Head of Remote Work

I think it's quite likely as a long term trend for a big enough number of companies.

Face to face meetings are much higher bandwidth than anything tech can offer us so it will remain a competitive advantage for at least a while. Also most people are sociable and yes, work counts, too.

I'd bet on a split something like this 10 years from now: 60-80% split, 10-20% no remote, 10-20% fully remote.

Right on. It should be treated as a compliance role to ensure remote workers aren’t second class citizens.

Spent 5 years working remote. Was starting to lose my mind from the lack of interaction.

Went back to an office. Was much happier.

Beginning to feel the same way again.

A better role were I actually interacted with people during the day would be a major help. But hard to predict when interviewing

Oh, game on: Someone had this as a signature in her mail(not joking I actually copied it):

> Lead Senior World Director of Marketing and Monetization, Research and Development.

Worked somewhere similar and saw similar outcomes. I think having too much money removes the feedback loop that lets a team know if they are on the right course, so like you say, it comes down to a popularity based culturr

> His job was to make python script to make devs happy. I've never heard of that before.

That's kind of nice.

Once a project grows a certain size if you have the budget for it it's cool to have a dedicated small team that takes care of the dev environment (maintaining the build and test pipeline, adding static analysis and making sure there's some working default config for at least one IDE). Also take care of the commit hooks and helps out when migrating language and tool versions.

How do you raise $200M with only $10k in revenue? That is, if your A round was $10M, your B round was $60M, and your C round was $130M (I'm just making up numbers here), how was it that none of the investors ever needed to see any material revenues?

Well I ended up working there for 8 and a half years believe it or not. But it wasn't like that when I started. That happened around a year ago(management was entirely replaced). I'm not known for being tolerant when it comes to bs so the moment those policies started getting pushed onto my team, me along with several others decided to bail(basically the oldest dogs, and as I understand a few others are one foot out already). Frankly I don't see anything but the company going bankrupt within the next year or two. Ever since the management swap took place, the company has been in the dark red zone in terms of revenue.

Not if you structure your org right.

Infra-office (ie in person) for the high bandwidth interfaces, usually the whole team is in the same office.

Inter-office for lower bandwidth interfaces, ie between teams and functions.

You definitely have some interactions that are effectively remote, say if your project involves working closely with $remote_team, but in general the highest-order terms in the equation should be in office, if you are doing a traditional WFO org.

I've worked fully remote, fully in-office, and a blend (3 days in + 2 days WFH).

For me, I preferred blend. (Caveat: office ~25 minutes away, some on-site campus amenities including dining, and WFH included scheduling flexibility)

I could slot annoying business-hours-only chores into my WFH days, or shift work earlier and later if I needed to be there for a kid thing.

And 2 days of that a week felt about right. I got the facetime and meeting stuff done my other 3, and had quieter, individual progress time those 2.

Yeah I also don't blame them though, if I were a parent I would absolutely hate WFH.

> Even if a four people of our 22-member team resume WFO, the rest are screwed. Soon we all need to WFO.

Pre-COVID I was one of 3 remote people on my team, rest worked from the office. This arrangement didn’t cause any obvious problems.

I always viewed it as people wanted their secretary to have more cachet akin to the WH COS. The go-to behind-the-scenes, "assistant POTUS" type roll.

Realistically though, that type of job exists in politics but it simply doesn't exist in business. The WH COS-type duties should be handled by a COO, Managing Director, EVP, etc. Any time I've seen COS used in a Silicon Valley context it's a glorified secretary/scheduler.

I'll add, be wary of folks that are hard core self-promoting. Typically they are better at marketing themselves than they are at doing the thing.

Who is Terry Tate? Why should we (or anyone) care what he has to say about company culture?

Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.

Do you know if there are any good articles on Valve's non-hierarchical culture?

Actually, this isn’t true. In The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx, Valve talked about how their 10 year dead period where no single player games were released was caused by their nonhierarchial structure. Half-Life 3 alone was started three times since HL2:E2 and people got bored and stopped touching it. They did work on several original titles and ended up cancelling them due to tech issues or boredom.

Alyx, once it gained steam, ended up turning into a hierarchical project and the largest in the company history, and was the only way Source 2 ever got finished (since they now had people waiting on it to get the game working). And it worked, as we finally now have proof that VR is a great way to tell stories. The book is excellent, and goes on sale often on Steam.

(A decent summary of the book is here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...)

Are there any more examples like that? I think that possibly Valve is an exception rather than a prediction for the future - they're obviously an incredibly successful company, but I haven't heard about other large companies with similar model.

I know Github had kind of similar culture in the beginning, with flat hierarchy, but that changed at some point. Then there's Zappos which is famous for their holacratic approach, but earlier this year I've read some articles saying that internally they move away from that model.

Valve has a strong hierarchical structure, where informal relationships makes the decisions that would (in other companies) be made by people in formal positions. All groups of people have implicit hierarchies. Some have explicit hierarchies as well.

Yes. If you have to talk about culture, you don't have it.

Culture is like macro economics - it's an illusion made up from micro economics. Likewise it's individuals' behaviour and interactions that will form a culture, and though you can put policies in place - like with macro economics - to try to influence maximize certain qualities - however that kills off nuances, flexibility, and variance of individual that's necessary for sovereignty to maximize the individual's contributions. A person will either blend in, integrate successfully into a culture - evolving it hopefully for the better - or their behaviour will lead them to being exiled unless they can learn, grow; my worry has always been if toxic, manipulative individuals capture the review and management positions - which is why I'm interested in non-hierarchical structures, however some still needs necessary; the never-ending tension between liberal and conservation, more hands on vs. more hands off approaches.

There are lot of fringe political folks on HN that would prefer everyone shuts up and works. Or that want to turn everything into a moral crisis.

But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on.

You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork.

You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you.

People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.

You're so deep in the BS yourself you can't even see it anymore? Office politics BS is commonplace and it's part of human nature in a place where humans interact socially, but that becomes a lot harder when you're working remotely (no references to give you about this statement, but I believe a lot of people have been saying this in the past few months). Can you really not believe that people can do work without a manager telling them to? I think that if that's all you know, yeah, can be difficult to adjust... but I am fairly certain most people would adjust just fine to a situation where they are their own manager: they have a job to do, a target to achieve, and they have to figure out how to get there. Some level of administration is always needed, but that doesn't require a manager as we normally have them. Just another worker whose focus is on metrics/people.

Yea, the top comments on this thread read like a bunch of ICs who don’t understand what management does.

Yes, you have more time to be productive from home but since you aren’t sitting with your team all day, your manager has to work harder making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing and they’re all pushing in the same direction. Culture is the norms of how that happens, so it makes sense to hire people who know how to do that well.

The flip side is forced culture. Watch some videos of corporations making workers sing and essentially peer pressure everyone in participating was cringeworthy.

Some people just want to go to work and do their job.

>I don't understand how this can be the top comment.

Know the audience. Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here. The other 25% are broken into aspiring entrepreneurs, reasonable ICs and Reddit migrants who are still trying to find their feet.

>Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.

Same crowd will balk at any suggestion around deriving accountability quantitatively. These rugged individualist coder wolves just need to be unleashed to let their genius flow, man.

>Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

See above. Why would the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with want a workplace that promotes working with others?

>That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

There is a difference between everyone being cold and taking it to such an extreme, everyone has to essentially be, ironically, the same robot in the rainbows and sunshine "work family".

>Well that gave me a good laugh.

Pulling out random numbers (goes for grandparent and your comment) doesn't help. Many people work in 1:5 manager:dev overhead, often more, due to multiple management layers all applying pressure on the bottom level. Not everyone is mentally a child that still needs to be babysat while an adult. Heck, college, university and all that are exactly there to ensure one is self-sufficient to an extend you don't need to manually moderate their every move.

It is fairly ironic you're devolving into the same behavior you accuse GP of, when a much more intellectual discussion can be held.

Corporations always give you a false image that they "care about their employees", "saving them world/environment", "mission", etc. Just stop the marketing BS, they don't care about anything else than just making money at any cost, it is all an upfront.

Even improving morale has an ulterior motive- to boost productivity for profit. It is fine as corporations' sole purpose is to give shareholders value, but don't color it around HR bs to fool people. As least most companies are this way, the exceptions are few. People are not dumb once they realize they are disposable and start smelling the bs.

I think why most people complain about management is due to their false sense of leadership and character, pretending to be virtuous, while stabbing workers in the back (i.e. hypocrisy). There are not many good managers or employers- most lack real leadership or morals

If by "culture" you mean, a group of people with the same attitudes and goals- there is no denying that humans work better in groups. Just keep the "do-good" BS out please...unless you really meant it by embodying those ideals- living as example.

Culture is (per definition) the underlying unspoken rules that makes a group of people behave the way it does. So what you are describing isn’t culture. They are actually examples of rules you could have in a culture.

Culture is an overused and overrated term that means nothing without detailed context.

When people say “culture” they usually mean...

- My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!”

- My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.”

- My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!”

- My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”

I've worked a number of companies where a culture formed spontaneously, and it was both productive and motivating with a real sense of camaraderie.

I've also worked at companies where the company created a culture with artificial team building tricks, and without exception it led to a shitty environment where HR and political schemers screwed over both the company and their fellow employees for petty gain.

Let's look at the other side:

I run process oriented companies

Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure

Would I allow the work place to be used as a surrogate for their social causes? no - actually maybe if it needed to court advertisers all the time, but otherwise no because that was not the point of the business entity.

Would I hire an operations person to plan social things for employees to look forward to because I don't care about that at all? maaaaaaaaaybe

I never needed that stuff, clock in, clock out, nobody is really on the clock just meet your goals

For me, location is more important. What can you do in walking distance after work? I tend to keep my social circles separate, I don't want my colleagues or employees around.

The jobs I loathed the most had car-only commutes to office parks.

The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.

I think the people that attracts are heavily correlated and makes the culture on its own.

> Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.

Exactly. Companies that have terrible culture project the need for a good one to get out in front of the accusation that their leadership failed in actually establishing a good one.

There is a difference between the management many people endure, and the management that both you and the GP strive for, which doesn't become apparent if you only look from the angle of "no management to start with".

The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.

When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.

Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)

More than that, once you have more than 2 people in a room, a culture will develop.

You can either let it grow organically or try to guide it at least a bit. And there is a reason we study for intellectual endeavors and train for physical ones.

Fair enough. My main work experience is at a smaller startup that has a heavy focus on collaboration so my opinion is biased towards that. In my experience trivial things can be solved with a slack message/call but I greatly prefer in-person interaction for more in-depth debugging, etc. But I understand how that’s not necessarily applicable to all situations.

My main concern, and the reason I posted the above comment, is I think companies may over -correct with hybrid work models. For those that prefer office work a hybrid work model is barely better than a remote-only culture; the office loses its benefits when everyone isn’t there. I’m not arguing these remote-only/remote-first cultures shouldn’t exist - in many cases they provide large advantages - but think there will be a significant desire for office-only environments for those that prefer office work.

I’m not arguing you should. But there are undoubtedly some people who would. And a hybrid work environment is detrimental to those who want that in-person experience. There should be opportunities for remote-only/remote-first cultures and in-person only jobs going forward. My argument is that a hybrid model misses the point - you lose almost all the benefits of in-person work in the process.

EDIT: I’m a new employee as well, just so it doesn’t seem like I’m projecting what new employees would want without at least some personal experience