Our journey from office-centric to remote-first
docker.com
docker.com
Type 1: "It's obvious that remote work is the future, and anyone who thinks otherwise is stuck in the past"
Type 2: "Remote work is infinitely inferior to office work due to the lack of socialization/collaboration/food/etc"
Evidently the leadership at Docker is type 1, based on their "step 4". The part I find particularly interesting about this trend is that both camps can't seem to fathom that the other could possibly exist (see: any HN discussion thread about remote work)
So, I'm expecting a reality where, for workers with the luxury of this sort of choice, this will become an early "disqualifying question" while job hunting: are you remote or on-site? (It probably already is that disqualifying question, just not quite as prominently yet.)
I wouldn't say it was the deciding factor, but when I got an offer from a smaller place working in person, I took a significant pay cut to go back into a (very cool) office.
There's a surprisingly large population in the tech community that want to follow your approach of "don't get vaccinated and hope everyone else does". I can respect that a bit if you at least want to continue to adhere to basic social distancing and pandemic safety guidelines.
If I do return to an office it would certainly only be for companies that require a vaccine before returning to an office.
The thing is having to be the social support for co-workers is one of the things that makes working in an office so horrible for many of us. It feels like a lot of people want to burden their co-workers with social roles that are better filled pretty much anywhere else.
Some folks are looking for new relationships, especially those just starting their career or moving to a new ciry. Ideally they find other like them, rather than 'burdening' people who don't care
For companies that are strictly one or the other, yes, definitely. It already is.
This bit is weird. I’m in the “I’ll never voluntarily take a remote job” camp, but… I get that some people like remote work, and that’s fine.
Some people seem to be positively evangelical about it, though.
I also feel that many of the people that argue that they need the socialization that comes from being in the offive just really need to spend time outside of work finding a way to socialize and they could meet that need.
As someone else pointed out tieing your friend circle to your employer seems like a bad move when the time comes to change employers.
See, this is exactly what I mean.
While I respect and understand (even if I disagree with) people that say they need an office, they’re just really not my concern right now. There will no doubt be office-only jobs for the foreseeable future if for no other reason than inertia. Without the fight, remote-first jobs won’t be there for those that want them.
On this bit, some people find spending the day alone difficult, even if they have social outlets outside work. This shouldn't be surprising; historically the vast majority of people see other people during the working day. Being completely alone for minimum eight hours a day (and in practice more; the evidence is that people tend to work longer hours when WFH) is not a particularly normal human behavior and many people don't deal well with it.
Again, it works for some people, and that's fine. What irritates me is people (rather dishonestly IMO; they don't really believe this generally) pushing the line that it works for everyone.
I love my new life. Don't ever want to go back to the office.
Actually I would. If I can stay out here in the burbs and work is just a 10 minute drive or bus ride from the school/home. But I hate city life so I have to live so far that the commute sucks.
I totally get the offshoring thing tho. The only thing remotely (no pun intended) 'preventing' that is timezones. But once you offshore _all_ the jobs, timezone are much less of a problem. I hope they still would be enough of a problem that we can have the cake and eat it too.
Offshoring in my experience is a very different set of relationships. It tends to have a significant power differential and to be much more distant, both physically and emotionally.
But remote working does. I spend more time with friends and my significant other then I did before. Because now I have more time to engage in social interactions I prefer. Work social interactions for me are just to a level of professional courtesy. It is more fun to interact with people outside of my field....
Long-term I want to live on a college campus(except it's filled with other like-minded adults) like environment where my peers are not my co-workers so if I switch jobs I don't lose contact with them.
Campuses are also built to be completely walk-able once you park on the outskirts.
Maybe I should speak up. I keep my mouth shut because I could go either way.
As a single person who does not have a family, working from home permanently sounds horrifically lonely. I only made it a month of solitude before I terminated my lease and moved back in with my parents (the rest of my siblings joined as well).
I also have ADHD, and sharing a space for work and play has been terrible for my ability to focus.
That being said, I totally understand the other viewpoint(s). I watched my father spend 3 hours in the car every day to commute to offices he hated for the majority of my childhood. He worked from home during the first few years after the dotcom crash, which was a wonderful opportunity for him to spend time with my siblings and I when we were young children.
My response to seeing that as a kid was making the decision that I would do whatever I could to avoid commuting. Since I'm still single, this has meant living in an apartment a short walk from where I work. Admittedly, I'm lucky in the sense that the office is in a relatively suburban setting. We're outside the city, so it's not city life but it's not suburban sprawl hell either.
Obviously the dynamic may change if I meet someone and have kids in the future and decide where the office is is not where we want to raise kids.
We don't gain anything from just having a knee-jerk reaction to the opposite solution. You just have a different set of happy and unhappy people.
People who feel positively about their home life are inclined to maximize it by working from home. People who feel negatively or have little home life are inclined to get out and seek social/private opportunities at or around the office.
Note that feeling negatively or having little home life is meant to encompass a range of situations that don't necessarily mean someone has a bad private life or that they're unhappy with their private life.
Basically remote should mean flexibility.
Which then makes the daily commute essentially all this time that keeps me from being with people I actually want to be with like my partner.
Couple all of that to the observation that ultimately in the tech world its a lot of work just to move me from sitting in front of one desk to sitting in front of another, and its really hard to muster much enthusiasm for the alleged benefits of being in an office - particularly when I can supply better and more ergonomic hardware and software for myself.
The problem there is the solitude, but during normal non-covid times this is orthogonal to working from home. It sounds like you and many others are missing social outlets outside of the workplace and these are important to have whether you're working from home or not, just part of a healthy work-life balance. Jobs change, companies go bankrupt, bought out, close offices, fire people, etc routinely and you don't want to lose your entire social circle when these things happen.
I'd look into ways of expanding your social needs outside of work, be it The local pub, church, sports club, makers group, library or whatever else, I'm sure there's something around that fits your needs.
This is fair, but what you have to understand is that you're taking away something work used to provide, and asking the employee to provide it for themselves. There is a group of people for whom "work friends" are really important. Whether work friends are their only friends or just a subset of friends, the low-pressure friendship of only socializing with somebody because you have to is a different relationship to clearly indicated socializing with somebody because you want to.
And so for those people who really value the "work friendship", that is essentially part of their compensation. Companies need to understand that for some demographics (especially the young nerds that make up so much of the workforce in tech) if they aren't providing low-pressure socialization opportunities, they need to consider what alternative strategies they can use to retain staff.
But...work friends aren't friends. It's very rare to stay in touch if you change jobs. In fact, that normalized relationship is a tie keeping you at a job that may otherwise be bad.
As a reason for why to be in the office, I feel like it's a coping mechanism, rather than real fulfillment of the need. I can't say "better to rip the bandaid off" or similar, but I can say that the 'right' solution is to find connection outside of work. Even if you're in the office, you have to do that for the friendship to persist should you ever leave.
But regardless of whether you keep them even with an active non work social life I want also want a work social life. I have your solution but that still doesn't remove my desire to have work friends too. I spend 40ish hours a week on work. I don't want that to be with people that I can't call several of them good friends.
I'm going to disagree here. I have plently of friends who I met through work. Some including former direct reports.
The same goes for many people I know. I don't keep in contact with everyone I worked with - but there are a key few who I'm happy to hang out with.
I've shifted cities, but when I return these are people I go out of my way to meet with.
The exact same holds for other situational friendships. Stop drinking, stop going to church, get injured and stop playing sport, and see how long those friendships last. That doesn't make them any less real.
The connections you have with work friends from previous jobs persist; you can catch up about old faces, industry and workplace goings on, and career progression among people who understand the situation intimately.
Work actually makes it -harder- to really connect with people. The norm is to keep personal stuff personal; you don't bring up the difficulties you're having with your SO, and they don't give you advice or commiserate.
These people are generally very disruptive and a huge burden on people not looking to mix their social and professional lives. The reason they’ve been encouraged to build personal relationships at work despite the disruptions is that their goals aligned with those of sociopathic middle and upper management that puts their personal desire to see their “resources” churning away IRL ahead of actual productivity. The move to WFH is going to expose the whole “office culture” mindset for what it is.
> And so for those people who really value the "work friendship", that is essentially part of their compensation.
Will those of us who are forced to play the role of emotional caretaker of our co-workers also be compensated for our labor? For having to navigate office romances and nepotism? Time asked to drink after work?
I actually think the Gervais Principle is a great way to look at this:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
In short, the sociopaths have the clueless building their entire lives out of the office. The losers until now have just had to suffer, but WFH is the first chance in a long time for them to score a win.
> what you have to understand is that you're taking away something work used to provide, and asking the employee to provide it for themselves. There is a group of people for whom "work friends" are really important. Whether work friends are their only friends or just a subset of friends, the low-pressure friendship of only socializing with somebody because you have to is a different relationship to clearly indicated socializing with somebody because you want to.
The thing is that "work relationships" aren't like material objects. Work doesn't actually provide them, not in the sense that work provides you a desk, a chair and probably a computer.
Those relationships are actually provided by other people. And while some of those people may actually enjoy being there, maybe others would much rather not be there and not endure this forced socialization. On the face of it, it doesn't seem fair to me to force me to come to the office, so you can have a social life, if I don't enjoy it. Why would your preference override mine?
I actually like my colleagues and have enjoyed the occasional after work drink and chat with them until the bar closed, but I don't consider them my friends and, most importantly, I absolutely hate having to waste more than an hour of my life every day commuting. I can see how working 100% from home would have prevented me from building some relationships I have built, but like everything, it's a trade-off. Who knows what relationships I could have built had I been free to live further away from my office.
As someone higher in the thread said, not all people have the same preferences, and I realize that it may be hard for the company to organize work such that everyone is happy. But maybe in the end, people should choose where they work based on those preferences. Like working alone? Join a remote-only company. Love open-spaces and chatting with random colleagues walking by? Join an on-site-only company. We shouldn't expect there to be a single way to work.
I have ADHD, and sharing an open floor plan is much, much worse. At least at home I can organize my surroundings to encourage productivity, whereas in offices I'm stuck with what's available; and for almost all the jobs I've had, it was just terrible.
Or, ya know, just not wanting to either pay for an extra room at home or work 8+ hours a day in my bedroom.
I don't think this is true. That being said, I think the most vocal are going to be the most evangelical (for either option).
The fundamental question is whether an employee should be free to pick their preferred workplace. Is is a superset of regular office work.
Coupled with the fact that in 2019 I was working in an office sat next to someone I absolutely detested, and realising that I was spending more waking hours with this hateful person then I was with my own family I will never want to go back to an office.
I imagine my career won't be as fruitful, but then again I get to take my daughter to school.
It’s been a very good demonstration of confirmation bias. I’ve seen very few posts that say I love working at home but it just doesn’t work as well and I can’t see it lasting or vice versa. Preferences and predictions seem to like up almost perfectly.
> inequality that we didn’t realize before: people with small apartments, young kids, or living alone were hit harder than those living with relatives and enjoying a large house.
they mention
> Giving employees help to set up their home office
but I don't think that really helps those issues they listed
For small children, day cares reopening are a big help, or coworking spaces where one can rent a desk.
Do those "employ anyone anywhere services" really work in a seamless way or is it not worth a company like Docker using them?
Originally it was that we could only legally hire in countries where we had offices. We've now solved that but want to make sure that teams are in the same timezones (or close by) so that they can meet when needed.
Our remote tools right now are evolved relics of IRC.
But eventually VR will provide an experience that surpasses in-person meetings.
Ok - so if you aren't big enough to need multiple offices what then?