Anthropologists and the business of sense-making at work

Edit: I've pinched some language from the text that is more representative of what's different about the article, and put it in the title above. Diffs are what's interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

They all fail to use the important lesson Henry Hazlitt thought us:

> The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Looking at the direct effects of being in or out of the office is very naive. They go further than that.

[0]: https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote

it differentiates three key aspects of work: the continuous information exchange, the atmosphere of in-person gatherings and the value of seeing beyond the personal scope.

in my personal experience in FOSS inspired evironments (like a Linux distribution) these can be achieved well with a balanced mix of on-site physical collaboration and remote work.

specifically large chat rooms serve as water coolers, or in the article coffee exchanges. mailing lists work well for technical exchange. VCS in combination with the other two works well for disciplined collaboration and preparation of consensus --- or the identification of divergent topics.

and those divergent topics are the ones where physical collaboration shines, with moderator support where needed. TIL about humming and I love it.

in total the first three, group chat water coolers, mailing list style thought exchanges, a disciplined review-enabled document collaboration, reduce the need for and value add of physical in-office presence I dare to claim by an order of magnitude.

agreed, this needs a breed of collaborators who express themselves in writing, chat, mail, documents are _written_. however that can be learned, no?

I hope companies make an informed an balanced decision moving back to the office intelligently.

and on a tangent I hope and pray MS teams gets usable chat rooms, and better threaded message support. Office has collaborative editing, change tracking. a decent group chat is missing, and imnsho that's the life blood of remote.

> “The Wall Street banks kept more teams in the office, so they seem to have done a lot better than Europeans.” That may have been due to malfunctions on home-based tech platforms. But Beunza attributed it to something else: in-person teams had more incidental information exchange and sense-making, and at times of stress this seemed doubly important.

This phrasing asserts that an observed affect may be due to one of two possible causes. Of course, the author attributes their observations to the phenomenon they are studying. They don’t seem to have considered the possibility that either the American bankers are just better, or that disparate trading returns between banks in a given year might be explained by factors external to the trading team itself. This kind of sloppy reasoning calls the rest of the content into question - if a researcher is willing to make these inferences in one place, they are probably making them elsewhere.

It’s a nice story, though.

Please do give it a solid read. This isn't just another "remote work vs. offices" screed, not even hardly.

One point that many WFH enthusiasts (I am one) tend to miss (I prove myself the exeption) is that telecommunications actually amplifies the power of locality, in a sort of perverse paradox. The logic operates somewhat akin to Amdahl's law of computer parallelisation, in which the degree of parallelisation is limited by the unparallelisable portion of processing. For remote work, the limiting factor is the obligate localised functions, or the functions in which local access is superior to remote.

Tett's essay addresses several of these, most especially the difficult-to-capture, difficult-to-engineer incidental communications. Water-cooler chats, conversations overheard down the corridor, incidental meetings in tea rooms or canteens or lavatories, car pools, shared lunches. It's why Steve Jobs designed the Pixar studios with a centralised bank of washrooms. Being in a space, crossing paths with people, being familiar with their faces or voices, can be useful.

(It's also often not so, especially where both dissimilar and incompatible activities are placed proximate to one another. But the opportunity exists.)

And in a work environment where all the remote-comms tools are excellent and as good as possible, the temas working in proximity will still have the advantages afforded by localised contact. They'll also benefit from activities which cannot be provided remotely (though those may also substitute for services which might be provided at home or locally to a distributed workforce). Still, though, since Adam Smith and before, the power of cities and concentrations of activity to support a richer, more complex, more nuanced, and more specialised set of activities has been recognised. And telecoms simply cannot answer all of those needs, especially where physical presence of people, equipment, and/or activity are required.

Even if telecoms could do so, it would have to be conscious and aware of the affordances it is being called on to replace, and the role and impace those had on earlier practices.

Most comments I read on Hacker News that say that working from home is better measure a single individual’s output or that of a group that has worked together for a period of time.

There may well be studies that show that WFH is better. It would be good to study this further.

Perhaps it is better in some ways and worse in others. Perhaps it is better for some groups and worse for others. Perhaps certain technologies or processes can shift the balance.

I would hope that this is what we seek to learn. Instead, on Hacker News, you find a lot of agenda pushing. That makes me sad. I hope that we become more curious and open minded.

There are 2 specific things it seems to me to bring up: domain knowledge and 'tribal' rituals.

There's no doubt in my mind that domain knowledge-sharing has suffered while I've been WFH: I started a new job during the pandemic, and it's been really hard to pick-up all the unknown-unknowns.

But this is a practical problem that can be overcome with the correct mindset and good tools. Instead of picking-up this essential work information in a discussion by the coffee-brewer, we simply need to be better at documenting what a new employee needs to know; we need to be self-aware of how we share knowledge and how it disseminates in an organization.

In other words, the practical things that the article finds are lacking in WFH can be fixed if we want to.

The other special element is the 'tribal' rituals, the adrenaline and team-spirit. Now even though that's sometimes an element in programming - for instance hackdays - the atmosphere in a bank trading floor is totally separate to 99% of the rest of workers' experience.

Probably a lot of things have changed since the 1990s, but I spent a lot of time with bankers in the City of London around that time (my brother worked at a bar there), and the 'tribal' aspect of these people was obvious in their behavior both in the office and socially. So I'm not at all surprised to hear that they performed differently while working separately in their homes (although I also note the authors don't strictly quantify what they mean by "performed better").

For the record, I'd rather continue to WFH but doubt it will be possible as the 'normal' takes over again.

I hope this topic shift in the right direction and focuses on the steps employers need to take to let employees decide for themselves and ensure equal opportunity regardless of what choice they've taken.

If anything, the modern notion of "work" as an employee-employer relationship with the primary goal of securing and sustaining a livelihood on the part of the employee, is barely 250 years old. And it's steeped in ideas and social dynamics which first emerged in the late 18th century which would spark the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution, above all, was a fundamental reorganization of society where economies shifted from localized labor found in tight-knit agrarian communities, towards concentrating labor in centralized industrial centers. This evolution was just as much driven by advances in technology as it was by shifts in modes of mobility, housing, urbanization, finance & banking, supply chains and so on. It also sparked massive migration of people moving from local communities towards these industrial centers. It's also important to note that this first happened in North America and Western Europe during the 19th and 20th century.

This was by far an evolution which happened on equal footing. The centralization of work in factories, workshops, offices,... was mainly driven by capital, and therefore happened at the behest of industrial elites who, during these times, also secured power as financial and political elites.

The notion that in order to secure a livelihood, one has to work in a centralized workplace, could easily be justified since the marketplace - labor, goods, services,... - was by and large based on manual labor, whether it was working textile, coal and iron mining, or other primary industries.

Throughout the 20th century, that changed as work in erstwhile industrialized countries shifted through secondary towards tertiary industries where labor has become predominantly office based. So long as efficient communication between workers was impeded by the lack of technology, the obligation of "coming to the office" could be easily justified.

In that regard, working in a centralized workplace has evolved into a widely accepted and deeply ingrained cultural norm, even though the digital revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century has deprecated any and all economic arguments to physically centralize labor in tertiary industries.

And so, the article, to me at least, seems more or less reaffirming a cultural norm which emerged during the 19th and early 20th century which was established and pushed by industrial elites back in the day, and is still upheld by their present day successors: the centralized workplace is an absolute necessity for organization of society.

The Marxist thinker Anthonio Gramsci coined the term "cultural hegemony" to describe such normative thinking:

> In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class which manipulates the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. This Marxist analysis of how the ruling capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) establishes and maintains its control was originally developed by the Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).

(Personally, I have equal reservations in outright applying this term to this discussion, since Marxist thinking is equally shaped by the same changing affordances provided by society over the past 200 years. But I feel it's important to mention it here as this has been recognized and labeled by others as well.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

Barring precarious living conditions of pre-industrial life compared to the modern comforts enjoyed by the last 3 generations in the industrialized world, it's important to note that Humanity by and large lived - and in many parts of the world still lives - in tight-knit communities throughout the vast majority of (pre)history. Strong importance has always been given to familial, tribal or clan like relationships as those defined one's identity throughout life.

In contrast, the Industrial Revolution and the drive to centralize the workforce has driven urbanization from which present day metropoles have emerged. But at the same time, it has also profoundly disrupted how humans interact with each other. Looking at Western European and American culture in the most broadest sense over the past 200 years, you can see a clear shift and how it became permeated by themes of alienation, loss, saudade, discomfort, deep struggle with identity,... as an answer to these profound, disruptive social changes.

And so, the social and economic disruptions of the 19th and 20th century have left a deep legacy. And the specter of that legacy looms large over our present day lives in profound ways we likely haven't yet come to fully comprehend.

Tangentially, I was left thinking about a concrete example: the HR industry and the approach of hiring individuals. The process, at the end of the day, is about figuring out one main question: is the candidate a "good fit" for the organization? What it really implies is this: "Can we put this random person in a group of 5 picked individuals who, in truth, have little in common and let them act together in a manner that creates a benefit for the employer for 8-10 hours a day in a physically limited space?" From my outline, it should be pretty clear that the HR industry is a cottage industry which tries to solve a problem which was artificially created by centralizing labor.

As far as most employees are concerned, their co-workers aren't part of the original social tribe in which they first formed deep social connections: family, friends, clan, peers,... The main thing employees have in common, which drives them to work together, at the end of the day is a labor contract which they signed in order to secure their livelihood.

For sure, I have to add nuance to those statements. Humans are flexible in forming social ties and cooperating in a central physical location isn't in and of itself problematic. In fact, there are as many different, complex contexts as their are humans out there, each living their own life. And plenty of people derive fulfillment, identity and satisfaction from banding and cooperating together. Many people forge profound friendships and relationships in the workplace as well. My expose above doesn't invalidate the psychology at an individual level.

However, it would be rather disingenuous on the part of employers to expect that any and all individuals, without discerning their backgrounds, would willingly, and unquestioning, from the outset attach deep importance to social ties forged in a centralized workplace. Even the veil of anthropology doesn't take away the reductionism behind that view.

But I've also worked on a trading floor.

The difference is that on the trading floor, every interaction is mutexed. You can talk to one person at a time, or you can shout down one line at a time. Someone comes to your desk and they get nothing until the previous conversation ends.

This works because you're mostly happy to delay whatever longer running projects you have on your desk, like fixing a spreadsheet. And because the information coming in on those conversations is high value, requiring immediate decisions.

Most people are not doing things in this way. If you're deep coding, you especially don't want someone to come and bother you. There's not much value in immediate interruption.

I'm real tired of this larger thought that a job is anything but a place where I'm paid to do a task. I'm not there for friends - i already have ample, chosen through decades of careful selection - nor am I there for rituals or world views. I already have those.

Sometimes I feel like lonely/empty people find these things in their job and force it onto the rest of us while singing praises of team building or corp culture/community into their inner void.

I think the key thing here is choice and being able to adopt a hybrid approach. The same approach doesn't work for all people, teams and companies. Having the power to choose is amazing though and us employees should fight tooth and nail to preserve these rights. Why should jobs that can be done remotely have a mandate attached about where you work on every day of the week? That's incredibly oppressive when you think about it.

I only have seen about 10% of staff or less wanting the opposite or completely office based work.

Like many have said here, commercial property vendors who have had their heydey now are scared of losing their rent. There are also businesses who rely on lunchtimes but they can always offer delivery. Economics always wins so businesses have to adapt.

The good thing is the experiment has started. Many companies are becoming remote friendly. The long term effects of WFH on companies success will determine whether it will be WFH or WFO. Whatever it is the rest of companies will have to adapt to new paradigm.

The cat is out of the bag I think. Once people can work from home in a post covid world where they can socialize normally, I think many companies, and especially in software development will become very remote friendly.