Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce

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188 pointsjsnell75 comments

I'm surprised and skeptical about some of this. In particular:

  We also measured networks across more than 90,000 Microsoft employees in the United States. Frankly, we expected to see them shrink significantly, given the rapid shifts in environment, daytime rhythms, and personal responsibilities. Instead, we discovered that most employees maintained their existing connections. Even more encouraging, most people’s network size increased. We had assumed that in a time of crisis, employees might strengthen networks within their own work groups in an insular way. In fact, we saw network growth not only within existing work groups but also across different groups, indicating that to adapt and thrive teams sought to build bridges.

This does not square with my lived experience. Close connections at work have stayed relatively strong, perhaps even strengthening as we shore them up with recurring 1:1s and social team meetings. Peripheral connections have gone down the toilet. Team and role homophily run rampant.

I wonder what evidence they actually used to back up this statement. I suspect the effect is actually in the opposite (and more intuitive) direction, and that their finding is actually a result of the McNamara fallacy.

"Network" is measured by Outlook emails, Yammer posts, and Teams conversations and meetings. I'm willing to wager money most peoples' network metrics increased simply because offline conversations never happened, and they moved to online conversations where necessary.

Not only this: online, the cost of “growing” your network by adding more recipients is (nearly) free which is very much at odds with offline growth. So my guess is the quality of weaker connections actually diminished even if the number of connections increased.

> because offline conversations never happened, and they moved to online conversations where necessary

Not to mention throwing everyone who might need to know about something on a thread because you don’t know who should be. This would be measured as a network increase. But it actually represents distancing.

> Close connections at work have stayed relatively strong, perhaps even strengthening as we shore them up with recurring 1:1s and social team meetings. Peripheral connections have gone down the toilet. Team and role homophily run rampant.

This absolutely mirrors my experience. Casual conversations with people outside of my team and friends, which would've happened by just being in close proximity to them have disappeared.

While I believe we're still working very well as a team, opportunities to form connections outside of our domain have dwindled. We used to have this Slack app called Donut [1] which periodically matches colleagues together for a 1:1, but these days people are sick of Zoom meetings so you really do need a sound excuse to set one up. In-person 1:1s were a chance to escape the office for some coffee and a snack; Zoom meetings are much less tantalising.

[1] https://www.donut.com/

I think more video conferencing apps needs to have simple games available like https://team.video does. Basically there's a new Scrabble game available for each meeting which you can play whenever. We have found ourselves using it as a nice social moment before and after meetings even if it's just for a minute.

Yes that would be awesome! We try and play games during our team happy hours, but the friction of finding a site, getting everybody to sign up, and dealing with "this doesn't work on my machine" issues is often off-putting. Having a collection of games we can start instantly mitigates many of these issues.

I'm wondering if remote-first and work from home will end up being reverse-ageist. Developers and others with deep existing networks and a lot of experience may do just fine or even thrive, while the young may struggle to develop those networks in the first place.

I think there's still plenty of opportunity to develop a professional network through structured events like 1:1s and mentoring sessions, but you definitely need to be intentional with this since you can't just strike up a conversation in the hallways anymore.

Where juniors will struggle with is not being able to swivel their chair and ask someone next to them for help. I've witnessed situations where people hold back "stupid" questions which end up blocking their work because the effort of crafting a Slack message or asking to set up a Zoom was too high. For anyone with juniors on their team, make sure to check up on them every now and then!

That the poor souls were so bored and deep in procrastination that they actually logged on to and used the corporate Yammer instance and "liked" perhaps five messages on there before being adequately underwhelmed to return to their respective work tasks, I am willing to bet.

Am I sarcastic? Maybe, maybe not.

five messages on yammer? That's a lot for a busy year in our corporation.

People I don’t have to talk to on a regular basis at work feel really distant now. Lunch used to be a great time to randomly hit up coworkers to talk and share ideas. That network has completely dissolved now.

You’re not the only one, coworkers that i only see online feels as distant as most Facebook contacts.

Ultimately this leads to less enjoyable work experience and thus more likely that workers switch jobs earlier than before.

I have witnessed that the opposite also holds true: less enjoyable coworkers are now less irritating simply because of the added distance and buffer room, making them easier to tolerate* than when having to deal with in person on a daily basis. *quality of work notwithstanding

But now imagine starting a new job and not being able to build that distant network at all. I have colleagues who joined half a year ago but have never seen a coworker outside scheduled videoconferences.

Not Microsoft, but my network's expanded significantly including to associates at Microsoft.

Mostly helped by the people I'd normally struggle to contact because they hide away in different buildings, behind different physical and digital security rules, now being much more available for video calls. Appreciate your mileage may vary but it does square with my lived experience.

I've lost some connections with people I only spoke to because we were physically situated together, but that's way outnumbered for me by those I now find more accessible.

I would be particularly interested to hear from people hired during the lockdown who didn't have existing connections at all.

This isn’t something I haven’t thought of. I’m hoping teams have prepared for this.

My network has expanded, but it was deliberate on my part. Acquaintances that I meant to talk to more often, especially geographically distant are now much easier to make regular contact. Before, conflicts with travel, out of the office meetings, at workshops made it very difficult to line up calendars. These days, there is a good likelihood that a 30 minute meeting will work.

It’s been much easier to avoid the time burners that pounce on me at the office. It’s been wonderful missing out on their complaining and uninvited ‘thought leadership’. They can post it to Yammer and LinkedIn.

> especially geographically distant are now much easier to make regular contact.

I have a few friends/coworkers who became remote over the years. Our contacts had been more infrequent, but still there.

Now post covid I not only contact them, but ask for "remote work advice" since they're experienced pros.

If it’s the same analysts who do their telemetry analysis then you’re probably right.

It depends how you built that network.

If it’s mostly the people You met at smoke/coffee breaks or going to lunch with you that network won’t grow much remotely, stagnate at best.

If it’s mostly people directly working with you, having everyone on the same playing field (nobody is physically closer to your desk, or to your office) can help that network to expand.

Perhaps they measured it as emails/chat network patterns, but the increase could easily be explained by the fact that you cannot just walk up to someone's desk anymore.

I agree, everything else in the article pretty much matches my own experience except that.

Also understanding what is going on outside of your immediate duties, which is based on informal or overheard conversations, has disapeared completely (not the least because no one will put a rumor or an overheard conversation in writing in a chat room), and it has a nasty effect of making people feeling isolated.

Org charts are pretty common in my workplace.

I wonder what facilities are available to Microsoft employees to discover people outside their teams when seeking assistance or niche experience.

You can see a “who reports to who” in Outlook on our phones when searching peoples names but I don’t think that’s how these peripheral connections are being made.

"Blame" helps, too. All the bigger projects are in Visual Studio Online, so if you wanted to know, for instance, the latest contributors to WMI, it's just a few clicks away.

I think that the increase they're talking about probably came about because people where highly stressed out and worried about Covid-19. A certain degree of comfort comes from reading about shared experiences during this stressful time on a company-wide Yammer feed.

Before corona I’d ask a colleague next to me for help first even via Skype, now I just go straight to the one likely responsible because I won’t get the social component so I no longer care to prioritize the contact of my team-mates.

There might have been noise elimination. Less useless meetings. Quality != quantity.

Plus on a 30min, you loose at least 5 or 10 in people struggling to join, asking to repeat because of a bad connection or because some baby is crying.

And I think like most people, my attention is reduced on a call vs physical meeting unless it is a meeting I particularly care about.

I would like Google to publish the report from its statisticians on this. They have an _amazing_ team who collect data and _really_ rigorously dig into questions that are important for the company to know answers to. They then publish some of their findings company-wide (I guess some are only seen by execs, since there are relatively few public reports coming out of that team). The quality of their work would always be quite obvious, and I always wondered how come other large companies I worked for do not have a team like this.

I know this is happening. Without any insight into what the teams are doing, my guess is that results will be some time as they are likely focusing on engineering outcomes that require multiple survey styles and longer timelines, e.g. code metrics, engineering happiness, release frequency, bug trends etc etc rather than the easily collected metrics presented in the OP.

> The share of IMs sent between 6 PM and midnight has increased by 52%.

While I like the idea of “social meetings” (non-work virtual meet ups), this trend of IMs outside of core work hours would make the change to remote work a net negative for me.

On the flip side, there are many of us who do their best work in the evenings. I find I get more done in a couple of hours after 5 (maybe 5-8) than I do in the rest of the day. I’d much rather start at 10 or 11am and finish late. Enjoy a sleep in, unrushed morning coffee, get stuck into work all woken up and motivated, get meetings out of the way and power through work from 3 or 4 until 7/8pm.

While working from home in the past I've experimented with a split work cycle, where I work from maybe 9am-1pm and 8pm-midnight. I'd do all my meetings and discussions in the morning, but my best programming work at night. It works pretty nicely and leaves the best part of the day open for getting outside. But it sometimes doesn't work with other people's schedules and you're forced to adjust your hours to take a midday meeting or when your dinner plans run long.

I have started thinking of a similar schedule to this for the coming school year. The majority of my co-workers are located in Germany, so I start at 0700 so that we have increased overlap. By 1100 they have all pretty much signed off and I can switch to working with my son on his school work (we are choosing to not send him to in-person classes). After dinner, I can work for the four hour balance.

I work remotely (and have done so since before Covid), and I get IMs at night (at least, in my time zone). But since we're used to working asynchronously, I just leave them until my next working hours unless I just happen to be really bored. It's not like it's a phone call, luckily.

I agree. Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help? I fight my keys inside the car, can you help me get in my car? Yes “everyone“ shops in line while at work, but few people are anti social robots. Point is you got a few hours to yourself after work, employers should respect that.

> Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help?

Our executives specifically asked middle management to be flexible to allow employees time to handle errands and favors during normal business hours. Within my team we've been stepping up to handle on-call coverage so on-call can handle family stuff during the day.

Management has been extremely flexible at my current company, and at one of the two companies I worked at before this one. It's been fine if people shift their working hours forward or back a few hours to avoid commute traffic or go off in the middle of the day to take care of personal stuff. This sometimes included things like "I need a lift" where one cubemate would go pick up another cubemate. Other times it would be phone calls, medical stuff, mental health breaks, double lunches an hour apart because someone was extra hungry/anxious/restless, weird errands like banking, walks outside around the block with coworkers, anything involving children, etc. In general at my salaried jobs I've found management to be more focused on team and individual output than input.

In exchange, I've had no personal qualms responding to coworkers if they emailed or messaged at 11pm and I happened to be awake to see it for whatever reason. Management certainly never expected people to work at these hours and generally actively discouraged it except during strictly-defined emergencies. I'd certainly have pushed back on any kind of expectation like this, and in all honesty I think when people work odd hours sometimes managers strongly question their time management skills. But some colleagues seemed to have odd working hours and I both enjoy my work and enjoy helping / chatting / troubleshooting with my coworkers. So if I wasn't doing anything else I'd usually respond and provide the info they needed to get past their blocker.

A key part of this though, is that I'm doing this with/for other employees at my level who happen to have asynchronous working hours, not at the insistence of management.

Also notable, was that the company that was very strict about clocking in/out using a fingerprint scanner when arriving, or while taking lunch, also never saw any employees working before 8:15am or after 5:15pm. In their case this seemed like dysfunction, due to their overall poor culture. But I could see in a hypothetical healthier culture that this could be a strong positive for many employees.

I think at the end of the day, employees should feel comfortable ignoring pretty much any communication they receive outside of working hours. I also feel like they should feel comfortable responding to off-hour communication if they find it rewarding, engaging, or simply not a hassle.

I often wonder if I am hurting my career by not responding to IMs/Emails after 6pm or on the weekends (unless there is a production emergency).

Probably, but that doesn't mean you should start.

The two biggest issues with current remote work for me are: my work day is now constantly stretched longer for many reasons (if everyone's on different schedules how are there boundaries?), and my house is just too small for two of us to work from home and it's taken over space that's supposed to be for other things.

Curious to know if anyone in a fully remote or mostly remote company: does your employer have even informal etiquette about “off-hours” messaging or is the stance more ad-hoc and left up to the employee to enforce those sorts of boundaries?

What’s the proper approach between the two, just looking for general opinion.

Automattic: off-hours contact is normal, just don't expect a response until they get back to work. My team is spread out around the world, there's always someone asleep while you're working. If it's an emergency (like you deployed broken code and closed your computer) you can probably expect a phone call and/or text message.

Edit: one of the benefits of getting a late-night IM is to read it and have plenty of time to think about a response. Though, many people do not have Slack installed on their phones and only on their work computers.

For us, it's pretty much "don't expect an answer", and DMs while away are sort of uncommon (i.e. people rather send an e-mail then, or wait until you are back).

We have people working all kinds of schedules in various time zones, but you typically have some idea when the people you directly work with right now are around, you pre-schedule times for meetings, and most people leave away messages indicating when they'll be back if they are away at normal work times.

GitHub: no expectation of an immediate reply even during your local "business hours". I'm new here and really appreciating the aggressively asynchronous culture.

How I deal with things like that is to ignore them, and if asked about it, politely point out that my contract does not require me to be available outside of working hours. If I am off work, I am truly off work. I will respond the next business day.

I was remote before this, and while I was a little light on hours at first, since the pandemic it’s been creeping up. At this point I figure that we are even, but I’m starting to feel a bit of burnout so I need to work on better work hygiene.

Perhaps the number was originally 4% of all messages, and now it is ~6%? The relative increase is large, but as percentage of total messages, it's likely still low. Kind of like how startups can have insane growth numbers because, originally, they had only a handful of customers.

Remote work is right for some people, but the past few months have convinced me that it's not right for me.

A thing that puzzles me is how adamantly some of the people who were already fully remote try to impose the remote-is-always-better mentality on their fellow employees. Different people have different circumstances/preferences.

The reason is simple. If you are remote at an organization that isn't fully remote, it is quite apparent that you are basically a "second-class citizen" unless a large effort is made to include you in things. It's not as simple as saying that everyone should work how it works for them. If you have a large enough mass of people who are colocated, it has real impacts on remote workers.

(The converse is that if you push everyone to work in a way that accomodates remote workers, you probably deprive a lot of the people who prefer to be in the office of some of what they like about being in the office. I do think that the things that enable remote work -- documenting decisions, having good channels of communication and documenting things, etc. -- are beneficial for companies in the long run anyway, though.)

I think remote work is most strongly preferred by very experienced individual contributors. It is not the best setting for many people learning the ropes and it is an absolute crap for me as a people manager and I do not mean “I want to see your behind in the seat” style of management.

When I was an individual contributor and the work was very well specified, well contained, and known, remote work was a breeze.

Teaching new and junior employees is a constant struggle, something very critical is missing in remote work. It could be that people are wired better to learn face to face or there is a significant non-verbal component.

Managing people as in - getting them organized and synchronized is also a challenge. There is an immense value of getting everyone into the same room. I am not surprised articles points out that managers bear the brunt.

Well you are making it seem like how well remote work depends on the type of work, which while must be true to an extant, is besides the point the parent was trying to make: that it depends more on the type of person. I agree with the parent, as I have seen some of my colleagues flourish, and others flounder in the current environment. We all have similar tasks, the difference is the individual.

I’ve only ever been a people manager in a remote only world, but I’ve also successfully ramped up plenty new hires, most of home have been more successful than those who started on in person teams in the same cohort.

I suspect the biggest issue to overcome was ensuring new hires have lots of time carved out for them across the team and ensuring they take advantage of it. When you can go physically knock on someones door you are harder to ignore then an IM or channel message, and it is more natural. Getting the team culture to be responsive to new members took deliberate work, but now it seems to be self perpetuating.

As for coordination, deliberate use of process and tooling helps a lot, but it remains challenging. We seem to get good value from all extra the formal meetings the article mentions, but there is still difficulty making sure everyone is on the same page at the detail level.

Agreed. I have experienced the same/opposite. I LOVE working from home and for years before covid was adamantly told "get used to working in the office"

Difference people have different circumstances/preferences.

It's important to note that remote work in March/April/May (and perhaps even today) was uniquely coupled with remote life, since most knowledge workers stayed home due to social distancing guidelines. It should not be surprising that the boundaries between work and life blurred when life itself came to a standstill.

I'd be surprised to see if the same tendency to blur life and work, such as by working on evenings and weekends, persists once life returns to its previous form.

Many companies are now shifting to full time remote work. The new normal is the new normal, things may never go back to the way they were. And companies might be able to save a lot of money on office space as well. I know in Seattle and Portland, there are quite a few firms who are allowing remote work because of issues of safety as well, chaos and disorder combined with a pandemic creates a new set of challenges we've never had to deal with before in concert.

Correct, which is why I'd like to see this same analysis redone once social distancing is relaxed and the situation on the ground (e.g. in Seattle/Portland) stabilizes, but people are still working from home.

What about effect of saving on disgusting commute time? That itself trumps everything else imho.

I am pretty sure having to care for small children at home trumps commute savings.

I really messed up... I bought a smaller house close to work, because a short commute was more important to me than a bigger house. Now, I don't get the benefit of the short commute, and I have to work at a small home with kids here.

I used to live and work in Portland, Oregon. My commute in the mornings was, at it's worst, 30 mins to my campus. That same commute back home took 2-3 hours.

I've been working remotely off and on for the past 10-15 years and I cannot even tell you how much my quality of life has improved to not have to commute anymore.

My total commute was ~3 hours a day. My quality of life has drastically improved since the quarantine started as well.

My total commute was ~45 minutes in the morning and maybe 1 hour in the evening. I really miss that drive. It used to be a good relaxing time for me. I used to listen to podcasts and felt refreshed after reaching home.

Now I have no such transition. I wake up, drink coffee, and I'm at my desk working. In the evening I get up from my desk, go to the kitchen and cook and then eat. It's very boring and monotonous.

Have you considered taking 45 minute walks at the times you used to commute? Audiobooks/podcasts are just as good while walking, and the light cardio might be more stimulating and enjoyable than the driving was. Or do something else with that time. Just because you’re no longer forced to drive for nearly 2 hours a day doesn’t mean you need to work an extra 2 hours.

I feel the same, with approximately the same commute time, except that I took public transportation. It was great having a little reading time before work, and that defined transition time really helped. I hate being 12 feet from work when I wake up in the morning.

Seconded. I was commuting to midtown Manhattan everyday, I'm saving at least an hour each day, not being on the MTA. I do miss the Citibike commute I did in the afternoons though--that's been replaced by an afternoon run. My cost savings there are not insignificant.

Forgive my bluntness, but I have never understood the people who buy or rent houses very far away from work so they can save on a monthly housing payment when their hourly rate at work times the additional commute time is larger than the "saving".

You are assuming that people can increase thier income by working more hours. Most salaried employees can’t do so at all and hourly employees don’t often get overtime hours. It’s quite possible that commuting really is the only way to “earn” the bigger house.

Regardless, there are other factors at play. A big one is that the amenities you want aren’t near your work place at any price point- see all those people who commute from SF to Mountain View. Another is that your job changed but you don’t want to move- I once rented a place near the downtown core thinking I’d always be close to work, and then somehow ended up with 45 minute commute to a satellite location. Once someone buys a place, get settled, and kids start school it gets a hard to move your residence as well.

You don’t get paid either way.

In many places, urban or close suburban school districts suck.

In my city, due to court mandated decrees from 40 years ago, my kid would need to take a bus almost 60 minutes to the other side of town based on a lottery.

In the NY Metro area, you can trade commute time for being a few minutes from the beach or living upstate with lots of open space, etc. People make choices based on what is important to them. Who in gods earth wants to live in some cramped apartment in Brooklyn or whatever if other options are available?

Where I live, you have to earn at least 3 times what you spend on housing to be allowed to rent/buy. This alone forces people to live further away from work even if it costs them more in the end.

My experience (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/07/11/1830) matches this to a T, from the longer hours to the shorter (typically 30m) meetings.

It bears mentioning, however, that I have been remote for a good while, but now have _so many more meetings_ that it isn’t even funny anymore.

The switch to all-on video (rather than audio conference calls, which had its own etiquette and “dances”) and the increase in context switching has made these very frequent meetings a lot more tiresome and impacted my productivity to the point where I have blocked out large swathes of “focus” time so I can actually work rather than constantly “sync” across multiple teams.

It’s not about being remote (the “old” asynchronous remote working was awesome), it’s about all the newbies wanting synchronous, high-intensity face-time.

(I get very few IMs, too. Only from other “old timers”, now that I think about it.)

>>It bears mentioning, however, that I have been remote for a good while, but now have _so many more meetings_ that it isn’t even funny anymore.

This ^^^. The girlfriend and I have both worked remote for years. Since her company did wfh company-wide, there has been a huge uptick in meetings. Also, for some reason companies seem to think 'video' calls are better then voice. Given we did business for almost a century with just voice (telephone) I find it rather odd. Maybe its just the novelty factor of playing with 'zoom' backgrounds ??

All the findings in that research completely mirrors my observations at my current employer.

My personal observation of forced remote work seems somewhat bipolar. If you have large responsibilities, lots of work, or the freedom to take initiative the new time flexibility allows you to increase personal performance. If you have a lot of time availability the new flexibility allows you to do other things than pretend to work or mindlessly surf the web. Sometimes people see that gap and try to fill it with more meetings to force engagement.

The issue with the study is this was an “unexpected and unplanned” work from home situation.

If a team or employee had better preparation I would expect mostly positive results (ie tools, processes , and employee had time to prepare workspaces, kids at school, etc)

What’s with the blank white pop up on the website?

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