It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization.
Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
In my experience, video conferencing several times a week is enough to build shared context. Open floor plan not needed.
For me though, I find relying heavily on asynchronous communications insufficient, and synchronous remote communications deeply frustrating (i.e., natural turn-taking cues aren't present in video calls). I end up feeling disconnected from the people I work remotely with, even though they didn't do anything wrong. I can only establish "shared context" with people who have spent enough time with me in the same space with ample frictionless face-to-face conversations.
The neat thing about lunch is that the conversations are entirely non-directed without feeling like the time is being wasted in a meeting. Conversations can cover a specific project, when a high degree of coordination is necessary, generalized venting, when there are shared frustrations or just be about non-work topics that help a team bond and get to know each other as people rather than workers. It’s like a meeting that doesn’t feel like a meeting that can be strategic or therapeutic as needed. There’s really no way to replicate the beneficial effects of eating lunch together when workers are remote.
As a manager, this has also been one of my go-to tricks for successful cross-team projects lasting any significant amount of time. I tell one of my team members to setup a lunch with at least one member of the other team on a weekly basis and use the incentive of authorizing the company to pay for it. For ~$20/person/week, the cross-team communications issues basically disappear. It’s ridiculously cost effective and almost magical in how well it works.
Also, in my opinion, remote work works better when team members have met in person. It's easier to pick up on certain ways that they communicate, which help understanding in online communications.
It's about the communication paradigm. If people consider communication to be only local, then it falls apart when people are in multiple locations (including multi site offices). However if people default to remote compatible communication, it scales really well to people working from home and multi site offices.
If all leadership is in one location, yes, it'll get one sided. If leadership are spread out, I think it works out fine.
I've spent the last decade working with large multi site companies in the "lesser" location, and was able to move up from a junior to senior/supervisor roles at each company. Obviously my anecdote doesn't scale out uniformly, but I've seen it work out fine for many employees as long as leadership was adequately spread out.
You lose the geographic flexibility, but apart from that, it seems like it could potentially offer the best of both worlds?
If you're hybrid, you can't really live further away in cheaper areas, but you now have to set up office space at home for the WFH days. So it's potentially worse than fully WFH or fully on site.
You still need to maintain having a vehicle or commute.
Of course there are advantages, like spending more time with family and reduced sum commute. But it doesn't allow for people to have a meaningful change in lifestyle that they're seeking.
While I haven't done this (yet?), I've had coworkers who have, and they've successfully lived farther away in cheaper areas. :) What I've seen happen is one of two things:
(1) They live far enough away that the commute is hellacious (say, Sacramento to San Francisco, which can run 2+ hours by car each way and 3+ each way via transit), but they're willing to put up with it one or two days a week.
(2) They live far enough away that daily commutes are simply infeasible and just come in for a few days to a week every 4–8 weeks, staying in a hotel. This may or may not be paid for by the company, depending on what they've negotiated.
(N.B.: I'm aware that there are people who have done daily commutes via plane from, say, LA to SF, but that sort of thing seems to be pretty rare below the executive level.)
In this case, Apple is two days of WFH (Wednesday/Friday I believe) so your second suggestion wouldn't work (honestly some folk I've spoken to have even considered car camping). If it were contiguous blocks perhaps.
Having been on both sides of the equation at two different tech companies, this hasn’t been my experience.
Can this happen? Sure. It is possible that remote work limits career growth. But employees should still be able to choose that.
There's a few people who have experience in successful mixed environments. I'm curious how, so I hope to hear more from them.
We have shared office pods in cities where we reach critical mass, currently Boston and Miami.
The experiment right now is between companies that stick to office requirements and those that decentralize. I hired a high-level Amazon engineer because they did not want to commute back into the office. We pay good money for top talent. The best time for startups to poach high-end talent is now!
Strong agree here. My company has hired a bunch of new people over the course of the pandemic and the same level of acculturation into the internal culture and way of doing things is just not there for them. A fair number of our team has actually been 100% remote all along before the pandemic, but I think having a core contingent of (particularly operation and project management) people sharing space over the workday did a lot to spread that shared context around and loop the fully remote members of the team in. Over the COVID period I’ve noticed newer team members just having a lot more trouble adjusting and settling in because all that in acknowledged cultural and context dissemination wasn’t happening.
I can’t think of the last time I actually spoke to anyone on our UI/UX team because I literally have zero reason to set up a meeting with them and if there isn’t a work reason to interact it doesn’t happen anymore. For me that’s less of a deal but, for example, imagine being in the shoes of a junior business development person. For them their career progression and skill development depends on picking up a lot of the lingo and philosophy around how development works by osmosis. The absence of that is pretty fatal for cross team collaboration.
Lots of big companies are heavily silo’d in this way where everyone just does their specific job description thing, and I’ve worked in many such companies. I really didn’t like it. Those environments have always felt less dynamic and creative to me. Obviously that’s just one man’s opinion and experience, but I really don’t think I’d be as happy in a fully remote team.
This is what I really dislike about remote work. I was looking forwards to mingling with non-programmers, but when you're new to the company and working remotely that's basically impossible.
They try to find cut-rate programmers by going overseas, then try to save more money by finding the less expensive outsourcing agency. Then, instead of engaging with the problem, they hire a third party middleman who takes a big cut and has no stake in the actual outcome. This is a horrible incentive structure and usually results in poor communication.
The fact that they are from another country is irrelevant. The language skills could be very relevant, but again it is usually so poorly managed that none of the people that should be communicating directly with developers even try or are given an opportunity.
That may have been the prevailing trend, but programmers were pretty clear in pointing out how destructive for performance and focus this open office trend was. There is an avalanche of data pointing to how harmful the openoffice layout is for everything from declining morale to decreasing productivity hits to faster spread of disease and increasing worker stress levels. This clear and unambiguous data was widely disseminated in the popular press. The only reason firms ignored all the data and did this was to save on real estate costs and to mimic other firms. To anyone who bothered to spend 10 seconds googling the topic, all the research was obvious, except no one bothered to do that very basic due diligence and see if there was any data whatsoever to support the openoffice thesis.
https://www.workfront.com/blog/what-science-says-about-open-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-w...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...
Seriously.
It'll be interesting to see where we actually land in a year.