We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons
blog.davidtate.org
blog.davidtate.org
>I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends.
Deserves more respect. There are lot of types of people out there, and it seems like at least some of them are energized by being surrounded by smart people doing interesting work. For whatever reason, for some folks, exchanging Slack messages with those same smart people isn't similarly energizing compared to overhearing and jumping into interesting in-person conversations, etc. Maybe the tech giants need to be very accommodating to remote work in order to maintain their massive workforces, but I think a lot of typical companies could just say "we prefer being in-office" and find sufficient local folks to make that happen. That won't be for everyone. But there might be a sizeable enough cohort that performs better in the office that it'll be a good option for some companies.
I think we can agree that if every software company decided that they were going to be a full-time pairing shop, that'd be a bad thing. In the same way, I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch to also suggest that it'd be bad if all employers decided that their workers had to be butts-in-seats 40 hours (or more) per week, no exceptions.
Well, yes. That's not happening, though. My point is that I see people essentially claiming that it's immoral for any companies to not permit remote work, and I disagree with that.
I have far less of a normal life than most people and am far more obsessive about the kinds of things I do spend my time on than most people, so I don't personally bond that easily nor enjoy the casual moments or marshmallow and spaghetti tower building.
I enjoy objectives and racing towards them.
I understand.
> I just want people to join me in the office.
Not cool, don’t make me change my lifestyle.
> My kids are driving me crazy.
I understand.
> Is it weird to say I'm lonely;
I understand.
> I miss my office friends.
I understand.
> Not cool, don’t make me change my lifestyle.
Having everyone work at home also changes my lifestyle. There's no way to make everyone happy.
It's insane that so many people are okay pathetically dragging other people into a shitty situation just to make themselves happy.
Join a casual sports league or a club or something but don’t make me pretend to be your friend just to draw a paycheck. This is one aspect of work I have no interest in restarting.
I have become genuine non-work friends with some (former and current) co-workers. But there are many with whom I have no interest in being friends, or even talking to them for one second more than is necessary for us to get our jobs done, and that's ok. I shouldn't be forced to fulfill their social needs; that's their job to do on their own time.
Up to the point where it becomes "I don't want to change the way I work, so everyone has to join me in the office."
Lots of organization big enough to feel like they need a uniform policy are probably also big enough to find mutually accommodating and perhaps even complementary subgroups within the org.
Assuming they want to do the work rather than just standardizing on everyone on-site, open floor plans (except management, of course), sun-at-noonday overhead high-blue fluorescent lighting, etc etc.
I still enjoyed drinks and meals with friends outside. People made it much worse to themselves than they had to.
There was a few weeks of crazy lockdown rules but even during these the police never bothered me when I was walking out at night with a friend. Most laws were passed so that they could have the legal rights to break up parties and large groups.
Besides France I don't know a lot of places that enforced a "stay at home and don't meet anyone at any time for any reasons" lockdown for very long
I live in Paris, where you can easily find a watering hole within walking distance [0], yet I used to hear this same sentiment from colleagues even before Covid was a thing.
At a previous job we used to work a lot from home, which I really enjoyed, and whenever I brought the subject up at the current one, many people would comment something along the lines of "I don't know, I'd hate to be alone all the time". And this was coming from people who seemed fairly sociable and who were often talking about friends outside work (so they weren't isolated).
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[0] Assuming you live in Paris proper, not in the far-away suburbs.
And this is why suburbs and "bedroom communities" suck. If you spend all your time either at home with your nuclear family, or at the office with your colleagues, my feeling is that you don't really have a healthy social life.
As much as people shit on San Francisco for its lack of density in many areas, I can easily meet up with a friend after work at a nearby bar or restaurant or park. I just did that last week and it was wonderful to be able to do that again after all the pandemic restrictions.
> I think the issue is more psychological than purely logistical.
I agree with that, and that's actually encouraging. It means that there actually is no real-world issue with this, and the issues in our heads can be fixed. People can learn to develop better boundaries while working from home, and train themselves to seek social interaction outside of work better. And also come to realize that social interaction at the office isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
Beyond that, any feeling about WFH related to social interaction that has developed during the pandemic is immediately suspect. WFH without the pandemic will look a lot different, and a lot healthier.
If these people truly need that social interaction, how about putting more effort into community/personal relationships instead of workplace relationships?
We can call this person selfish and attend to the root malice only because they were honest. If they just contrived a reason to further their goal state, then they are being both duplicitous and selfish, which seems to be something we should respect less?
This is very different than daily forced containment.
Your argument also rests on the premise that the people who have been forced to come into an office every day should continue to be forced to do that, because some other group wants that situation. The idea that that's an ok situation to begin with is just bonkers. If you can't have your communal office experience without harming others, then you should not get your communal office experience. (But you can have that! No one is saying you can't!)
The idea that a group of people wanting to work from home is somehow "harming" people who want to work at an office is ludicrous.
having distracting kids at home is not an "undesirable home situation", in fact its a great home sitaution, so great that it makes it impossible to focus on getting work done because i'd rather just play with my kids. there is a reason most workplaces don't typically have your children in them.
the fact that so many are happy being isolated at home with no real interactions with any peers is concerning in itself.
It was a very, very rare thing for most people for all of human history until the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, a lot of people helped build StoneHenge and the Pyramids, but most people were just farming (at home) or else hunting/gathering in family units.
That seems to be a huge straw man. "Interactions with peers" doesn't have to mean "going into an office for 8 hours, 5 days a week". I know plenty of (pre-pandemic) fully-remote people who get tons of interactions with their colleagues. And I know others who, yes, do want to keep that interaction to the minimum necessary to get their jobs done. Both of those situations are fine.
Work is not the be-all, end-all of existence. While I have made many good friends through work, and some (though not most) have made the transition to non-work friends (the true friendship-type test is when one party in the work friendship leaves the company), I have very little need or desire to socialize at the workplace these days. I get plenty of interaction outside of work, and that's how I like it. I certainly recognize that others want more interaction through their work, and that's fine. But you don't need to drag me into that to get it.
Now the office is an escape from people who don’t want to be in their homes/communities?
This just strikes me as not at all the same thing.
People wanting to work from home does not remove the world of office work from your list of options. Depending on how extreme your particular company wants to go with remote work, yes, that might mean you'll have to find a different job to get the office experience. But that's the breaks.
I think it's the height of selfishness to require that your colleagues continue to waste hours of their lives on a commute daily and deal with inflexible office working arrangements just so you can get the "working relationships" experience that you want.
Your side seems to want the status quo, and our side seems to just want more flexibility, flexibility that doesn't preclude office work, at least some of the time. Seems obvious to me here who is being selfish and unreasonable.
It's absolutely astounding that you'd use a phrase like "that's the breaks" about a radical new change you're proposing while not realizing how it applies to something as baseline for adulthood as commuting.
But working from home, only home, for 16 months now? At macro level, it drained me of motivation after a few months - and it took a lot of self-examination to realize I'm no longer at my peak and why, because the change was slow and subtle. I lose this internal intuitive feeling of what we're doing and more importantly, why it matters. Everything is just words on the screen; success or failure, it's just an email or slack. There's no energy and pride to soak in when we wrap up a project. And most of all, I recognize I'm highly motivated by successful peers I respect; and I just don't get to experience that the same way. I see the good results/work of my peers, but I don't get to "see them be successful / good at their job", which is subtly but critically different thing, more of a continuous and passive experience - what you call "being surrounded by smart people doing interesting work" really rings true.
So while any given morning I'd rather stay at home, I recognize that in long term, I'm suffering from only staying home.
I cannot IMAGINE what an extrovert is feeling these days :-/.
(Oh and yes, I love them to death but there IS such a thing as "too much contiguous time spent with my kids", for me at least it turns out... but office is not necessarily the solution for that:)
Maybe (and I'm half serious) companies should hire actors to simply walk around the office, quietly talk about things, draw things on whiteboards, maybe carry papers to and from the printer, etc. and in general provide that "hum" and "buzz" that people crave. That way, people who want the Office Experience™ can get it, and people who'd rather WFH can have things their way too.
- I will agree that there is significant productivity variation between team members
- On my team, sure, ~20% of people are developers and doing Development work
- But testers, business analysis, system admins, release managers, etc are all still necessary and valuable. It is common but inexcusable hubris or unawareness of business goals and other team's contributions, to think they don't have necessary and productive roles.
- I've been on several dozen projects across at least two dozen companies and cultures, and I don't think I've ever been on one where only 5th of people do all the productive/needed work. Not even remotely close :-/
Could an actor become somebody I respect, and effectively portray a worker I know, understand and respect, having a breakthrough or trying something a few times or brainstorming or teaching spontaneously? Dunno. Would they be cheaper than just get somebody to do that AND actual work, I don't think so :D. And in some ways a lot of these things "could" theoretically be done over webex/zoom/teams/whatever. I don't have the answers - only the personal experience that after 16 months alone in my (phenomenal, fun, ergonomic) home office, there's definitely something dulled in my work life/satisfaction/performance, and I've tried to articulate it.
What it comes down to - I'm personally surprised at both extremes: at those who ONLY want to work from office, and those who ONLY want to work from home. Both, for me, would be imperfect compromises in which I'd lose something.
How often do we need people in the office? Some places are looking at hybrid schedules, anywhere from 1-4 days each week in the office, and 4-1 days at home.
Remote offices are rarely fully remote anyway; there's usually stuff like fly in for a week every quarter, or go to a conference or offsite together.
Absolutely, never connecting in person is going to lead to work feeling very separate, and a source of motivation we're used to will be missing. Whether that's a needed or even healthy source of motivation (do I benefit having a personal connection to people at work?) is complicated, but I don't think outside of a pandemic that it's actually -missing-. It just varies how much you'll get.
As I mentioned in another follow-up, it's those who prefer either full-time-office or full-time-remote, that I am least alike. Clearly, there are people who hate working from home at all, ever; and those who don't want to spend any time in the office, ever.
The thing that amazes me is that even despite all the difficulties that cropped up due to forcing people into remote work (for jobs where that's been possible) during a global pandemic, people have actually done surprisingly well work-wise, considering all the challenges. Just imagine how fantastic it can be now that social-oriented activities are opening back up, most people are vaccinated, most areas are relaxing their masking and distancing rules, and schools and child care are opening again. And companies are finally having the time to breathe and figure out what flex office/remote work really will be like in practice, and will start allowing employees to travel for business again.
If we keep pushing for all of this, and help our employers see the value, we can craft a balance that works for each and every one of us.
I'm pretty sympathetic as not everyone's home is handy to work from. Folks with fewer means have smaller homes / fewer resources there.
I can afford to outfit a big space, folks with smaller homes / different situations very much can't.
Having said that I feel lucky that I've been able to move to a new apartment recently. Now my partner and I have an extra room to dedicate to being a work space and we're no longer taking up the living room to that end. This is a huge QoL improvement.
I think self-care becomes much more important when one has a limited indoor space that is seeing mixed use. Even just making making sure one takes 1 or 2 walks a day is a huge improvement in energy, mental clarity, motivation, positive outlook, etc.
"My kids are driving me crazy."
And he had a wife at home to referee it all. If one then asks what might the conditions of a household be where she works as well... Yeah. That explains a lot.
None of this bears on whether people should be allowed to work remotely, of course.
I didn't realize there were so many reluctant parents until COVID. I feel society has coerced people into lives so unhappy that they'd rather spend time at the place everyone else is trying to escape than with their loved ones.
We can throw up our hands and either say a) stop moving away from your extended family, b) deal with the struggle, or c) don't have kids. Or we can use our big brains and try to figure out a better way for everyone to live where/how they want, but also be able to raise kids in a loving, supportive environment where the parents can still get a break sometimes.
I don't know what that better way is, but I think it's pretty fatalistic and defeatist to assume it doesn't exist.
When there is? Well, I am not proud or happy about this, but my kids have very detailed knowledge of and strong opinions about Minecraft.
BTW, home is not really a living nightmare, and kids are wonderful, but they do need human attention.
FYI, since it comes up often: digital annotations will be added in July
That said, you can always whiteboard solo, save your digitized content and upload/send it wherever you want. We'll even support image vectorization soon.
I've been to a lot of these clubs at the invite of friends, but found that most of the members are 60+. Maybe these clubs need to get out there and advertise themselves to a younger audience, because it's quite clear that many people need the social outlets that these provide. Plus, dancing is fun and people should do more of it.
At least some of them also have fairly high dues. I remember looking into Rotary in my area about 15 years ago, and just feeling like there was no way I could justify paying however much it was per month, even knowing that a lot of Rotary's purpose is to try to do good works, given what I was making at the time. (I don't remember how much it was, but my impression, at least, was that even if I was interested in actually devoting my time to it, it would still be more expensive than I could comfortably afford on a just-barely-above-national-median salary.)
And there's also a religious aspect: the Knights of Columbus are explicitly Catholic; while it's not officially religious, my experience with Rotary was that it had a very high overlap with churchgoers, and my recollection is that they opened and closed their meetings with a prayer.
And while the VFW may not require members to be former military, it's never going to attract large numbers of people who aren't, just because that's its stated purpose, baked into its very name.
I don't think those kinds of organizations will do as well with the younger generations, today and into the future, given these things. Now, if there were more interest-based clubs/groups around (like community singing groups, tabletop gaming, nature trail groups, etc, just to give a few examples that would interest me), that seems more likely to appeal.
For interest-based groups, I'm constantly seeing large bicycle groups cruising around, so such groups do exist (at least that is one that is openly visible). I periodically will jump in on Linux user group (or similar) meetings in my area too. But they typically have about half a dozen people that show up. I know that hackerspaces were popular in some areas for a while, they may pick up again post-pandemic.
Edit: I just looked again, that is the dues that the central organization charges each chapter for chapter members. The individual chapter dues may be much higher, and probably varies depending on location.
I can guess which type of person you are...
I certainly don't mean that. Another poster who replied to my original comment compared it to a company that chooses to do pair programming, knowing that not all software developers like pair programming. It'd be fine for some companies to choose to implement pair programming and some not, and for the most part, employees would choose employers that fit their preference.
Likewise, I see room for companies that run with being in the office. Not all companies. Not everyone wants that. But if some companies offer remote, some companies are in the office and some offer a mix, I think that's a good thing for the variety of workers out there. There might be some transitional pain if your current employer does something other than your preference, but that's long been the case, and (hopefully) you have other options.
Invest the money saved on leases and cleaners on coworking memberships for those that want them. They can pick somewhere local with a pleasant commute. They’ll meet and share a space with people from their local area. They’ll be energised by interesting conversations with people from other industries. They can form friendships without the weird distortions of power imbalances caused by their positions in an org chart.
If the person at the next desk makes a weird noise when they breathe and always leaves dirty dishes in the sink? Cancel your desk and try a different place. No biggie.
Remote work doesn’t have to mean work from home. It’s up to you.
The pandemic really reinforced to me that so many of these are pointless, at least for many participants. I have played games with co-workers, gone to sleep, done freelance work, had lunch (away from my desk), and all manner of other things through pretty much every meeting over 1 hour that I have had this pandemic. Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in taking notes and throwing them away), sprint planning (creating a faux schedule and throwing it away as code is done when it is done), and even in many cases the daily standup. Ditto for departmental meetings.
We cargo culted a lot of processes to WFH and will cargo cult them back upon return to office. What WFH lets me do is opt out of them and just have the conversation happen in the background instead of me being stuck in a meeting room.
At companies that misuse meetings, most meetings are not optional to attend. Of course you could say "Well just don't go", but some people don't like getting fired over things like this.
> Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done
What a condescending way to communicate.
Also it's worth noting that the gripe wasn't about meetings, but about meetings that don't translate well to remote, which I think is a totally different class of problem than attendance and meeting misuse. If those meetings added value when they were in-person, totally skipping them is a big mistake. The "work" so to speak is adapting meetings that added value in person, to continue to add value while done remotely. This obviously isn't just "Use the exact same format, but have it via Zoom", but more thought needs to go into it I think.
Or just the general acceptance that for some people, some things will just never be good unless they're in person.
I was specifically talking about the meetings OP was talking about: The ones that have no value-add and where you have no nuggets to add. You can sleep through them, or otherwise tune out and do other work in the background. Why are people even going to these? If there's really absolutely nothing you can gain or others can gain from you, just don't go. I didn't think this was a controversial view, but the votes say otherwise.
EDIT: Also, who is actually being fired for not being attendee #47 at a meeting that they are not contributing to? If you actually saw this happen, let us know the company to warn us all not to accept offers there, because that seems extraordinarily petty.
edit
To answer your edit: Most (all?) companies would fire an employee that refuses to comply with required company activities (meetings as an excellent example). I don't really think it's petty for a company to not allow every individual employee to decide what required team meetings are right for that individual.
As in, you should communicate with the organizer and give your reason for the meeting not being a good use of your time -- or rather, not a good use of the company's money that is paying for your time to be in the meeting rather than doing something else.
If the meeting really is overly broad, then the organizer probably won't really care; they invited everyone who they thought might need to be involved, and from their standpoint it's better to overinvite than underinvite. If you point out that you're extra, then you're taking the potential work to figure that out off of their hands.
In the best case, they'll reconsider the invite list and/or scope of the meeting. In the worst case, they'll fire you. In which case there's a decent chance that it was actually the best case, but you couldn't recognize it at the time.
But I suspect that it's a lot more common for the outcome to be "uh, ok, thanks for letting me know."
What you're describing is fine, but also not what we're talking about.
My previous job had about a 4th of the total work week dedicated to meetings. As someone with ADHD, this was very difficult for me. What made matters worse is that they were sometimes spread out and I could lose an entire day of productivity and I was just unable to work when my meds ran out and there was a shortage in the entire country (Mexico).
I am now back to contracting and my client just lists out the requirements in a document and I code away and have been VERY productive. No meetings or calls since I have started working with them 3 weeks ago.
We had a project a few months back where we used tech nobody on the team had used before. Had a fancy Gantt chart of where the schedule would be. It was shot to hell by day 3 and we spent hours trying to figure it out and gave up as it was never accurate.
PHB: "You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager."
Dilbert: "In that case, we'll fix the bugs before we find them."
I've been on teams where we got good enough at estimating that we were +/- a couple of hours each sprint on our burn down charts.
Long tenure, good knowledge of the code, and a healthy amount of time spent on reducing technical debt all combine to make accurate estimations possible.
Of course things can go awry in regards to partner team or 3rd party API integrations, those are always wild cards, but that is why you first do an exploratory task to figure out how hard integration will be (my current team calls these stories "spikes" in our workflow), which de-risks future estimates around the work.
And it also makes more sense. "Spend this week learning how to use this API and figuring out its warts, then come back and give an estimate next week on how much work it'll be to get it up and running for real."
A rather reasonable way to do things.
Retro is one of those meetings that I have found very useful, at multiple companies. When done right, everyone should be involved, and useful action items will be taken away to make work easier in the future. I've seen retros done terribly wrong, where nothing is accomplished or taken away. Those seem like a waste, but I think when done right, it is actually a valuable use of time.
It really gets tedious hearing the same problem every two weeks with action planned and nothing happening.
Here's a gnomish submarine I drew for D&D campaign I run. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51263880414_ee12f5cc5d_o...
I worked with a small team in a small office. Everybody is typically at their desk in silence with the occasional manager or sales person on the phone. At predictable intervals throughout the day, someone will get up and be gone extra long.
You know, and everybody else knows, they've gone for a number 2.
Occasionally a manager will say "where's X" and someone will respond they stepped out. Nobody cares, and yes I'm being neurotic, but it is still slightly embarrassing that everybody _knows_.
Again, nothing is devastating here, it's just... awkward.
The fact that I can have my morning coffee and then when the urge comes, march off to my porcelain throne without anyone knowing better, answer Slack messages from my phone, etc. is one of the great joys of no longer being in an office for me.
Not to mention I’ve worked in places with two bathrooms total for like 300+ males lol. Always a pleasure to be standing in line after lunch.
If you're based in the US, that's likely illegal. OSHA requires 1 toilet + 1 urinal per 50 employees (IIRC). CA and other states have slightly stricter requirements.
At home, I can actually go change my shirt and/or take a shower and actually be sure I don't stink.
Also, nobody cares if I stink while I'm working from home. I still shower mid-day anyhow when I want to.
Lunch is also a lot easier to deal with. I don't eat out because I have to watch my diet or I'll gain all my weight back that I lost. That's really hard when eating out. It's pretty easy at home.
Then I remembered, we all work remotely, and got a good laugh out of it, since this can never happen. (Even if I do stink!)
Other days I just have long list of individual tasks that I want to get through without being distracted. On those days I'd love to just work from home, have space to dramatically crash on my bed to think about things, go for walks, etc.
With these two things combined I think the hybrid approach is probably going to win out, either where employees can use their own judgement when to WFH, or maybe having a system around particular days of the week.
Being able to quickly draw some things that may or may not make sense, and then have someone else quickly draw on top of what you drew, and then sharing those ideas, is really hard to replicate online.
I don't think any of this is an argument against true WFH, I just think you'd have to change your process to accommodate the lack of interactive whiteboarding. RFPs + doc reviews + (for really big projects) in person quarterlies are definitely good enough, to me.
"Being able to quickly draw some things that may or may not make sense, and then have someone else quickly draw on top of what you drew, and then sharing those ideas, is really hard to replicate online."
This is exactly what ShareTheBoard is aiming to deliver. The last piece of the puzzle are digital annotations - those will be added in July.
Please take a look and share some notes. I'm curious if our solution scratches the itch!
Unlike a whiteboard, you can prepare 11 x 17 inch paper ahead of time and bring it to a meeting. Including carrying all those random post-it notes in some weird order that you made up.
For you Europeans out there... that'd be roughly A3 sized paper.
Thank you.
For example, I wouldn't mind moving from my apartment in central London to a commuter town to have a garden and dedicated home office. But that would only be possible if days in the office are limited.
Of course, "come in for collab meetings once a week" is most certainly an option for teams who really need it.
We too are not fans of "online whiteboards." Instead, we're looking for ways to bridge the great offline tools around us with the powerful online/digital tools we use everyday. Our work is "hybrid" already - it's weird that our tools have not been.
Anyway, please check it out and share some notes. Happy to answer any questions you may have too.
In short, I can’t exactly blame managers wanting to return to prior conditions to reduce the level of uncertainty, especially if the last year has been a mixed bag. I do think most people I know want to return to a hybrid model but there was already a significant part-time WFH culture before the pandemic (1-2 days a week). moving to WFH 2-4 days a week is probably where it will end up.
EDIT: Typo
"Maybe you should work to improve what you measure and how you encourage feedback. It is normally a good idea to have ways to tell if people are doing a good job for what you are paying them to do."
Measuring this stuff is really, really hard. If you're a manager who's non-technical it's almost impossible.
No-one is saying that you can't slack off while at the office, or that you are guaranteed to slack off if you're working from home, but I think the discussion would be better if some of the more rabid pro-remote people acknowledged that for a lot of people there is a big difference.
In the office: - You're limited in what slacking options are available - You're surrounded by coworkers who at least act as though they mostly work which can be motivating - You know your boss is around and could stop by, so you don't want to do something too outlandish
At home you could go play your xbox for 8 hours while responding to DMs, and then say "investigated the bug, think I made some progress" during stand-up and in many places get away with that for a very, very long time.
I don't think some lighter version of this is that uncommon. Sure, you can take the position that it's managements responsibility to figure this out and fire you but understand that this type of thing is why many companies are against remote, especially with how vehemently most developers reject any form of tracking.
The position to take that leads not just to a successful wfh environment, but a great work environment in general is to not worry about “slacking off”. People are either producing results, or not. Especially in software development, developers will have spurts of great productivity and plenty of downtime. Trust, freedom and positive motivation are the keys to success.
How do you suggest a non-technical manager tells slacking apart from when things just take unexpectedly longer?
Hire good people, managers included. Keep trust high. Keep motivation high and keep autonomy high and I assure you software will get produced at a high quality.
Software development is a high leverage creative field. You want to maximize for developer flow, creativity and comfort.
You didn't really answer the question. Say I'm a non-technical manager and I suspect one of my employees is slacking off, they just respond with "oh, the load router was misconfigured, luckily I caught it in time. I'll need to hot patch it, it will probably take another 2 weeks" what do I do?
I think what you want is not possible. More process, monitoring… is only going to slow down your development.
I also think if a developer manager is going to be non-technical that they should be able to demonstrate extraordinary developer relation skills. Otherwise, what are you paying them for?
The real answer of course is to pay more to hire better developers. You may even need to pay “hazard pay” if your software is boring enough.
Your answer, including "The real answer of course is to pay more to hire better developers" and "software is too complex to be created by non-experts" is essentially saying that only a portion of the current developers should be writing code at all. Okay, so let's assume all the companies hire only "better developers" and everyone else gets pushed out of the industry - but there's not enough developers as is, so what do we do with half as many developers? Writing half as much software is not really an option.
I also will believe we have a real developer shortage when dev pay and exec pay are more closely aligned. As it is, I see a lot of room to pull from exec salaries to pay for devs (which would be required if there was a shortage).
How does that even work? How can one be 'non-technical' when they are managing people who produce technical output? Is it not key to managing this situation that one understands what is being done to at least some degree? And if one understands to some degree then one is not 'non-technical' I would say. If understanding is lacking; it can be learned.
It's not like it's magic!
Separately from that, many people believe having people be in office leads to a higher chance of them doing work because the alternatives are much less enticing.
The job of a manager is supposed to be hard, that's why it pays well. If you want an easy job, do something else.
Is someone who writes bad code all day really less valuable than someone who gets their tasks done, and then plays Xbox
...is there really a meaningful difference?
The problem is that you can't do that so now you're left with having to measure their performance in some other way. That is very hard and noisy.
The point you made is that you think it's only a fair comparison if you can clone the same person. Which is simply false unless your determination of a person's value is dependent upon that person rather than upon their output.
Absolutely it is.
> how vehemently most developers reject any form of tracking.
Huh? I don't know a single professional developer who doesn't use version control. Usually some sort of bug/todo/issue tracking, as well.
Second, there's also a lot of external pressure that pushes the office building as a bastion of productivity. From commercial real estate landlords to agents to contractors: many livelihoods are reliant on the exorbitant inefficiencies of office real estate. I remember when I was working for Edmunds.com, our new offices were better than Google's (the company spared no expense on the suspended rotating Corvettes[1] and free delivered lunches). But just a few years later (I had quit a year prior), over 100 employees were laid off[2], including several friends. Their jobs may have been secure had it not been for the $XX million dollar "new office" project that mostly served as an Instagram photo op.
In short, I think the argument in posts like this is oversimplified. It's not just "are people more productive from home?" -- the research has already been done on this, and we've all just been unwitting Guinea pigs for over a year now. The answer is a resounding "yes!" -- but that's hardly the only consideration.
[1] https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/edmunds-coms-new-headquarte...
[2] https://www.dailynews.com/2020/01/27/edmunds-com-to-lay-off-...
After 10 years of writing software, I’ve realized that being in an office is the opposite of productive when it comes to coding. The office is where your more career driven peers climb the hierarchy through soft skills, currying favors with each meeting and business lunch.
This might sound a little like a brag but I was pretty good at playing that game. Doing it remotely is a bit harder, but it’s possible if you’re especially power hungry. Honestly though, it was stressful and not even all that fulfilling after rising up to engineering manager.
Just getting to write code without bad managers who negatively affect my mood is all I’ve ever wanted, and I think there’s a lot of folks on this site that feel the same way.
The entire problem is that the set of people that are good at the online game is not the same as the physical game, thus the people that already got the power by playing the physical one will do anything to stop changing the rules.
- They are control freaks. They feel the need to control their employees beyond their body of work, they want to control their lives. Useless "team bonding events" and intrusive behaviour are to be expected.
- They are very bad at minding their own business. These people often have a mix of extroversion, lack of self awareness, and a frivolous personality. They will interrupt developers and other knowledge workers and they couldn't care less about the thousands of €/$ that they waste, missed deadlines, etc. Ironically these are the people whose strong point is supposed to be their soft skills.
But one thing I've struggled with since growing to a size where the number of employees is more than I can keep mental track of is measuring individual performance and success.
Can anyone share any resources on how to handle that? What sort of metrics can one use to realistically measure the performance of a developer or designer where work consists of changing requirments & lots of back and forth? How to handle employees who seem to be working low hours or slacking off? How to reward those which have been working efficiently & productively? Any advice or experiences will be appreciated.
You would not want to use metrics but rather knowledge of the actual effectiveness of the programmer. Evaluating this requires someone with programming knowledge who can see first-hand what their code is and what they accomplish on the project.
Again look at the work output rather than your guesses about their hours. If they are accomplishing their tasks then they are not slacking off. If they are not accomplishing their tasks, make sure they have motivating work and autonomy. Having covered all of the above, the next step if you really have a problem is a serious warning and probably just firing them if/when they don't radically change their behavior which is somewhat unlikely to occur.
> Do they deliver what is expected of them?
If the answer to this question is “yes”, then congrats! You have a great team and shouldn’t waste your energy (and their well-being) worrying if they are working hard or not.
On the flip side, comparatively, it is much easier to compare performance vs other engineers working on the same project. At least for outliers.
At a more basic level measuring value created vs what you pay someone is far more important than measuring hours worked.
Don’t forget also that the bigger the team, the harder it is to manage, so splitting is always a good options!
Work was a respite from home. Then came WFH and remote-learning. "Just figure things out" smacks of privilege. For starters, (almost) no one plans to be a single parent.
Unless there was an underlying assumption that the office provided daycare that I missed. Or if this was more toward remote learning than remote work.
Also, If the child is old enough to care for themselves at home, I don't see the issue of being in or out of office.
Depending on age, caring for kids is a full-time job. Perhaps even 1.25-1.5 full time jobs for 12-24 month olds. And even in those blissful moments when you don't need to be doing something specifically to care for them, they are either making noise or your brain is "on call" and splitting it's attention on work-and-watching-out-for-kid. It's hard.
Luckily they sleep outside of work hours so parents can rest or catch up on work.
When the outputs are socially restricted, it’s not as if work from home is enabling free thought and novel productive agency.
IMO it’s merely step 1 to on a long path ending the aristocratic control of productive output. Somehow what we do has no value unless they can own and speculate about its financial value.
I see no merit in emotional grifting by a minority. That’s the binding we need to question. Not the middle manager who is aristocratic in title only.
Privus lex should be universal. Currently it clearly favors those with financial control of the planet.
I have met the majority of my friends at work. Once you pass your 20s, your exposure to strangers diminishes greatly. And many of us do not have kids.
There is no way to guarantee all of this stuff for remote workers. The US was already becoming too isolated. I just don't understand all the optimism about people just figuring this stuff out, or even companies being able to help from a distance, at all. We're in for a ton of downstream problems.
That seems like a non sequitur to me.
Are you expecting the employer to guarantee this stuff? To police an employee's exercising, eating, and meeting people? (Some degree of policing healthiness of workspace seems reasonable, but it can very easily go overboard...)
If resources are made available to help people become more intentional about these things, why would they help people working in an office more than people working from home?
Exercising is much easier if you aren't stuck on a train/in a car on the freeway for an hour every morning and evening.
Eating right is much easier when you have the extra time (and energy) to make a fresh home-cooked meal some or all evenings.
Meeting people is easier when you have the freedom to choose where you live based on where you would prefer, rather than being stuck living within 1-3 hours' drive from a specific office building.
Even having a healthy work area is easier when you have the freedom to design it yourself, rather than having to be in exactly the same cost-efficient cubicle as 999 other employees.
If we can make working from home a norm—for those who want it, for companies for whom it makes sense—a lot of these things can be improved.
And if people want to work in an office... let them? I'm not sure why everyone hears remote work and thinks "oh great, businesses will just not have an office at all". ???
Sarcasm aside, this was already my situation before the pandemic, just due to not making real friends at work. It takes work, but not that much. Each individual is ultimately responsible for their wellbeing, because they're the only ones who can be. Any help from their employer (if they even have one, e.g. not a freelancer) is a bonus.
Could it be, at least partly, caused by having to commute to the office? When you work from home, it becomes so much easier to pick up a hobby and meet new people.
* Working at home: commute longer than 30-45 minutes.
* Working at office: commute shorter than 30-45 minutes.
Like everything in life, people optimize for different things in life. Optimizing for a short commute is a choice that people can make if they want, likewise optimizing for a bigger home 60 minutes away.
I still have to hear somebody who lives at a short walk to the office, wanting to work from home, because it really wouldn't make any sense at all. Remove the commute from the equation, and the office is superior in any possible way: socially, economically, mentally. Now if they were to move 60 minutes away, I would understand why they would want to work from home.
It's all a function of commute, which in and by itself is a choice in our highly paid industry.
It's a choice until your office moves or your job changes (and you had to balance other priorities).
Mostly I agree with you though--if getting to the office is painless, then working from the office is great--except if you need to concentrate on your work. Any task that needs focus will take 2-3x as long to accomplish in an open office.
* Working at home: no kids
* Working at office: kids
or
* Working at home: introvert
* Working at office: extravert
There are a lot of reasons to prefer one over the other, and dismissing it as being "obviously" based on one specific factor is unhelpful, and likely to leave you with a skewed view of the situation.
Personally, I live 5 minutes' drive (or 25 minutes' walk) from my office (and on the other two divides, no kids, and distinctly introverted). I love working at home, because it means I get to eat lunch with my family every day, pet my cats when they come over to see me, and take care of random household chores that it's often a bit too much to always cram into the weekend. But I also love that I can go into the office easily any time it's helpful to do so—and I'm expecting to be walking to work again at least a day or two a week this fall.
But while I'm unquestionably part of the tech world, with my everyday work being basically a full stack developer, I'm not "in your highly paid industry", and I think it's a lazy and self-centered shortcut to think of everyone who works in tech—or, worse, everyone who has a choice between working from home or working from the office—as being part of Silicon Valley culture or among the small fraction of Americans lucky enough to be making six figures.
Look outside the techbro culture, look outside the cities, look outside the high-income bubble you're clearly stuck in, and you'll see a lot of people whose life experience and reasons for doing things look very different than what you're used to and expecting.
Uh, no. I can't afford to pay twice the rent I do so that I can cut my commute in half.
Last week I watched the movie 'Nine to Five', which was released in 1980. In it, the characters were working toward equal pay and flexible work schedules. It was depressing to realize that for many people, what was considered radical in 1980 seems just as radical in 2021.
That's because WFH is/has been be temporary for most in management (i.e. the people who could actually drive change to procedures to fit WFH better).
One need a place where one can work [at home] if one fails at that for whatever reason a remote place might be an option. Just like proper training for a job one has to organize that themselves.
I work a lot of night shifts. My employer doesn't provide a place to sleep during the day. Productivity is regularly hurt by peoples children, construction work etc etc Should the employer now provide office style bedrooms and expect everyone to sleep there?
The office primarily exists for clients and investors to marvel at the marble floors, the fancy decorations, the smoothly shaved men in expensive suits, the open floor plan and many other D type rituals that after examining the price tag can only be considered a cult.
Why not replace some of that with parents playing with their kids? Or should that be: Show kids how work is done? (if we for laughs pretend nothing else is important) Which kids would end up more productive?
There is an expression in the Netherlands: "Dad is the man who cuts the meat on Sunday".
Some don't have a dedicated office space at all, those that do often don't have it set up for two people to work (dueling Zoom meetings are a problem). Most people in the US can't afford or even get enough bandwidth to support two simultaneous video conferences, much less three or more if there are kids doing remote school.
Don't forget that with parents in the office and kids at school, lunch was pretty easy to take care of if you could afford to eat out, and often dinner would be scattered among friends. Now you've got to figure out food for the whole crowd. Ordering delivery gets expensive.
That's the skeuomorphic way of working from home, of course. While the article is on point, it doesn't offer any suggestions for new ways to work. Where are the Forbes, WSJ, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc articles on embracing remote work?
?!?! How much bandwidth do you think it takes???
Zoom requirements: For group video calling: For 1080p HD video: 3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down)
(Of course, most people probably don't even have 1080p webcams...)
For one person, the FCC definition[1] of "broadband" speeds of 3MB/s up are barely sufficient. The are lots of places that barely break that. Now get both parents and the kid, there are plenty of folks who can't do it[2]. Sure, they could watch, but they'd have to have their video off. Better hope that some program doesn't try to download an update.
We're all a bunch of relatively well-paid nerds here on HN, so we have better-than-average internet speeds. I'm still betting there's a portion of us living in the 'burbs who would struggle streaming more than 2 video conferences.
1 https://www.engadget.com/senators-fcc-change-definition-high...
You do realize that 3MB/s is TWENTY FOUR Mbps, i.e. over 6 times Zoom's requirement for 1080p, right?
Even 10Mbps upload is enough for at LEAST two video calls.
I'm not OP, but latency matters more than bandwidth in this case.
More specifically, the variance of latency matters. It's easy to grow accustomed to a constant 500ms delay, but it's incredibly difficult to deal with the random delays you get when you put a packet-switched network atop a high latency physical layer.
let's rearrange office into gym, pub, strip club or something else and let's increase profits!
Anyway, my co-workers want hybrid approach, 1-2day office, rest home, with exceptions for ppl that have long commute (tiny minority) - they can 100% remote.
It sounds relatively reasonable
"I like working from home when everybody is working from home"
is not the same thing as
"I like working from home when some people are working from home and some people are grabbing lunch with the boss",
and I think a lot of us are about to figure that out.
What experimental studies prove that work from home is superior to work in the office (or vice versa)?