity, what do you for work? You said technical, but sending emails for 7 hours per day sounds more like sales. I’d highly recommend quitting and finding a remote job that doesn’t require you to do idiotic busy work if you’re interested in doing things like snorkeling and hiking in the middle of the day.
---------------------------------
When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail
When you're the CEO of HammerCorp you are driven to turn everything that is not already a nail into a nail
When the global economy is based solely on hammers society collapses as dying people chew on nails for sustenance
Real solutions like working from home, working less, putting real taxes on externalities, reduce the scale of economies are not really taken into account because they reduce GDP, or generate fewer jobs.
We have to think of a post-growth and also post-work society
E.g. buying small farm ecological fruits need more work by the farmer and you to pay for it -> higher gdp.
This is due to Borsodi's law which states that as the cost of production decreases due to centralized operation, the cost of processing and distribution increases disproportionately [1]. For example, if a greenhouse produces one type of fruit for the entire continent, its production costs are low but distribution costs will be much higher e.g. the costs of transporting the fertilizer to the site, and those of transporting the goods as well as cooling, packaging, marketing.These distribution costs will be much higher than in several decentralised small-scale regenerative agriculture productions.
All waste on gasoline, packaging and fertilizer (much of it synthetic) enters in the GDP. In fact the GDP is not a good measure of progress at all and this discourse to clarify why [2]
At the moment in developed countries you have 2% of the population working in agriculture and 40% in distribution. Even if you increase the number of jobs in agriculture (for example to 10%) this would mean a fairly large reduction in employment in distribution.
We have to solve our social and environmental problems even if it does not provide jobs. Employment is a means to an end and not the end in itself.Previous generations created infrastructure unimaginable 100 years ago and that is the reason why there is no employment. To insist on full employment is not to value what has been done.
I leave here a quote from Ralph Borsodi:
"It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind's most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve -- the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them. When he produces more things than are necessary to good living, he wastes both of them; he wastes time and he wastes material, both of which should be used to make the world a more beautiful place in which to live, and life in it more beautiful than it is Today".
[1] https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/GoodBooks/The%2... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY
The Club of Rome, a multidisciplinary group of scientists, published the book "Limits of Growth" in 1972, with various scenarios. In the "Business as Usual" scenario, the one of maintaining exponential growth, aims at collapse in the beginning of this century.
But as in all addictions, it is easier to find excuses and not face the problem head-on.
This book introduced me to the discipline of systems theory. It's awakened a lot of interest in this disciple that appears to be very powerful.Sadly, it has also aroused much concern.
There are solutions but they involve having the courage to change the paradigm.
Edit: This is the "Business as Usual" scenario. Even if is wrong we shouldn't risk it. http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/slide4.png
Most millennials / Gen Z fully realize that "perpetual growth capitalism" has to end in our lifetimes. Even ignoring climate change, we simply have to consume less because we're running out of things to consume. At best, we're looking at holding global economic output relatively flat in perpetuity; at worst it will decline across the board.
Our political and economic systems are not designed for that reality over any significant time span. We will need to replace them with ones that are, and that process will be neither pretty nor peaceful (the left is starting to bring guns to rallies too).
I'd be hesitant to paint a future whereby consumptive expansion isn't feasible or possible. In this past decade alone we turned automated prime factorization into a currency just to have an excuse to waste energy.
Where does that excess money go to?
This is just my opinion but it can also reduce conspicuous consumption. Remote work makes it less necessary to be in the centre of a city or surroundings. This reduces the consumption used to define social status. For example at the moment the fashion business is in a strong decline.
We are already seeing an increase in savings partly due to remote work. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/investing/jobs-coronaviru...
How did you come up with remote work increasing savings? It's more of a fact that in economical uncertainty savings will go up.
That combined with their governments inability to do contact tracing and keep order with their castrated police. It's all a lot of work, and work is costly. Powers at play don't want all that unless they can profit from it.
Some legit criticisms I have of WFH (I’m not “anti” WFH, mind):
If you rely on colleagues/get blocked by them, they can go AWOL for extended periods and block you harder. Some people are straight up much less productive even if they don’t have kids in their house, probably because they need the structure or get distracted easily at home.
Meetings are more efficient ways to relay medium-large amounts of information than async communication like email/messaging. And video meetings are still quite awkward and may never be able to be as good as in person.
It’s much harder for managers to do their job (understand the state of the team and communicate that upwards, track progress, manage wellbeing, help where it’s needed) in environments that are more closed off.
I’m sure many people are more productive when WFH but it’s certainly not everyone. It’s not at all “too efficient”. I have directly seen how it harms individual and team productivity and communication
Absolutely could not disagree with this statement more. Meetings are where productivity goes to die. Information should be throughly documented, annotated, and shared. Async feedback + RT collaboration is how value is created.
You could build a multi-billion dollar business without ever going into a meeting.
Meetings are a crutch. A bad habit of legacy forced-commute workplaces that simply want to give the appearance of work. It’s the ultimate form of the art of not working.
The written discussions take awful amount of time compared to moderated meeting (whether online or offline one).
We seem to have a lot of self-centered people floating around in their own spheres of interest. "I had this experience, I'm most people, so most people should agree".
I thought HN would be different from reddit, but it those differences seem only superficial.
A lot of the WFH discussion on HN goes something like this:
“I’m a senior SWE working remotely for ten years, I make $200k+, never work if I don’t want to, wake up whenever I want to, go hiking during the day etc. It’s so great!” (Obviously an exaggerated simplification here).
Well great that it works for you, but that will not translate for a huge swath of the working population.
I do agree that for SWEs and others who are able to and enjoy spending their time working independently, that WFH is likely a godsend.
HN self selects for those types of workers, so it makes sense that is the most prominent opinion here on the board.
FWIW, remote first companies are not automatically immune to these dynamics. A few examples of how they can still emerge:
* A group of folks that all live in the same city informally decided to start working from the same co-working space. A clique emerges.
* The CTO frequently travels to SF to talk to customers, regularly has lunch with a local employee who later gets promoted over better performing peers.
* Same but while the CEO goes to talk to investors.
* Same but the whole leadership team meets in the same airline hub city twice a quarter because it's easiest for everyone to get to. Employees in said airline hub city have better outcomes.
* You live on one coast, and your supervisor lives on another. People in the same timezone as your supervisor get more virtual face time.
There are definitely more opportunities for this dynamic when some people are remote and some are in a shared office. But I'd be wary of any organization that tells you this can't happen to them just because they're remote-first.
These dynamics can emerge in many ways, and if an organization doesn't realize/acknowledge this, there's a decent that they could fall prey to it, or may already be in progress.
edit: formatting
If more people going remote makes this more visible, fine by me.
I work in Ireland for a US company. When I started in the company, I was constantly surprised with the competence of people I work with in my local office, in NY, in D.C. & in Asian offices, compared to those I work with in SF (our HQ).
But after a while I realised it wasn't that people in SF were less competent or people in other offices were moreso. It was simply that the levels were different. PoCs for a project who were at a similar "level" to me were clearly less experienced in SF, due—seemingly—to the promotional ladder just being so much more accessible there. Because those responsible for promotions are present in person.
I don't think this is an easily surmountable problem with humans, but I do hope that WFH becoming more common will make people generally more aware of the challenge.
I think it just depends on the particular situation. It can swing either way.
It's happened at every company I've worked at - in general you need to have a manager who will have your back and represent, and have to be able to not worry about the small stuff
Remote work means companies can get the best people for that company anywhere.
Remote work means life changes can happen and you can retain the best people for that company. With jobs and life, changes happen, people move, have families, want to be close to family, want to change scenery, get a new significant other, go to school, buy a house, all of these things can mean you might have to quit if you have to physically always be in the office.
Even when companies have remote/different city offices, virtual communication is very important anyways.
Clients and customers are almost always remote with some sprinkled in meetings but mostly virtual communication and communication through the work.
Companies would be wise to switch to remote first thinking and processes with a focus on virtual communication and a nice to have of physical meetups, integration sessions etc.
Remote work helps companies focus on their external view not just their internal machinations.
For truly unique talents and workers, location has never really mattered.
The world is virtual and remote now, the companies that perform well in that and with their external view, not internal view, and do the best virtual communication will win, and not just in tech.
Remote work allows relationships/lunches with friends as well, maybe not work friends but friends, networking, local groups in the same focus/area, it isn't just automaton. We rely too much on work environment rather than our local environment. Remote work allows freedom to dictate your day more and allows for more opportunities to meet people if you want. Co-working spaces for remote workers are also nice.
External product/brand view is the most important thing companies need to learn today.
Even within the office when people go in, most communication there is email, communication/chat, video etc.
Remote and virtual communication is now how most business is done, even at physical offices.
Offices that have ability to do meetups or have integration sessions are nice to haves as well. Even when it comes to shared desktop pair programming, you can get to know people not having to stand next to them. The lunches and other things are nice though, but they have little to do with work and better external products though.
The best products come from people that have time to do research and development and more open mode versus closed mode, that kind of work is really hard to do at a modern office.
Some jobs cannot be remote, the ones that can are usually in fields where most work/communication is virtual even in the same office and maybe even the same room.
I would argue most relationships with coworkers aren't genuine. You might have a different metric for this, but mine is that when you change jobs, these relationships evaporate.
FWIW, I've worked remotely for 10+ years and some of my good friends are remote. We live on opposite sides of the country, and in one case the globe. But we catch up with each other, know about each others families, etc. And we haven't worked for the same employer in years.
True, my relationship with my coworkers is scoped to my work environment, but I don't think that makes them not genuine. Rather, they are circumstantial, limited, and probably have a time limit on them. I don't value them any less for what they are. In fact, I embrace them for what they are: a meaningful aspect of the large chuck of my life that I spend working, even if they never exit outside of that realm.
Some of them do, like you say, slip through the cracks and do become friends outside of work.
As an analog, I spent about 5 years traveling and working remotely out of a backpack. I met A LOT of people, and I had many genuine and sometimes perspective-changing interactions with people. Most of them I don't keep in touch with anymore, but that doesn't devalue the time that I spent with them, even if we knew from the moment we met that we would only ever interact face-to-face for a few months.
Transactional and/or circumstantial and/or scoped to some time-bound aspect of your life != genuine
Second, work is where human beings are referred to and treated as resources. The only way to be "genuine" at work is to embrace the reality that you are essentially an automaton. Any relationships built along the way happen in spite of, not because of, your job.
I have specialized in a niche which made employers allow me to work remotely since they could not find local talent. Being the sole remote (tech) employee, or one of the few, means you will not get promoted. Remote-first is a different ballgame.
I now turn down all "only you will be remote" positions that are sent my way. I no longer work in my niche since there is no demand locally, but I will not be the sole remote person again.
PS: I am an extrovert
> Zuckerberg said Facebook will reduce salaries for people who move to cheaper places >
If company X moves manufacturing to a lower cost company, it doesn't suddenly discount its product. The CEO's mindset is: if I can provide the same value for a lower cost, I get to pocket the additional (saved) margin.
But when an employee provides the same value but at a lower (personal) cost, the boss wants to clawback the savings.
In my team, at the end of the day, everyone is sharing what they did throughout the day work-wise. You can still list things that are non-engineering related. What I also do is tracking these notes in an application and tag the notes later for a self review. In the end, sharing these notes gives the team some perspective of what the others are doing and because of the random stuff everyone is doing from time to time we had awesome conversations / ideas because of that.
Most tech companies should be 100% remote with no exceptions. That doesn’t mean small satellite offices or co-working space for a group of employees. It means literally everyone from the CEO to the lowest paid IC works remotely.
This is the only way it can work. When you start mixing in-person and remote you create a political monster.
I also, in contrast with other commenters, talk to my direct boss 2-3 times every week in a standup. We have weekly 1:1’s. My successes are recognized, my failures are managed.
Getting (or not getting) promotions is a function of your communication, not proximity. Those two-three yearly returns to the office don’t include any more (or less) communication than I had previously.
Do you want more money? Get a better remote job anywhere else or do something else for money or keep good investments.
Do you want more prestige? For what exactly? You're not seeing any co-workers regularly to pull rank on them and there is no corner office desk with a window to fight for. If you want to be respected in your industry commit to some charitable projects or give talks.
Do you want different responsibilities? Ask, and if you don't get it go find a more suitable job.
An email is easy to ignore. The boss's boss will at least know my name if he sees me every so often.
But it also removes what I've experienced to be a low-barrier opportunity for those who are quiet or unlikely to promote their work to do so—in person in a one-on-one setting. Without the opportunity to learn by example in-person, I worry that less experienced people (especially shy ones) in technical career tracks will not self-advocate. In turn, due to implicit bias that will inevitably shape manager-employee relationships, I fear they'll stall.
It's really not a solution to say that managers should be offering the conversations, because of course, managers inevitably will fail to do so in many corporate culture.
We are going remote-first from the jump, but as we scale I am pretty concerned about how to combat this phenomenon.
All my career I have been moving to increasingly more expensive places chasing after better jobs. So far I have very strong feelings about what I call 'the satellite office effect'. Anecdata shows that my colleagues at the head office get promoted at a ratio roughly 3:1 compare to my (remote, smaller) office.
Amid this pandemic and many companies looking at full remote, I decided to move to the US to a yet more expensive city. I love the idea of living in a low CoL area and working remote, but for the sake of my career I feel the need to work at the main offices. Even if one day I decide to make the switch, I would never consider working for anything else than a full remote company.
https://www.wired.com/story/remote-work-perks-until-want-pro...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/can-remo...
https://marker.medium.com/remote-workers-just-outsourced-the...
Most plausibly just coincidence, but an interesting anomaly none-the-less.
This is especially meaningful to people with kids. Two working parents have to pay for childcare. If they can move closer to parents, that cost may disappear.
This is incredibly important for managers of large teams and contributes to a really great culture of people who appreciate each other rather than people who are in competition with each other.
I personally have received several of these emails since the lockdown. It's not enough to act on, but it's enough to ask peers some questions to help establish a 360 degree view of an employee's performance.
Lots of people are working remotely, and it looks like the #RemoteBacklash has begun because... well, everyone is different. But I don't think I've met a single remote worker who thinks that literally everyone can and should work remotely. It's a totally made up argument.
This article is made up, too. It's totally speculative, cites nameless studies about "trust"(however you're supposed to measure that), and seems to believe that the rest of tech operates like Twitter and Facebook.
The places I have worked, HR has typically let the hiring manager decide if they want to promote an existing employee or start a new search. I don't expect remote work will change that much.
Given that, it comes down to the hiring manager and I wouldn't feel comfortable that they are this level of rational either. They may have some pre-existing opinions about remote workers and those opinions may not all be reasonable.
I think there's also reason for concern when a remote person has to "compete" with an in-office presence for the position. Qualifications and job performance aside, the person who is in the office every day, I suspect, has a real advantage here. I do think it is easier to form relationships in person, rather than over conference calls or Slack.
Articles that are upvoted (which I largely associate with “people who identify with the sentiment of the article”) show up will reflect the current state of the pendulum.
These articles are introducing FUD so that when companies start recalling employees, the opposition won't be as universal as it would be otherwise.
Just let people do what they want. If you like WFH then find a company that allows it, if you don't, do the inverse.
I don't see why there is so much hate against WFH when it's a choice (not including the virus situation).
I would NEVER go back to an office. I've been WFH for 5 years now.
You can certainly put a price not having to live in a rent-trap city.
I bought and paid off a 3bdr house in a year because of low cost of living. I no longer pay rent/mortgage or commute.
I see how some people wouldn't like it, but there are plenty of jobs for those people.
P.S: a 30 minute commute is 252 hours of your year gone ($25,200 @ $100/hr) and $3-6k in gas plus stress.
Do yourself a favor and start working on your office setup, you'll want to work remotely when you get older at least.
Offices are corrals in a way. Dont allow yourself to be herded.
e.g. currently I've got a fixed desk at the office. But if I decide to work from home nobody is going to ask questions.
Given 5 min commute I'll probably go in most of the time, but the ability to decide is almost more valuable than either on it's own
- long commutes
- crappy coworkers or offices
- a space large enough to comfortably work remotely (or the money to afford a bigger space)
- a partner, kids, or both, which makes extended social isolation more livable
- a rich network for career growth and opportunities
God forbid some people want to live in big cities and don't make their choices solely based on reducing costs and bottom line expenses (ironic since every other day people here rail against big corporation bean counters). Example: Facebook's latest internal polling - the majority of people want to be in the office sometimes.
People suddenly waking up and realizing the office is a huge scam is the current du jour opinion here. But time and time again the HN demographic only speaks to itself.
And of course people will reply with that it expands choice, but that doesn't stop those from cheering that companies going full remote like its a universal good thing for everyone.
And on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
edit: Going full remote is a huge cost savings to companies. A cost that is now hoisted onto employees. So unless employees are receiving some equivalent compensation for blowing out my utility bills and refitting my office, be careful who you're cheering with.
This is fascinating to me. I've lived in the rural Midwest, NYC and Texas and always had A/C everywhere I lived – only question was central or window unit.
Nobody except masochists really stay inside a stuffy apartment mid-day in the summer though. The reason you pay so much in living expenses is mostly for the good weather, so people spend their weekends out and about. As a kid in the summer, I remember walking around shops in the mall just to stay cool during the hottest hours of the day, and going to the beach often. My parents would do their grocery store shopping on Saturdays and Sundays mid-day if it was going to be hot. As I got older we'd go catch a matinee, or hit up a restaurant or a bar.
I imagine workers in the L.A. area will largely flood into cafes and co-work-esque places as businesses start opening back up and remote work becomes more dominant.
It gets colder here than you’d think. Not “Late January in Chicago” cold, but averages down into the 40s are the norm during winter.
Working from home, no AC. Too lazy to get up from my code and turn on the fan. Then again, I moved to LA because I love the sun and hate the cold.
- Office is not perfect but better than some
- I do have a home office with a nicer setup than my work office
- I love and thrive on social isolation, going home to my empty house is the best part of my day...
- See above... I have no network...
>>God forbid some people want to live in big cities
yea I have never understood those people... I live in a mid sized city and have a strong desire to move back to the farm fields. Probably more on how you grew up than anything, my childhood was in a town of less than 3000 people.
if it was not for network connectivity issues in Rural America I would probably still live in the sticks.
>on top of that, my observations are anecdotal. No need to point that out.
Sorry, this is HN it is rule to point that out :)
- I don't want city overflowing (and price-gouged-by) wannabe suburbanites
- With a sufficiently high carbon tax, hopefully WFH can mean towns not exurb hell by those that insist on leaving the city
- long commutes are bad and denormalizing than as an exceptable part of modern life (in the USA) can help us make our land use less shit
- We should all work less, and making work as socially isolating for the upper classes as it already is for many lower class jobs will help move things in that direction.
> a rich network for career growth and opportunities
This is a I think the most important one, but the ultimate solution is to simply make "career" less important be making a decent quality of life available to most everyone. I know it's great us here that in the last 20 years society has begun to value intellectual work more, but the scarcity that caused this culture shit is just unsustainable.
In short, don't discount the urbanist accelerationist argument for WFH.
Anecdotally, I've spent a fair amount of time living in both environments, and for me the quality of life difference is night and day. The lack of proper "towns" within commuting distance of NYC means that we have to live in town-y neighborhoods within the city, which are much more expensive to than the 'burbs, and don't come with an acre, a pool, and free parking. The apparent lack of towns means we're eventually going to leave the entire metropolitan area, which is kind of sad, since we like working here very much.
Just because there's no mass commuting doesn't inherently mean the exurbs are cured of that. People could still shuffle arround funneling roads making traffic to go to the mall. Every has lawns but no one has nature. Everyone is still isolated.
Traditional rural towns and villages are actually quite dense---you must discount the surrounding land. I mention the carbon tax because I think it's that or highwaymen needed to force people to clump up.
\[BTW, I think the variation is key: density should be "fractle" "scale-free" or whatever other similar buzz ord one wants to throw out. Everyone gets stairs and nature.\]
Most towns I think of as pleasant in the US (I’m mostly familiar with western Massachusetts, central CA, and the border towns of NJ/PA) are still basically inaccessible by any mode of transportation other than a car outside of downtown. I don’t believe they would score high on your scale, but maybe I’m missing something!
No reason with enough carbon and land value tax the towns in the places you mention couldn't recover though. Plenty of nice Berkshire and foothill downtowns.
To me there are more factors than "the work is there" (at least in more developed country) to move to a big growing metropolis. An anecdotal observation I read somewhere here on HN was something like "have you logged on to tinder in a suburb of some smaller US city?".
Another big factor is the environmental one, sure if we can reduce the commute for a majority of people that would be awesome, however people will not stop moving around (restaurants, entertainment, socializing). What alternatives do we have if people are going to leave the city? Public transportation is for the most part only viable in highly dense areas. Electric car is of course going to grow their share, but medium term expanded public transportation is an extremely important part of the equation.
It is illegal for me to do things far less dangerous to myself and others compared to driving a car, and as someone who has no plans to own a car again, I neither want to breathe in exhaust fumes or risk getting hit by a vehicle just because others feel entitled to drive. If we're going to live in a nanny state, let's actually maintain a consistent framework for measuring harm and stick to it.
What are you going on about? Every country in the world is enforcing social isolation now...
Zuckerberg was recently in the press saying he wants Facebook to pay remote workers less (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264521). That could skew the results a little.
The prospect of a full time shift to remote was not communicated as context for the poll. Employees answered the polls thinking they were talking about how they'd go to the office given COVID-19 (a lot more people saying they'd do 50/50, when in reality, that just reflected their lack of comfort due to the disease).
Companies should be sure not to confuse actions people are willing to take due to a pandemic to be what they'd do in a post-pandemic world. Same thing with productivity: just like we don't know the long term impact of this disease, we also don't know that employees will remain as productive as they've been so far.
Too many people assume remote work always means working somewhere far away from a major urban city.
Commuting, lunch, tons of cloths/uniforms, (likely more stuff I am not thinking off) is also a huge cost to employees.
I know my mortgage payment is due if I go to an office or WFH. My car, on the other hand, requires loads more fuel and maintenance when I work in the office.
Electricity bill goes up slightly.
Heating / cooling costs goes up a bit. I was already heating and cooling my home though but a schedule made it so I didn't heat or cool as much during business hours (when I was not home).
For lunch I am not going out nearly as much. Mostly because my home is not well positioned for a quick trip for lunch.
Seems to me there are savings on both sides here. I could be convinced otherwise though - I have not read any proper studies where the dynamics here have been fleshed out.
I feel like I am saving lots of money and a fair amount of time with WFH.
I had not really considered moving because WFH is an option, other than the digital nomad dreams that float through my mind. :D
In my case, I live in small town WV (pop < 2500) and work outside Pittsburgh, PA. Living in WV basically means you can afford a house with acres of property IF you can make more than 60k / year (which is a big IF for most around here).
Back to the original point - The choice to live in one place over another, shorter or longer commutes, etc.. Is not the company shifting its operating cost onto its employees. is it? Do I misunderstand still?
Seems to me, if anything, this is an opportunity to continue to live the way you did before with slightly more free time and potentially more money OR, as you say, move a bit more out of town and save even more money.
This change should decrease costs for the employee, open up the labor market for the employer thus lowering costs for them as well. Shedding office space is a great way to save money anywhere in the country - Let alone in a hyper expensive place like downtown SF.
I am still failing to understand how this is pushing the cost of business onto employees.
Where do you think all the tech people with kids moved to? And they are probably dual income. And the couples who don’t have houses were saving up for houses so that the percentage devoted to rent was limited anyway.
The beach and GG Park are mostly in the fog belt. Lived near both places. Nope. Must be thinking about one of the few really warm and sunny days. Not that nice unless you like surfing. If you are thinking the Marina area, well that is very expensive already.
Generalizing, the really nice areas in California are already pricey. You need to make a trade off for things to work out such as if you love snow and skiing, then go to Tahoe. You trade that off for food choices that won’t be nearly as good and meagre entertainment options.
The number of people in an area drives up prices but provides a quality of its own. One prime example is the variety and quality of food. So does the infrastructure/wealth of the area lead to improved education, health care services, etc...
It’s as if the wealth is mostly in the people rather than the geography and concentrating people creates more wealth.
about that... dang wrote a long comment regarding this community, and why he thinks your sentiment comes up so often: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
The top comment(s) are only representative of that subset of readers who both a) agree and b) bother to upvote.
I skim read the top few comments then minimise them, or minimise them immediately. I'm looking for what's different to my current understanding, and the top comment(s) almost always are perspectives I'm already familiar with.
There seems to be a group on HN that really wants to make the desire to WFH seem universal. A few weeks ago a post like yours likely would have been buried.
Unfortunately a lot of industries outside tech do not provide those. The cost of transport, especially the drainage of energy after squeezing into a crowded train / bus definitely outweighs utility bills.
However, if a company provides both options, remote workers are usually disadvantaged because of the reasons stated in the article and the comments.
It's a tough choice, and I think the division should at least be team-based for a fair competition.
[1] https://qz.com/work/1825934/how-working-from-home-impacts-yo...
What I learned from working at large tech companies is that the only way up is out.
I left my first remote job, because becoming a team lead would had me required to give up remote.
Went freelancing afterwards, because there I can promote myself.
Just because it was true for you doesn't mean it'll be true for all.
You are never the presenter at company events. Nobody outside your team can recognize you. Nobody talks to you except to get something or clarify information. People can casually take credit for your work as you aren’t there to defend it. You lose out on all the background information like conference funding availability or the cool new job in Innovation.
You miss all the little opportunities for going the extra mile as you never look over your colleagues shoulder to see how they do their job and nobody looks over yours.
So much of success is being in the right place at the right time to meet the right person and that can’t happen as much remotely.