After embracing remote work in 2020 companies face conflicts making it permanent
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
What I mean by that is that for sufficiently large organizations, you can have options for folks. Some teams can be remote, hybrid, or in person. But make sure the teams understand what their structure is and have them build their processes and tools around that as appropriate. Then if you have an employee that wants to go remote, have them join one of the remote or hybrid teams. Have someone who wants to go to the office every day? Great, you can still be on a remote team, or here are the in person teams available to you as well (although realistically in person is preferred so you aren’t using up teleconference rooms unnecessarily).
For smaller companies, and as someone who started a remote first company in ‘17, it really needs to be an all or nothing. Being mixed creates weird dynamics on small teams, and it takes a lot of diligence to include the remote team members on off the cuff conversations.
I, for one, don’t plan on ever going back to an office full time. My wife and I just purchased our first home, and we bought a large enough place for two offices so we could both stay remote. We do multi generational living with my mom providing child care during the day, and a one year old running around like a banshee. It’s a really wonderful setup and I’m thankful to see so much of my son each day during these early years. No in person meetings come even remotely close to being as valuable as the time I get with him.
But, as with all things, these are just my $0.02. I get why there are varied opinions on this, and don’t begrudge companies that are going to ask everyone to go back in.
The multigenerational thing looks like it will work well for all involved too.
Just look at the profits per engineer at Facebook.
Rate(s). Agents in real life are heterogeneous.
It shouldn't matter to the employer. To the employee it matters a great deal.
I get money in return of delivering value, not to suffer.
As a manager, director or exec though, where your role is to review the work of developers, and plan their next move, you feel an added challenge from work from home. The distance makes it harder to have a grasp on what work is being done and how well/fast, and what impact. You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews. And it's not as engaging or easy for you to understand and ask questions in those meetings either. Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality.
This becomes truer and truer the higher up the chain. So a dev manager might still enjoy the freedom of work from home, less commute time, able to do home chors while they work and all. But a VP will feel less benefits, since they already have a lot of luxuries, maybe they have a Nani, a nice home closer to work, etc. And a CEO will feel even less, maybe they have a helicopter, a chef, and they already chose where the office was based on where they want to live.
I don't think this is true though. I can review code or a product just as effectively remotely as I can sitting in an office chair. What I can't do is walk the cubes and see who is sitting in front of their computer at the moment, and at least in my experience running IT for a moderately sized organization, this is what managers seem to have a problem with. Over the past several months I've had to fend off requests to pull reports on how many e-mails people have sent, setup mail forwards to their managers, line up VPN times to timecards, or find monitoring software for PCs, all in the name of making sure employees are "working enough".
Fortunately so far I've been able to fend these off by pointing out that none of these are real metrics for what's being actually being accomplished and that's what's really being exposed here is that the manager doesn't know how to tell if an employee is doing a good job and/or pulling their weight, and is trying to use butt-in-seat time as a proxy rather than figuring out what actually matters.
> You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews.
I can hit the call button on teams at any time. Sure it "feels" disruptive in a way walking into their cube didn't, but in actuality I think their about equally disruptive. Managers tend to underestimate the impact of "just swinging by".
> Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality.
I suspect most people would agree with you on preferring in-person meetings to Zoom. If we'e doing cameras I agree with you too, but... just don't. I spent most of my meetings this summer out on my front lawn with a notepad watching the bees work the clover. Made them infinitely more tolerable than being stuck in a conference room.
I would even argue that a call is way way way less disruptive than "just swinging by" as it is was easier to someone control and manage calls (as I can turn off the notifications if I am in the middle of something super important, but I can't turn off your insistence on walking over in physical space unless I have not one, but two levels of door).
This pretty much. I have a long commute as a programmer and working at home with a triple monitor standing desk is so much better... but "water cooler" chats and a meeting room pow-wow is something sorely missing. Some things communicate better face too face with white boards.
Everything else I think is true... face to face vs zoom to zoom has to be a hell of a change and, if I was in those shoes (Zero interest in management) I'd push for people back in the office.
Personally... I'd love a 3 home, 2 in office routine. Would really afford the best of both.
How so? Tapping techies on the shoulder and asking "what's up with your task?" is a widely disliked management technique. Or you meant something else?
> You can't as easily come in and check-in when you need too, you need to formally setup meetings or reviews.
Good. I am glad there is more tension for you when doing that now. Most meetings are disruptive for the creators so the increased barrier to entry for setting them up is a welcome correction and a reality-check mechanism. You do rely on those people to produce artifacts that lead to the company's bottom line and it is known that creators utilize flow state for their best productivity, thus their time shouldn't be sliced and diced so easily. Bureaucracy is not an universal virtue, let's all acknowledge that.
> And it's not as engaging or easy for you to understand and ask questions in those meetings either.
What do you mean by "engaging"? That you felt an informal bond with your underlings while having status meetings in person? If so, fair enough alright but how is it stopping you having it now during virtual meets?
> Also it's unpleasant to be on Zoom all day long, and since your job is just meetings all day, that's your new reality.
Also good. Should hint you to do less of those then. Find other formats: collaborative editing of documents / spreadsheets, to-do lists, milestone calendars, email + ticket tracker hooks, all of it. There's basically tooling for every need out there and most is leagues cheaper than JIRA. Use managers-only Slack channels or internal forums. There is a plethora of viable alternatives.
> This becomes truer and truer the higher up the chain. [sic] ...
This might sound a bit cold and I apologize if it's taken this way but... that's really not my problem as the techie and the creator. At all. You need my services, I need the pay, we both agreed to the terms, and we are so far both happy with the transaction. If you decide to start changing the deal due to factors I cannot fully appreciate or sympathize with then that new situation now becomes your problem, the VP's problem, the various CxO people's problem.
They do, after all is said and done, get their money's worth out of the employees, no? Why should I be worried that they rented or bought a mega-expensive office somewhere?
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I suppose the gist of what I am saying is: the current full remote work situation highlights problems with the previous process that were always there but were never seriously challenged.
I view that as a good thing. Old processes need refreshing every now and then.
What do you think?
If a project is well-described then 90% of the real production work should be tracked by the project framework. You mark task X done to tell your current self, your future self and your manager that, at this moment, you think you did X.
Getting meat together in a room to make flapping mouth sounds is mostly useful when kicking around concepts and planning the future.
I spent most of last year with a boss who kept saying "I really want you to come in, just in case you have a question." He said this during a growing pandemic.
In my field we deal with buildings and my boss was in sales, so that meant I saw him maybe four hours out of a week.
I'm supposed to commute five hours a week and sit in a dangerously non-masked office forty hours a week in case I have a question too complicated to handle over e-mail or video? When our product is specifically remote control?
What this suggests is that management doesn't know its job well enough to describe it in words.
I'm now 100% remote at a job that pays more and is higher profile and I'm accomplishing more in a day than I was in a week.
hat tip to you sir.
So start with asking for the meeting to be recorded. Refuse to attend unless it is using the excuse that you may want to review bits of it later. They can’t refuse for accountability reasons.
Agenda means they need to set a time window and agenda for the meeting up front. That keeps it in writing and the scope well defined. If there isn’t one there’s no reason to attend so carry on your normal duties. This becomes a virus quickly which trashes junk meetings. If you’re complained at for not attending, there was no agenda. If you don’t attend people see the person’s meetings as not mandatory and this disempowers them slowly.
Actions. Make sure recordable actions come from the meeting and make sure they are accountable for tracking them and that they are delivering business value. If they aren’t then they don’t need to exist. Escalate that. Even as a junior a long time ago I asked for concrete actions at the end of a meeting and managed to cause a company wide shit storm :)
After doing this a few times, organisers who rule or even just exist in the chaos and distraction are marginalised or made to conform to order and the good of the team.
Edit: warning this doesn’t scale down to small companies.
If it’s a corporate zoom account then it can likely be included in the IT AUP however.
But I usually ask for it to be done.
I enjoy my job, but the office is open layout and very social especially with people that have been there awhile, unlike myself. So it's headphones on most of the time. Now with all communications online through slack it's been so much better. I now know what's going on in my larger team and we have a much better 'synergy'.
Unfortunately we will be going back and I'll be back to the 90 minute commute, open layout and my headphones on. I really think a hybrid is the what to go. They already own the buildings and they are tight on space. So it works for them and for us it let's us get together and plan things out and then go do the work remotely without the distractions.
I'm like you, I'm fortunate enough to work for a company who took Covid seriously and has gone 100% remote, in a market sector that's actually up due to Covid (grocery), so no fear of layoffs.
When this is over, I hope we'll remember that those essential "low value" employees that we spend so much time arguing if they deserve a minimum wage or not were the ones out there every day exposing themselves cleaning the stores and restaurants, stocking our toilet paper, packing our Amazon orders, and generally keeping society functioning while "high value" employees like you and I got to hide away in our houses with minimal risk.
Hopefully we as a society can see and that and reconsider if maybe, just maybe we're undervaluing these people.
There’s been a lot of managerial meeting bloat which has only been tolerable because of savings on above time sucks and really being able to multi task through BS during zoom calls you cannot in a conference room. I find zoom has also been a great leveler as 30% of the team works in other countries. So pre-covid 70% of us would be in a conference room the other 30% were dialed in through zoom and not participating nearly as much.
The issue is clear at the middle management level. Firms are making broad vague commitments to not forcing anyone back to office anytime soon. Senior leaders themselves seem to be enjoying the benefits of working from their vacation homes instead of their pied-a-terre. More family time, no commute time.
Sadly some middle management layers above me have willingly gone back into basically empty (10% capacity) offices for no reason. Sick of their kids & face time & workaholics basically. One team lead has actually bought a home closer to office while 15% of his team has actually gone the other direction and moved further away.
If you are already in an organization doing daily stand ups, bi-weekly sprints/closing/retro/planning, project backlog reviews, post mortems, (easily 10+ hours/week total).. plus tracking everything in Jira, with multiple active & lively Slack channels .. it’s unclear to me how middle management can’t do their job at home.
They probably feel unable to APPEAR to be doing their job to the same extent, however as you can’t see them huffing&puffing across the floor from one conference room to another back to back to back.....
Anyway I like it enough that if the pendulum swings all the way back at the end of 2021 to year-round, 5-day/week in-office 100% then I’ll answer some of those recruiter emails that have been piling up.
I always figured this was an extremely obvious weakness we took for granted. Full-time managers who either won't or can't do anything but manage. Which eventually yields different problems (once the work is gone they become overhead, and if they manage too many teams they'll spread too thin to follow everything). Comparatively, hybrid leads still getting their own hands dirty seem much stronger and desirable.
I agree it was nice to chat with colleagues face to face. But all said and done -- it's work, not your family's house. I dealt with it quite fine back when I moved to remote work 10 years ago. I miss it sometimes still. But the perks of working from home far outweigh this drawback.
Plus, remote work encourages you to have an actual social life outside of work, which I view as a very good thing.
This may have been the case in China, where many factories were idled, but there was no sizable benefit here in the US.
> Air pollution levels in the U.S. have not decreased significantly during the pandemic, despite the concurrent increase in remote work and decrease in travel.
https://news.gsu.edu/2020/10/01/current-air-pollution-tied-t...
There was a huge benefit where I have been waiting out the pandemic. I hiked a peak in April, and because almost nobody was driving and work was significantly reduced, visibility was the best it has ever been in my lifetime. I saw very distant mountain ranges I didn't even know would be visible from that peak. The views of the intervening valleys were absolutely stunning, once in a lifetime clarity.
Those kinds of days were a great part of the week and boosted productivity as well as enhanced our cohesion.
I kinda like Stripe's idea that remote people are attached to a hub, because it's important that people have some ownership around projects and a cultural context within the company.
To be honest though, a lot of the benefits of offices are through social connections of weak-ties, and I have a hard time seeing that replicated in a remote fashion. I think it would be great, I'm just not sure how to manage it.
- Stand ups for 15-30 minutes in the morning.
- I screen share a Google form I made that asks three questions and I fill out for the team to see what each response is.
- What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Anything blocking you?
- The answers get put into a spreadsheet that myself or upper management can review progress on performance and services.
- If I’m unavailable to hold the daily check in, my team fills out the form on their own. If they don’t fill it out for the day, there’s a record they didn’t spend the five minutes to fill it out.
- I have weekly 1 to 1 meetings with the individuals to check in on how they’re doing with work, career development, anything they want to talk about, and how personal life is going.
It’s working out well for me. I also schedule a once a week meeting on Jira tickets to see where status is at on any lingering issues the team can’t address.
Overall I put enough in front of my team that I can track progress and ensure they’re doing their part while working from home. This way I avoid needing to be on zoom all day. I do leave the option open for my team to Zoom me if they urgently need me to help.
[0]: https://geekbot.com/
Having 2 days a week without meetings is great for deep work.
To everyone else who has to contend with tight pools of talent that are often fielding multiple offers and using them against each other, the desire for change is much stronger. Many more companies fit this bill.
There are some challenges though:
Remote workers have historically not worked on premier projects and products at hybrid companies. Effort will have to be made to ensure that remote workers are included in the kind of reports that indicate work distribution.
Remote workers get payed less. I can't prescriptively say how much less, but many companies in tech participate in geo-based compensation models while not being geographically locked in sales. I've long told people I would understand if I'm a welder and my product is only sold in one state why you may lazily geo-lock my pay. That stops making sense when my part is sold nationally or internationally. Then I really want my income to reflect what my position contributes to the business. This is why I think RSUs are so great. The compensation model for remote cannot just be padding margins for a business, especially if I'm going from SV to Texas for instance.
I'm looking forward to a more remote future, but without these problems sorted out remote work will only create an underclass of developers.
This is a very vocal small minority of all engineers. Companies have just grown accustomed to being able to have a huge false negative rate in their interviews.
As the remote culture gets propagated through the industry, I’ve so far seen mainly good outcomes. Pretty much every team I’ve worked on in the last 7 or so years has had some remote component. I think the most difficult one is the stereotypical Fortune 500 company where only some employees work from home and the middle manager shakes their head while watching their empty desks.
This seems to be the explanation for everything these days, so I doubt it. Just from the recruiters I know, I know this happens often at least at larger firms.
My post was mainly to raise some important milestones and objectives remote work will need to hit in order to be viable past COVID.
And many companies do NOT participate in geo-based compensation. The first half of you statement sounds like an absolute ("Remote workers get paid less") and the second half walks it back...
It's quite possible to work remotely, and not take a paycut. Its also possible to work remotely and make "FAANG money" if you're in the right tech.
This seems to be a rarity. If you can show me some data that it's false I'm happy to take it back, but every company I have worked for does geo-based compensation in one way or another.
> The first half of you statement sounds like an absolute ("Remote workers get paid less") and the second half walks it back...
It's less an absolute and more a trend. I also did not walk it back. I talked about RSUs but there's a lot of caveats there. You can't be offering someone in CA more RSUs than someone in Oklahoma. The COLA part of your salary may change slightly, but the relative take home pay should be the same. This is not true at most companies but they'll try to convince you it is.
I could see many companies ending up with a hybrid model where core teams are geographically together and in a shared space most of the time (although less than the pre-pandemic M-F 10-6), and other teams are distributed.
Now, for permanent work vs contractor work, there can be separate tiers but... that’s not what we’re talking about here.
You mean they don't get healthcare if they're in the US?
If you’ve already locked in a Bay Area RSU grant you’re set to work remote in a no income tax state. That alone could make up the salary difference.
After a couple years, the company did start adjusting RSU refreshes to reduce grants to people outside of top cities. Even with that though, I'm still breaking even or ahead.
Just another voice saying that you need to do the math and think about your company's policies. You can only account for changing policies so much.
I got in at a time when the deal was very good. Today, my salary reduction would be much higher (2-3x the reduction) and all other comp has caught up to being location adjusted. But, the deal at my company can still be good as long as you check the math.
Another gotcha to watch out for is benefits. Make sure the company health care plan(s) have doctors in-network where you are moving. Since health care networks are very regional, this is not always the case. I had to switch plans.
Also, you won't be able to use a lot of the other tech company perks that people don't price in a lot: free food/snacks/drinks, gym, spa, health center, daycare, etc. Though some company's will give you money to get a gym membership, but probably not the other things.
[0] The cost of living savings mostly came from housing. But nearly everything local (grocery's, restaurants, gas, etc) is 30% to 50% cheaper where I'm at, which adds up quick too.
The right way to do this, for what it's worth, is to have standard base salaries and regional CoL increases for the most expensive cities.
In all likelihood these companies will continue to compensate generously relative to everyone else. It's their MO.
It's pretty hard to complain as I watch working class people around me struggle to get by, or get sick working in "essential" industries. Friend of mine got COVID (likely) from work, carpenter at a petroleum plant. Mid 50s, but very healthy and fit, no health issues. Had to be rushed to hospital to get oxygen, was on his ass for weeks. Luckily a unionized job, but others not nearly as lucky.
Personally I can't wait to be able to go back into the office, at least a couple days a week. Nice that my chronic back pain has improved a lot since I haven't been driving my commute daily though.
In the case of international locations (Waterloo) there's often a skill gap as well. Not everyone there would qualify to relocate to Mountain View.
Any employee at my office in Waterloo could transfer to Mountain View without any problem at all. Google would be very happy to make it happen. The only limitation would be the US immigration system.
If anything the skill gap would be the other way around. The hiring bar is high at Google Waterloo.
Transferring to Mountain View requires to re-interview. Satellite offices like Waterloo being harder to be hired into while simultaneously paying a fraction of Mountain View sounds... a little far fetched.
There's probably more filtering happening at the satellite branch however.
Just with the North Acquisition, they hired exactly nobody and shipped the product back to Mountain View right away.
Maybe you should apply and see how loose the standards are.
There's no re-interview to move between offices or countries. The only "interview" would be to be accepted onto a team at the destination and then request the transfer. I know people who have gone both ways. For what it's worth, these days more people seem to be coming back to Canada than the other way around. Ability to move around is actually one of the perks of Google employment.
As for acquisitions, I came into Google via acquisition 9 years ago. Of a company divided between US and Toronto. I am not privy to the details on North, and I haven't met those people yet because of not being in the office due to COVID etc, but they report up into the same general product area as me. They definitely brought in many of those people as employees in Waterloo. If it's like the acquisition I was part of, not everyone gets an offer, some get put on contract, etc.
I've never heard of this and I know multiple people who have transferred. There is usually a team-fit interview with the new manager and maybe one of your new teammates (if you want that). But you have that even when changing teams in the same office.
Now think about the places in the world where a developer gets paid 40k/y or 20, or 10.
Where do you draw the line? Do you think a 35% salary cut would be reasonable to complain about?
At some point, in moving from Seattle to Winnipeg, if your salary gets adjusted from being able to afford a small apartment in downtown Seattle to being able to afford a small apartment in downtown Winnipeg... At some point that becomes a bad deal, right?
But in a lot of cases, the average FAANG engineer who takes this route will be leaving their small apartment for somewhere they can buy a house.
Greed is irrational. If you consider the time saved by not having to go to work and all the benefits of being able to work from any location, the difference is even bigger.
This was a common strategy at a FAANG I was at. People wiped off generational debts with this strategy because strong dollar and bull market.
I've been remote only now for 20 years, and being fully remote just gets easier all the time.