Netflix boss: Remote working has negative effects
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links $x-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.
For some people, remote working is really not good.
And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...
WFH is horrible for some people in some scenarios.
WFO (work from office) is also equally terrible for some people in some scenarios. It’s just that people have generally normalized and accepted that these horrible WFO situations are required to feed yourself.
Barring jobs where you cannot function without physical presence, I’d say we need to fundamentally rethink why WFO is a default. And why we think a baseline of suffering for some people is generally OK.
IMHO, if you mix WFH and office the WFH folks will end up like internal contractors that don't have the same advancement potential as their office colleagues.
Many larger companies already are coordinating across multiple locations and timezones. One of the teams I work with has people on Eastern US time (though not all in the same office even before this) and Europe.
Another group is in two geographically separated offices in Eastern Time.
And other groups are just scattered all over.
I've worked remote when the rest of the team is in an office, and it's definitely not for all positions/teams.
The groups I'm involved with were already distributed with not much in terms of a "home base."
To expand a bit on the fixed hours, early-birds tend to be fine with getting to the office early, but night owls will either get kicked out or have to deal with people vacuuming floors around them.
By that logic, you could just bring your own monitor and chair and keyboard into the office.
Past that:
-If you have kids, you often can't easily get them if they have an emergency at school, or appointments
-WFO encourages buts-in-seats management vs. productivity based management
-Background noise
-Interruptions to your workflow that break creative "flow"
-Time spent packing lunch
-Money spent on cafeteria food
Whatever benefits WFO has, it needs to cover commuting costs, loss of life (car accidents), loss of time, loss of concentration, and for the company, the expense of renting and maintaining office space before it can break even in cost-benefit.
I usually tell people to go home if they are sick, but some of them are too proud and say "I'm fine". Since I'm not the manager, I can't force them, but I think I'll switch to home office when those scenarios happen again
Any other suggestions how to deal with those situations?
- Commuting sucks, unless you live in a nice neighborhood and can walk to work or take a leisurely ride. This doesn't exist for most people. It's especially bad in the bay area if you need to take BART. Who wants to be packed inside a train like sardines with people smoking crack. Seriously, have you ever seen a train station during commuting hours? They're 10 rows deep of people waiting to get on. That's assuming it isn't shut down for some random reasons. I should also mention wasting around 2 hours a day that you could spend on more sleep or hobbies.
- Open offices suck and are a poor excuse that they increase collaboration. Constant disruptions (both sound and visual noise), can't have any personal conversations and need to find a meeting room or hide in the hallways. Not to mention, I don't need/want to see my coworkers on facebook all day while they complain that they don't have enough time to finish their tasks.
- WFH can contribute to a more flexible schedule. Most people cannot focus non-stop for hours on end. It's healthy to take breaks but you can't do much beyond walking around your office (if it's in a safe location) if you're tied to the office.
- many more but I got tired of typing.
- an extra hour per day getting ready and travelling which increases stress and is ~250 hours per year simply wasted - many people have to waste much more.
- my office has terrible facilities. there is no natural light, heating is inconsistent and it's dusty.
- my office is attached to a factory so i have to listen to lathes running for a full 8 hours per day while i'm trying to solve problems.
- no eating area so i pretty much sit in my car for my lunch break
- people are constantly interrupting me with trivial issues that have absolutely no priority
- i don't really socialise at work much anyway so what's the point? i'm the only developer so there's no benefit from being near a team
Instead I could sit in my office at home with a superior set up, superior comfort, relaxing environment. I can go and have a lie down whenver I want. I can start and finish work at odd times if necessary. I can go to the gym on my lunch break.
It's just no contest for me personally although I must admit the quality of my office environment is certainly below average.
Personally, I believe that WFO is still the better way to function. Human collaboration is tied in closely with pre-existing conventions, using multiple modes of communication, and building camaraderie. I think its clear that conventions and ritualistic practices help a ton with social cohesion. Also we use multiple methods to communicate our ideas and feelings - verbal, non-verbal, physical, non-physical, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Someone punching the air when they've solved a hard problem, or some co-worker who isn't on your team that you only occasionally meet, excitedly telling you a fun story about their vacation or whatever. There is tons of communication that happens between humans in an office that is difficult if not impossible to replicate in a WFH environment. As a society, I think we'd be poorer for that if we lose it.
I've been able to spend significantly less energy on work, while being more productive. The commute, the open office and the useless meetings, really are murder.
So I think it's hard to say anything like you're trying to. We actually did research on it, because we're a 10,000 employee organisation, and the only groups who have reported a negative effect are managers. Productivity is up as well. That's still too general to say anything though.
The real trick will be figuring out how to create an environment where some people work more from home than others. Which isn't actually easy, because you kind of gotta schedule it so that people don't take turns being alone in the office.
This is going to be one of the problems. Some people who desperately want to come back to the office do so and discover that most of their co-workers haven't. And some of those co-workers have, with management blessing, moved outside the easy "drop in for one day a week" radius.
I expect office/remote workstyles are going to be popular questions in interviews over at least the next few years.
One is people who want to be in-person with their team all day.
People who want clear work-life separation (and who may not have space like a dedicated office at home).
Co-working spaces can solve for the latter but not the former.
I can’t for the sake of it focus on work in my apartment.
What's great about WFH is that everyone is equally reachable, so you don't fall prey to proximity bias.
* a post-standup, periodic “coffee time” meeting my team has
* multiple random channels my team and also company has, with such topics as ‘allow developers to yell, all messages here must be in all-caps-rage’ as well as a literal regular random channel that has lots of memes
* an open, inclusive and encouraging culture where people promoting ideas at a team or department and possibly even company level is commonplace and encouraged.
We haven’t had much of a lack of culture and idea generation. I’m sorry you’re suggesting you’re not experiencing this.
In the real world, however...
Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this discussion that bugs me. There's working from home, and then there's working from home during a global pandemic that has shut down large swathes of the economy.
I wish everyone writing these articles or trying to analyze wfh performance data would acknowledge that "not being in the office" isn't the high-impact change: "having to take care of children while doing my full time job" is.
If we brought everybody working from home back into the office, but also had them bring their kids along and try to help them through zoom class and make their lunches and stuff, it would be chaos.
Isn't this the worst case outcome? How are those young go-getters supposed to turn into the senior engineer who can actually thrive in the work-from-home world?
It's why we use an always on RTC thing so it's easy for crew to ping me ad-hoc for guidance.
This doesn’t match my experience joining a fully distributed company straight out of college. I think, as always, this has much more to do with company culture.
In distributed companies with strong communication cultures, it isn’t difficult to prove yourself a go-getter. There are easy avenues for asking lots of questions, and there are always lots of unsolved problems. In a culture which promotes learning and helpfulness, it’s easy to get an answer from a more experienced individual by pinging them directly.
I would even suggest that if you have a strong async communication system on top of something like Slack, it is even easier to prove yourself than in person. Anyone and everyone has the ability to create posts and spark discussions which are very visible. You can, for example, write a post about a deep dive you did into X system, and post it for all devs to read internally. People will notice your efforts!
This depends on having a great culture and good systems in place, of course. Many places don’t, which is why I think the focus ought to be more on remote culture and practices for distributed work.
Of course, the employer's wishes for the (hard to measure) productivity of the employees lead to->Employers profitability->Employee salaries+opportunities.
I think in your list of types of roles, the only one who may be helped by WFH is the developer who works on concrete tickets. The lack of cohesion, creativity, etc by these all remote teams is palpable to me.
We either need entrepreneurs who are willing to test this as a way to get better talent, or engineers willing to take a pay cut. Either way, it won’t happen at big companies.
why not 25 though? I personally think, 20-25 is the sweet spot.
Don't even get me started with "unlimited" vacation policies which are a joke. When I used to interview with companies and they told me they had unlimited vacation, I let them know immediately that I respect their time and dont want to waste it any further because I can already tell I dont want to work with them.
This is why I ONLY do contract work now. Truly unlimited vacation and however many workdays per week I want.
Not all unlimited vacation cultures are bad. The best way to find out is to ask how much vacation the CxOs took and how much vacation the hiring manager took. If they can't answer that, then be concerned.
Ugly and hostile reasons, but still cultural -- I don't think there was ever an evil cabal of CEO's rubbing their hands over the thought of engineers working 50 weeks a year.
It happens to have a nice side effect of saving the company a bunch of money, but at least in the case of Netflix, that money goes into your salary.
In the same way you count on your employer to provide you pay every two weeks, you should be able to count on them to provide you with the amount of vacation time you need to be both happy and productive. If they fail in either of these duties, it's time to quit.
Yes, I'm sure some companies "hope you take less time off than would otherwise happen" but that's really short-sighted of them, as the question isn't how long you're in the office, it's how much are you getting done relative to your goals. A company that can't see that likely has other issues IMO.
More likely, they would rather avoid paying you out accrued PTO on your last day.
My department lead works about four days in August. My boss takes three weeks to visit family abroad each year.
A few Swedish companies I know basically shut down entirely for July.
Are American tech companies so fragile that you can't lose staff for more than two weeks at a time?
How is it possible that you don't all end up in the mad house with work absolutely dominating your entire lives?
Oh that's easy. Only people with good jobs get medical and mental health care, so the rest just die off!
But less sarcastically, it's a huge problem in the US. Many people do in fact die or have serious issues from burn out.
Even at salaries far below Netflix-tier offers, many people depend on consumption to stay sane. Media, food, buying unnecessary items, seeking the next sale, etc.
Almost everything in the US is understaffed to the point that one person missing will ruin someone's day.
How many long vacations can a small subset of the company continue to take while still delivering ‘above average performance’ relative to other employees they experience the regular fears of taking vacation that come with unlimited vacation?
And most people take the long vacations because everyone else is.
As far as I know, that's a minimum required in all EU countries. Nowadays I think that companies that don't provide at least 30 paid days off a year are not worth working for. 25 is like the bare minimum.
Less than 25 is rare though. And it excludes bank holidays - those are on top.
It's not, 20 is minimum.
> Nowadays I think that companies that don't provide at least 30 paid days off a year are not worth working for. 25 is like the bare minimum.
Providing just the minimum (20 days) is very common for software companies where I live (it's in EU).
(To be fair, I have significant flexibility during a given week and can afford to go on extended vacations.)
The Netflix culture is very strongly built around in-person collaboration.
One interesting way this manifested itself was when the new HQ was built, it had a ton of 2-4 person meeting rooms, more than I've seen at any other big tech company. This was a reflection of the many 2-4 person meetings that were scheduled every day. In the old building, you'd often see a 10 person room being used by two or three people because there were no small rooms left.
Sure you can replicate this on zoom, but it's just not quite the same as sitting across from someone reading their body language.
Before the meeting, everyone who has a stake in what's being discussed contributes to a memo outlining their thoughts on it. Then everyone reads it ahead of the meeting.
The meeting is then just to hash out what's in the doc and agree on which already proposed solution will be adopted.
In the first org, there was a lot of pressure that any such memos had to be highly researched and data driven (also borrowed from Amazon, I imagine). In reality what this meant is that drafting a memo even for the smallest decisions or ideas became a large laborious effort, which nobody wanted to do and/or didn't have time to do it. The result was that everyone procrastinated on decision making, if they even participated in it in the first place, and I knew a fair share of colleagues who didn't even bother to pitch their ideas because of hating the memo system.
In the second org, it was the opposite problem: in an attempt to make memos "painless", there was much less pressure on making the memos "high quality". The result: every "memo" was a hastily scrawled together draft of random notes that didn't make much sense, and we had to spend most time in meetings going over the "memo" to decipher it and have the author explain it anyway.
2-4 person meetings are great because everyone has a chance to interact and ask questions.
I've also personally noticed an interesting subtle difference: in-person there seems to be a tendency to contribute if someone is present in the meeting and hasn't said anything. With zoom the general tendency seems to be the opposite (the longer someone is on mute, the more likely they are to stay on mute).
Anyone else notice things like this?
Meetings where people are there just to listen in, or for FYI purposes are utterly useless.
Also, the fewer attendees the better, in my experience. 3-5 is a good size. 1-2 "higher ups" and 1-3 with "boots on the ground". More than that and it risks devolving into chit-chat and speculation instead of bullet-pointed queries and actions.
I see this as a positive, no need to read body language for most tech company meetings - while troubleshooting a network issue, doing code review or talking through a new feature. It may be different for HR or a law firm, where its about "judging your opponent" or similar double speak but 99% of tech meetings can easily be replicated over zoom and are better of without any of that anyway.
Not everyone communicates like you do. If you want to be an effective communicator, you have have to tailor your output to the recipient. Body language is an important part of that.
I try to read body language to gauge if I need to explain further without putting people on the spot. I can usually can get by with video-on Zoom calls, but that's still a bit different... I can't make eye contact with a specific person and judge the reaction since they don't know who I'm looking at
WFH naturally allows more flex into your real life. This will not vibe well with Netflix's culture IMO.
> All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]
> 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
> You question actions inconsistent with our values
> You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
> You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.
I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.
I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people.
> Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews
A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.
If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google.
At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?"
I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends.
But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it).
Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching".
It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched.
There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring).
Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content.
This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture.
Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.
I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here.
I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.
I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
If only you had said "never" ...
Most companies have a set of values. Some, like Amazon, actively encourage questioning things that go against those values. In my company, we haven't as deeply enshrined the notion of questioning things that go against the claimed company values. As a result, no one cares for the values, and people tend to ignore any org/department leader espousing any value (company or otherwise). The common refrain is "That's just talk, and few follow it." A company where you can actively question people's actions when they are inconsistent with the claimed values would be quite refreshing.
> You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
First, to clarify different interpretations: They're likely saying to avoid decisions that will benefit you/your team/your department at the expense of the company as a whole. If that's the case, I understand the sentiment, and most companies claim the same. Mine definitely does. However, again, it's rarely practiced and the company is full of folks who do things to benefit themselves while hurting their team/department/company. If Netflix's culture solves this, then this is great! In any case, even if they fail at this, the statement is in line with most companies.
> You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
Well, a lot of companies want that. Probably few actually follow through like Netflix. I agree I probably wouldn't want to work there because of this, but I also don't think there is anything wrong with it. They're up front about it, pay a lot, and from what I hear they pay generous severance pay - the idea being that you're getting fired is not meant to be a statement about your abilities.
If you have to conform to it, but can't contribute to it, question it or change it, it's a cult.
that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)
And those caveats are that (a) you have a substantial and enforced amount of employee empowerment (ability to push back on poor tasking from above) & (b) you have an incredibly objective and ungameable performance evaluation system.
If you're going to all in on measuring people by performance, then you'd better be really good at actually measuring performance (and preventing managers from influencing measurements).
That's not employee empowerment, that's an employee incentive. To the extent that the person doing the tasking remains a the company and the IC doesn't when this happens, that's not empowerment.
Empowerment is an ICs ability to effect change, not whether they're sufficiently motivated to.
One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.
Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?
The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. You could direct between 0-100% of your salary to it.
If you can wait it’s a great way to make a lot of money.
Unless they changed it, the option price was 40% of the strike and the strike was the current price on purchase day, which was monthly. Gave a nice dollar cost average. But you could only put in up to 50% of your salary, plus you got an automatic 5% of your salary put into the stock program.
When I worked there the price was 20% of the strike and you could do 100% of your salary. I had friends who did 100% of their salary, which are now worth tens of millions.
Now, if they opted into the ESPP and stock options programs with a $1M TC, remember NFLX has 5-6X'd in the last 3 years. Someone who allocated a lot of their TC towards equity could easily be making $3M/yr today.
Unless they're counting stock gains. In which case that could easily be a SWE. Netflix lets you choose your stock/cash ratio in your comp, and if you went stock heavy you could be at $3M a year if you've been there a while.
I don't get how people in SV can make this much and not be financially set after a few years of working.
That house will cost $2M at least if you want to be near the office, which means, assuming you can collect the $400,000 down payment, will leave with a mortgage/tax/insurance payment of about $9,000 a month, or $108,000 a year. The tax man will also take about 1/2 of your earnings.
That leaves you with less than $200,000 a year. You'll spend probably at least $50,000 on food, clothes, activities, etc for the kids and yourself.
So now you're saving $150,000 a year, if you're super frugal.
Let's assume you're ok with retiring out of the Bay Area. You'll still need a couple million to retire on. At that rate, it will still take you decade to do it.
All that being said, I have a friend who did exactly that. He worked as a senior/principal engineer for about a decade, was single the whole time, lived super frugal, and retired back to Kansas. I hear he just sits at home working on open source, going to the bars every night.
My firstborn however, now that went a bit too far.
Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.
1. https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlik...
You can claim it's net negative, but not seeing anything positive probably just means you are a workaholic with no life and can't fruit a good debate about it.
- no water cooler talk and lunchs > bad for team spirit/work friendships
- heated discussions going stale and ending up in resentment > easier to resolve in person when you get a good feeling for how the other feels (and interact about non-problematic things, e.g. the mentioned lunch together)
- grabbing a busy person when you feel the time is right
- harder to motivate yourself when you are on low-energy or stuck
(And yet I think the positives even that all out)
I would like going back to the office. I miss the espresso machine, the snacks, seeing people, playing boardgames after work. But that's because it's a 10 min. walk for me to go there.
For some coworkers, it's a 1 hour drive each way, having to pay for parking, and needing to leave work no later than X because otherwise they have to pay extra.
Also, I can concentrate more at home. In my previous job, I ended up moving to a small cubicle that was not being used, because I couldn't stand the noise of other people talking around me (had some loud speakers there).
FWIW I personally think that remote work is hugely beneficial to the employees - but I don’t have enough data to figure out what the net impact is on the employer
1. People in more social roles (e.g. marketing) who spend the day working together, joking/laughing/being loud and disruptive.
2. Some management who don’t like spending entire days on zoom (understandable).
3. People who spend most of their time using company money on first class flights all around the world networking/visiting other offices.
4. Older people (50+) who will always believe in the magic benefits of being in the office and don’t want a huge lifestyle change this late in their careers.
I think people either want to or don’t want to WFH for selfish reasons. Just like there have also always been people who don’t want to work from an office for selfish reasons. One option is not going to work for everyone and doing it halfway will not be good either. Do what’s best for the company. Execs need to look at the data - how is output? Morale? Finances? Employee turnover? If it’s improved move to full WFH if not, full office (with a little more flexibility now you know you can trust people).
I know of at least one counter-example. Maybe it’s the exception that proves the rule but I’d rather see some numbers before believing it.
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...
edit for possible misunderstanding that I'm critisizing the OP
Makes a lot of things make sense.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Randolph#Early_life_and_e...
Just because certain personality types work better in solitude doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all.
Others are suffering loneliness, marginalisation, are struggling inside their own heads, are stuck in tiny apartments or don’t have access to outdoor space. If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.
And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.
Also comparing Covid wfh with normal wfh is vastly different and incomparable. Many of us are stuck inside, whereas normal work from home you could go to a coworking space, or a coffee shop, are the beach. Being forced inside is totally different.
Replicating a truly creative collaborative working environment is impossible everywhere.
Truly creative environments are grown from the resources and people available. You can't copy something that worked elsewhere with different people and expect it to work again.
Also, entirely anecdotally, the band The Postal Service are so called because they created their album by sending each other tapes through the post. They were very creative, and living in different cities, so creative remote work has been achieved at least once.
That's quite a departure from "WFH isn't one-size-fits-all". If working from home isn't for everyone, why do you assume the office is?
> And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.
Strongly disagree. I don't think you even real-time communication, much less video is required to have strong collaboration. There are certainly times when it helps, but even in those times I've never felt held back by jumping on a quick call vs an in-person meeting, and we almost never do video.
As a manager, there are certainly conversations where I find in-person to be beneficial, and for those video calls are a poor substitute. Reviews, raise negotiations, disciplinary conversations, etc, but these are all discussions where an accurate emotional read is critical for both sides.
On the other hand for discussing algorithms, software architecture, network layouts, server specifications, etc, these can certainly be topics with lots of disagreement, requiring lots of conversation, but if your relying on emotional nuance for or other non-verbal cues for communication I think you've got an unacknowledged problem, where people are communicating clearly enough with their words.
I know I'd rather be coding from a beach than in a fluorescent-lit cubicle (and I do). Even if it's more productive for Bill to barge into my cubicle than wait for me to respond to his Slack message.
Let's at least let our work culture hit a nice 50/50 split between office jobs and remote jobs before we damn the WFH movement too much.
Btw, the "kool aid" you're seeing is companies grappling with a pandemic. It's not like fanatical WFHers have spontaneously become ascendent in our society.
I don't think a 50/50 split is required to test out any new idea. All you need is a representative statistical sample.
Then again I don't have children and I cycle to work so maybe that's the difference.
I haven’t seen a corporate space “designed for work” in years thanks to the cult of the open plan office.
Meanwhile at home I have a nice electrically-adjustable standing desk, an Aeron, an air conditioner set to the precise temperature I alone want it to be, and I can go to the coffee house downstairs if I want to hear people bleat about blockchain.
You were doing pretty well until this sentence.
In an ideal world, workplaces would strike a balance and allow each person the environment to deliver their best work.
speaking to this: If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.
What percentage of people who 'prefer WFH' are just people who don't like where they work and who they work with?
Would be interesting if someone did a survey on this
What we should be advocating for is an inclusive policy that allows employees to choose how they want to work.
I couldn't agree more with this, and from a lot of comments from the past months, this is something that seems to be a big issue with people wanting to work from home.
"No. I don't see any positives," he replied
Not even a tiny bit of positive? I would be curious to know Netflix's workers point of view on this.
Either way, this world wide work from home experiment isn't even a good one because there's a massive pandemic going on that... Judge wfh after the world is vaccinated.
The CEO of Netflix is a brand in itself. The guy is selling a message, a vision (and a book!) My guess is, deep down inside, he sees several positives of WFH, but that doesn't vibe with his overall message or the culture he's trying to cultivate.
In addition, certain (but not all) aspects of the media business such as creating media do work better in person. This is true of many industries, not just media, and may explain some of his thinking.
No judgment just wondering.
It also helps with recruitment: Your catchment area is bigger if someone only has to come in the office 3x/week vs. 5x.
I guess we need to differentiate between 100% remote, and partial WFH. Just about everyone will be in favour of the latter, but pushing everyone into the former has its consequences.
I wish people would stop thinking about remote working as a binary thing. Everyone's situation is different.
I live a 15 minute walk from my office, so for me going to the office has loads of benefits and few downsides. My brother-in-law pays £100/week to spend 2-3 hours a day commuting in and out of London. For him WFH has been a massive quality of life improvement, especially as there are few benefits to him being in the studio (he's a video editor).
We are split between two offices, one in SF and one in the UK (with everyone wfh at the mometn), and our entire front-end team is remote, it all works pretty well. Sure, there are jobs where being in the office will be prefereable, but we need to start being more flexible in both space and time.
I think allowing people to work however they want should be the way forward.
I personally don't plan on ever going back into an office. For me, WFH is the best thing that has ever happened. No commute, no open office bullshit, more sleep, more focus, more time for personal hobbies, no working in a filthy neighborhood in downtown SF, options for better accommodations (due to no commute), no waiting for people to finally clear a meeting room, no need to stand in line to go to a smelly restroom, etc. etc.
One of the things I miss most about the office is that I live in “ a filthy neighborhood in downtown SF” and the office was wonderful. I also miss the commute, which was on one of the tech busses, so I could sit back and take in the scenery.
I am upgrading neigborhoods though, so that’s something.
Plenty of companies are first to market and don't win the market. Also, Amazon Video predates Netflix streaming and Hulu was out only a year later.
In practice every company does a version of the "keepers" test. The difference is where the bar is for keeping. At the very least companies will fire people that are just plain incompetent. That is deciding the keep line is basic competence.
Hopefully Covid-19 exposed people to the positive effects and there will be more remote work opportunities than before. People frequently working 1-3 days a week from home in many professions might become accepted norm.
I think there are immediate negatives, like collaboration, synchronous decision-making. I wonder what the long-term ones are.
This hits companies with teams who sit in the same office. Companies that are more spread out didn't suffer as much. My team of four people is spread of four cities, so we were always remote to each other.
The negatives come from equipment and socialisation:
- most homes are not equipped to be offices (anything from lack of proper chairs to lack of proper quiet places at home, especially if kids are on vacation)
- you do miss interactions with other people at the office even if they are not on your team: lunches together, coffee breaks etc. This can be mitigated (just ask freelancers how they cope), but it will eventually affect most people
- You often end up working more at the detriment of your work-life balance due to some routines just not being there. No one asks you to join them for lunch? You end up skipping lunch because you're working. People are not leaving for home en masse, you end up staying way beyond work hours hacking at "just one more bug and PR, and I'm done".
Work-life balance is really hard to maintain long term when you're WFH; and you don't have the "sniff the air" kind of awareness of politics/power-struggles/etc taking place in the office, which can easily cap your mobility, which anyway is pretty limited; you can end up stuck in one job if your lifestyle depends on WFH; and finally, it's difficult to power through when your motivation is low.
Of course that's from the employee's point of view.
From the company's point of view, I think the only long-term negative that's not already evident in the short term is that you miss chances to develop and promote your top remote talent to maximize their contribution. WFH folks tend to get stuck in a role or at least a very narrow silo. (Remote-first companies try to solve that of course, but I've never seen one up close so I have no comment.)
Source: I'm WFH for about 11 years on the current gig, which I guess counts as "long-term."
Ill have to ask one of our TTRPG streaming group who is a writer / co-producer on a netflix show.
Even a four day work week with one day remote for most white collar jobs was a foreign concept until this year. The quality of life improvement for everyone is insane. People have more time to spend with family, cut entire commutes a few times a week, getting that extra hour of sleep, or have that extra hour or two after work, it’s about as close to the mythical European quality of life Americans hear rumors about.
I know that they have a leadership position today and supposedly hire great engineers, pay them very well and are doing very well in the stock market.
But, in view of numerous other streaming services, purely in today’s context, do they have an engineering edge that is a key strength that will help them keep their leadership position or is that engineering edge no longer relevant and leadership in streaming services would simply be determined by who has the content.
If you don't have content, your technical edge means nothing. Netflix understood this the moment Disney (or was it WB?) announced they would cancel their licensing deal with Netflix a few years back, and Netflix started pumping billions of dollars into producing its own content.
1 - speed and quality - 1080p, no buffer
2 - Good interface - netflix has great interface, Prime video is ok-ish, Crunchyroll is so damn hard to navigate
3 - just works, everywhere - Netflix has an app for most devices, works on any browser, and streams to chromecast and smart tvs. Prime doesn't cast to chromecast, doesn't work between android and smart tv app (I can't control TV on my phone). Crunchyroll... well... nope. Pirate websites have a better player than crunchyroll...
Guess which service I don't pay for?
Just checked. In Sweden the featured videos in Amazon Prime are: Shrek (2001), Red (2010), Twilight (2008), Top Gun (1986), Life of Pi (2012) etc. with a hodgepodge of Amazon's own content and recent-ish movies ranging from Madea's Farewell Tour to Amazon's Chemical Hearts to SCOOB!
Yeah, nah. I get the same crap with Netflix.
But I agree with you on that, and this is a bummer for Amazon here in Canada. They have: old movies/shows, Indian movies, old Indian movies.
I still like Prime because of a few originals, and because I personally like old shows and movies. But I can't really recommend to a lot of people
And I'm really enjoying punishing Disney for taking their ball home.
My budget for entertainment is already 100% allocated to to Netflix, and Disney has lost my entire family (2 adults, 3 kids), both now and possibly into the next generation as well.
I would "just enjoy what's there" if there was sufficient content. There's enough to go back to it once every two or three months, maybe.
Netflix doesn't just have to have enough content, it has to surface that content to the viewers that find it interesting. The streaming service that does this best will likely keep the most engagement.
It's been hard going from shutting down my laptop straight to playing with my kids, it seems like I'm part-zombie at first and not as lively as I would be later in the night with them.
One of the things I hate the most of the fact people just disappear and things then take way longer to get done.
The best jobs I’ve had is probably what Reed is describing in terms of attendance.
3-4 days in the office, flexible hours and some work from home options.
It’s a good balance and I don’t have to sacrifice some part of my house to being an office.
Yes many of the maintainers and key people are allowed to work remotely, but a lot more people work in the office.
I don't want to against the general WFH vibe, but that statement is hardly 100% true.
You don't get a paradime busting product without a tight co-located team
The current deficiencies in remote work will create opportunities for new products to fill those gaps.
I find it nonsensical for people to commute 1 hour only to sit in front of a computer that is connected to the Internet. And, lately, that computer happens to be the same you could use at home: a laptop, making it even more nonsensical.
Saturating streets with 5 seat cars with one occupant in them, cars that do not even need to be there anyways, creates a miserable urban experience for everyone.
Working from home also makes people focus on deliverables rather than superficial aspects of work: clothes, haircut, fitness, etc.
Plus, I don't think "I want to see face muscles moving" (something you can do using a camera anyways) is a proper justification for ruining the environment. The #1 challenge of the 21st century is how to make each human have a lower carbon footprint, and working from home fits well into that narrative.
Unless you seek a physical intimacy or violence with your coworkers I don't see the need for being in the same room.
I disagree with this on multiple fronts, but certainly lots of business is built around lies and perception.
Try to understand that this guy is cargo-culting. He's selling a vision (and a book) -- that the Netflix way of doing things is superior to the average way of doing things. I'm sure deep down inside he knows WFH has benefits, but acknowledging them would go against the culture he believes is required to keep Netflix at the top.
Many times he used sports as an analogy, and I will too -- the greatest coaches in history say and do odd things to inspire greatness. You might not agree with them, but you can't deny the results.
WSJ: Do you have a date in mind for when your workforce returns to the office?
Mr. Hastings: Twelve hours after a vaccine is approved.
For me the fact that the line between work and home gets blurred reduces stress by a huge amount. No longer do I have to do all my work in a specific 8-hour window. I don’t have to be ‘on’ for 8 consecutive hours anymore. I can do a few hours of work, do some mindless chores around the house, then go back to work. If I’m stuck on a problem, I can just take a break instead of sitting at my desk going in circles. I’m more productive and more relaxed since the start of the lockdown.
In addition, just the fact that I have access to a fully equipped kitchen makes a world of difference when it comes to breakfast and lunch.
Some of this might be personality differences, but it sounds like how Reed Hastings experiences work is very, very different from how I experience work.
No positive effects for him. Maybe. And even that is pretty dubious considering we're in a pandemic and nobody is at their best.
(This is in the UK, where our infection rate is pretty low now, how long that lasts remains to be seen)
Yes, as a lot of people I've been feeling negative effects of prolonged WFH however this talk of WFH "makes debating ideas harder" just makes me roll my eyes. I don't think there was anything I didn't manage to do over a quick zoom call compared to what's doable in person.
I would say that I am able to find something I want to watch on Netflix about one out of every five attempts. The other four end with me giving up in frustration after 20-30 minutes of looking.
I wouldn't pay even a single dime for the service, myself. My partner does, and every now and then I get bored enough to give it another shot. Usually I regret it.
They have a very positive view of their recommendations, like they have of their customized thumbnails.
Yet I, and all of my friends, find the recommendations nearly useless, and I also find the thumbnails mostly ugly.
It tricks your brain into saying "this is my commute". Ideally you have a work laptop or some such that you can take out in the morning after your walk and put away at night before your second walk.
It's worked out well for me, but I can understand it not working as well for others.
WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (or organization).
* agreed 100%
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
* yes, for people who don't know how stuff works, company culture, how to get things done
this is very bad
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
* pretty sure there are more parents who wish they could WFO than want to work from home and also homeschool their kids
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
* depending on company 'coasters' can be 20% to 70%. For all of them WFH is superb because no one knows whether they are working hard or coasting. All their tricks like having certain things set up and certain screens on their monitors etc. - not needed any more
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
highly focused developers who like to shut off everything. WFH is great
Except the PM/Project Manager/Tech Lead goes crazy because then developers start making what they find interesting and there is no way to keep them on track
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
* yea, this is absolutely terrible for anyone who has a leadership role
much of the work you get done is by leadership, and sometimes by leadership by force of personality or by 'created' consensus
good luck getting that in a WFH scenario
*
The real test of WFH will be when we see how companies that choose WFH after Coronoavirus, do compared to companies that go back to WFO
lots of tech companies are slobbering at the thought of cutting out office costs and paying employees less
my money is on such companies getting trounced by teams that work together and interact in an office environment
Right now we are in the honeymoon phase of work from home and very few (if any) real products are being launched that were started after coronavirus forced work from home
let's see how people feel in a year or two
It just takes 1 or 2 lazy people to bring down an entire product launch. WFH makes it very hard to figure out who these slackers are, and even harder to cover up their mistakes/flaws
Mythical Man Month is even more dangerous when WFH scenarios are involved
I listened to one coworker tell another that they had no sense of humor and were too “by the book” and it was disrupting the ability to communicate.
When a fraction of people worked remotely, this virtually never happened, because with only a small set of people working remotely, people had the mental bandwidth to devote a little extra time being sure to interpret their tone charitably, check for assumptions and follow up more often with them to fill in communication gaps that in-person gestures and signals would avoid.
But when everyone is remote, it’s like taking the attention and time budget you have and dividing it by a much larger pool of people. It’s simply intractable for a human to spread their attention like that and remain diligent and focused on communication metadata about every pairwise colleague interaction channel. It spreads you too thin and you run into extremely exhausting ego depletion and decision fatigue from all these little micro communication assessments you have to make that our brains are just not setup or wired to handle because we’re so adapted to analog facial and voice analysis with gestures and cues.
I despise loud, distracting open floor plans deeply, but the pandemic time period has made me deeply question whether fully remote work would actually be better. I feel way more tired and mentally exhausted from remote work, and casually I’ve noticed many, many more arguments and short fuse communication issues with everyone in my company.
I think it speaks to the evidence that the most cost effective office environments for knowledge workers, even in dense urban centers, from the point of view of pure short term cost savings to the company, are environments where every individual knowledge worker has a private office with a door that shuts, combined with separate communal workspaces for the extreme minority of people who either need a mix or need more extraverted / social work environments instead of quiet / private workspaces.
That way meetings naturally happen in person and it’s low-cost to setup meetings, grab coffee together, grab lunch, etc., while still preserving the remote work benefits of privacy and quiet.
Unfortunately though my experience working remotely has taught me that avoiding a commute is deeply not a good reason to be remote, because the costs in terms of worse work experiences and worse communication are way too high.
My very large tech company did a survey this summer about remote working conditions. Out of tens of thousands of respondents, less than one third said they wanted to continue working 100% remote. Nearly half said that their work/life balance was worse when working remotely. Over one third said they are less productive.
HN lives in a bubble of pro-remote talking points. In reality, most of the tech workforce (to say nothing of the non-tech workforce, which I assure you is much more anti-remote) does not enjoy it.
Most negative experiences I've observed have come from split companies, where two classes of employee occur, or from companies who say they're "remote first" but have a culture that hasn't evolved past the office. With the right process changes and the right culture, remote work can be enjoyable, rewarding, and more productive. Not to mention the big advantage: no commute.
Absoultely. I think there's a place for remote work, and a lot of people do manage to make it work really well for themselves and their organizations. I don't think it's broadly generalizable though. People's priorities are diverse. I'm a pretty well-established person in my field, and I would hate to do WFH 100% because I enjoy mentoring junior folks, and I just can't form connections with people unless I'm in the same space as them.
I really value the option of discretionary WFH, but in reality I'd exercise it fewer than two or three days a month. I find a ton of value in being present and attentive in meatspace.
Ignoring the wishes of these people is not how one builds an inclusive workplace.
Listen to them and, if granting their wish, make sure tools and processes take remote workers in consideration.
It’s a far worse situation to pretend remote working is supported without proper consideration.
Bubble ad reductio, someone add that to the list of logical fallacies.
I particularly remember some colleagues behaving like zombies for a couple of days after spending their night sleep hours binging on the platform.
Humans are a social animal and we like crowds. And with less physical work required then in past centuries jobs became more a brain exercise and less muscle required and with that means our brain requires more stimuli. And what is the easiest way to entertain brain? SEX. It's way more easy to work with a beautiful colleague alongside, it's more easy to take a coffee break and stroll through HR area to "cleanse the eyes" over "Janet" there. That's all about for those who hate WFH and are missing office. They can say a crap load of reasons why they don't like WFH but it boils down to one reason that absolutely nobody will talk about and that's SEX.