Why can't software engineers work from home most of the time? (2016)
workplace.stackexchange.com
workplace.stackexchange.com
Why burden business relationships with forced several hours /week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
The only other situation you spend that amount of time with someone is a cellmate in prison, and the inevitable and necessary conseqeunce is micro-power struggles over the least significant things because in spending that much time together, you literally exhaust every other way to relate.
Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result, whenever someone tells me they are a "people person," I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, "you are what you eat."
I can't imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.
Some people can manage that separation with a home office. Others prefer a physically separate workplace.
For me, I didn't think I would like WFH. When forced over the last year, it was better than expected. Certainly not having a commute was nice, not having to "dress up" for work was nice, but both my productivity and the amount of direction on tasks/priorities fell off a cliff. Interruptions were about the same, but when they come from spouse/kids (especially spouse) they are harder to deflect.
Or the other way around. That's the rarely stated but arguably common case, particularly for middle-age people: office is a place of escape/relaxation/recharging where your spouse and your little children and/or your inlaws don't interfere.
I love my WFH, I have it worked out with my wife and our family, and I don't want to ever have to work in an office on a regular basis - but I do understand this point. Parenting is hard. Marriage is hard - and COVID in particular threw a lot of people into uncharted territory. Despite all the romantic ideals and the condescending opinions of some people, modern marriage in western world is designed around partners spending significant time apart. Our current pandemic suddenly forced every couple to live a lifestyle most don't experience until retirement. Few were ready for this.
For many people, making new friends as an adult gets harder with age. Part of that is that we're not compelled to join things like we were as children. Part of it is that we have the cumulative time and means to create our own favored environments - my house has some kick-ass stuff in it and air conditioning, so why would I leave it? :D I kid, but kinda not.
As I've gotten older, I've made a point to get more involved in entirely voluntary organizations (collector's groups, church, etc) and it takes work. It's rewarding on the balance - good for my personal growth and good for the group assuming they would agree that I bring a modicum of value to the table - but it takes a dedication that doesn't come easy. Kind of like exercise, right?
An antipattern here is expecting to replicate your quality childhood friendships quickly. Friendships, particularly intimate friendships, take a long time and many shared experiences. 80% of the job is just showing up, so nothing kills budding friendship opportunities like flaking out one too many times. Show up!
I don't think friendship is a substitute for the socialization an office provides. A roommate situation might be, but that has other serious challenges.
You have the choice to choose your own employer and if you don't like the terms, the choice to leave.
A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
That assumes two things:
1) That a company exists that will grant you your (let's presume reasonable) terms, and
2) That there are enough companies accepting those terms such that there are enough jobs available for everyone who wants those terms.
My ideal job would be a part-time gig where I get the benefits of a full-time gig (health insurance, 401k, equity, etc.), but can choose my hours (essentially 100% flexibly), perhaps with some sort of weekly minimum, and get paid by the number of hours worked. It would be fully remote, and I could work from wherever I want. But there are very few companies that will agree to terms like that (maybe even no companies), even though I'd be just as (probably more) productive than their "standard" full-time employees.
> A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
It's not absurd, it's people who have traditionally been on the bad end of a power imbalance (employees) finally getting the flexibility they've always wanted, proving that they can be just as productive that way, and then being pissed off that employers are requiring them to go back into the office for little reason other than management's desire to control their employees' lives.
And it's really funny that you find that absurd, because many of them are doing exactly what you claim they should do: leave and find a different employer that will accept their terms. Post-pandemic there are a lot more employers that will accept flexible/remote work arrangements than there were previously, and employers that are requiring employees to come back to the office are going to lose some talent.
- very healthy hourly rate - min commit of X hours per month (I think it was 80), then work as few or as many as you want beyond that (though for planning purposes we'd often ask people to give us a rough idea of their plans for the next few weeks) - various bonuses that would kick in when the group reached different milestones each month (this was a consulting company, so a lot of them revolved around billable hours) - no additional paid benefits at all
That last one took the most time for people to get on board with initially, but ultimately proved to be really popular. I think it had to do with how entrenched the mindset is around the norm, but concepts like getting paid even though you're not working, or having your employer be involved with your health insurance are pretty odd if you think about it. Things like sick leave, paid time off, etc. are also things that look nice on paper but IMO tend to be a net loss for employees - they tend to be assigned inflated values by the companies and are used as leverage against employees.
> A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
For all of the negative stuff coming from people who do not want to return to an office I find one thing in common: they all usually really like their company and job.
While "If you don't like it, leave" is the reality of the situation it doesn't change that this is somewhat irrational behavior. It is the {CEO, Boss, Manager}'s decision as to who gets to work remote obviously. That's the power dynamic at hand. However, if you think of this in any other situation you can see that there's something about remote work that makes some managers loose their cool. Imagine employees saying this:
1. I have back pain and if I had an (ergonomic chair|standing desk) I'd be able to work for longer without getting up and walking around. This would make me more productive.
2. The coffee machine makes bad coffee and everyone walks to the coffee shop across the street 3 times a day. If we just got good grinds and a machine in the office we'd all save money and we'd save ~1hr/day/engineer on context switching for coffee.
A {CEO, Boss, Manager) has every right to say: "If you don't like your (coffee|desk|chair) then you can leave" but they are obviously acting pretty childish here. If you look at all of these situations logically you're looking for a small input effort for a large continuous return on investment.
If you add into the fact that myself, and many others, think working from home makes us MUCH more productive you can arrive at the following conclusions:
1. We are not more productive, we just think we are. 2. We are more productive, and we commute less (save money + sanity).
If we think out this decision matrix:
- Employee + !Productive, Boss + WFH: the employee is no more productive - maybe even slightly less productive - and this comes up in their performance reviews and they're asked to come back to the office. The employee will probably see that WFH does not work for them if this performance review is fair (ex not "You called into the meeting but since you didn't come in person you were obviously not listening as well").
- Employee + Productive, Boss + !WFH: The employee can quit and find a WFH company. The employee may be willing to accept *less* money and will produce *more* value for the new employer. This new employer now has a major leg up (in most industries) over the old employer.
- Employee + !Productive, Boss + !WFH: The employee could still jump to another company for less wages at a lower output if WFH means a lot to them.
- Employee + Productive, Boss + WFH: Company gains efficiency for no extra money. Employee is happier.
Most companies are asking for partial return to office, which IMO is already a concession, and people are up in arms over it.
I'm not against remote work, I just think people are being too entitled about it.
Does this not personify the relationship with the company a bit here? This is a negotiation. Skilled laborers have the ability to throw their weight around here a bit.
I personally don't think using bargaining power and leverage to ask for more (perks, pay, etc) is entitlement. The employer is allowed to say "no" and the employee is allowed to look for some place else that will say yes.
I think the mental framing that "people are up in arms over it" might be playing a bit into how you envision this working out. Most people I've spoken to have just said something like "I really liked working from home and if my boss asks me to come back I'll look for another job".
That sounds a lot like you are claiming their friendship isn't real to me.
I would take the latter over the former every day. My best friends are in that category, wven some who live in the same town
It might be safe to say that one group likes being in the same physical space as their peers [0] and another doesn't, and that both these groups are judging each other for their choice (typical in-group / out-group bias).
> Why burden business relationships with forced several hours/week physical presence when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
See also: Chesterton's fence when advocating for fundamental changes in the way things work [1].
I see where you are coming from, but honestly the workplace is one of the rare places someone can easily make friends after 30, precisely because someone is forcing you to be together with other people.
There are obviously other ways to do this (hobbies, etc) but they typically aren't as simple and you're now setting up a second thing you need to participate in. I don't think people love being in the office; they love being with other people instead of being stuck by themselves in their home or quietly sitting by themselves in a coffee shop.
In my experience, being forced to be a Slack @tag or DM away from coworkers who see you as a screen name rather than a face is far worse for conflict.
Remote work doesn't mean employees get to withdraw from social interaction and isolate themselves. It just moves the interaction to a different medium.
I've managed in-person, mixed, and full-remote teams. Conflict always gets more heated in the remote teams. When you're in the office with someone and talking face to face, people are more likely to treat each other like humans. When you're trying to communicate through emotionless Slack text all day, some people misinterpret harmless comments as being aggressive and struggle to treat their coworkers differently than screen names in an internet flame war.
I had a manager in one of my first jobs tell me to always have a hard discussion in person, if you can, because "there are eyes". It stuck with me then, and it makes more sense all the time.
You definitely miss some important indicators being on Slack all day.
Many probably don't realize (yet) that there's a difference between working with people in the office then being remote and just being remote.
If you've spent some time with somebody, it's easier to assume tone and intent behind something that may seem hostile in isolation.
Many people are in bad relationships. Many married people spend little time together.
I'm quite surprised that this is a large part of the top comment. I'm not an extrovert but I love office life, despite its flaws. The primary flaws of office life for me are:
1. Commute. Currently not a problem but it will be in the future for me. 2. Open plan offices are the norm and make focusing more difficult. 3. Slight more difficulty in eating home-cooked food as if you aren't organised, you end up buying lunch rather than cooking at home.
I don't think I have a perverse addiction to conflict.
Major advantages of working in an office include:
1. I work more productively usually. The environment helps me focus, rather than goof off. 2. It is much easier to have impromptu coffee and lunch conversations and interesting discussions, both work related and otherwise. This increases team social bonding and speeds up knowledge transfer. 3. The people I work with in the office regularly are easier to relate to and think well of than faces online.
That's one reason to go into the office: to leave your spouse alone for a few hours. It's much healthier to resent your coworkers than to resent your spouse.
However:
1) I am definitely feel less productive and I find myself getting stressed out easily when something unexpected happens at work (live bugs for example).
2) I hate teams meetings. I mean the whole microphone/camera not working mess got much better. But I find these meetings less focused and less communicative. Nobody feels obliged to bring a meeting to a productive end (less than ordinarily).
3) I definitely experience a lack of communication across teams. I have no idea really what my colleagues are doing outside my team. Four to five people quit during the year and, personally, I have no idea what happened making them so dissatisfied.
4) I gained some weight due to the lack of commute and decreased mobility. During the warmer months I enjoyed my bicycle ride to/fro the office.
5) The commute also helped me to shut off my thoughts about work issues. Now, I carry them with me all the time and sometimes I return to work at night because I feel the need to finish something. I try to add breaks during the day to distance myself from working at home.
All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. While my colleagues are certainly not good friends (which I don’t have much) but I always enjoyed lunch time with them, chatting with them over a cup of coffee or enjoyed a team event outside the office. Living with and loving my family for many years it feels good from time to time to be a separate person with a separate realm from home.
I take a lot of the remote-work perspective on HN with a grain of salt. It's easy to forget that HN is still a bubble online that doesn't necessarily represent the norms in the real world.
1) I am definitely more productive than in an office, almost by an order of magnitude. That is in a large part because of my specific personality idiosyncrasies (I get anxious in shared working environmens), so it doesn't generalize.
2) Meetings I'm in are exactly the opposite - they're much more focused and productive. Probably because everyone has more interesting things to do than waste time on chit-chat over a videocall, so there's this constant pressure to either do something useful, or cancel the meeting.
3) This one matches my experience too. With no ability to just bump into people or notice they're there, I do feel as if my team is the entire company.
4) No change.
5) Sort of the same, except I consider it to be a feature more than a draw.
> All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home.
To this, the answer is simple: autonomy. You get to choose your own environment, your own pace; you can protect your personal space. And, you reclaim the time you wasted on commute, which you get to spend on what you want. In my case, I'm getting 2 hours of my life back every day. Some people are getting more.
For me the pair programming experience has only improved with remote working. It's so much easier to share a screen in a remote call than to awkwardly huddle together around a small desk and look at a single 22" monitor or 15" laptop screen. Also it's easier for teammates to chime in into a call or ignore all together which is harder to do in an (open) office space without requiring headphones. Even onboarding new team members went better than I expected.
Does "in person" mean sitting next to each other? Or can they be in different rooms?
I have seen developers collaborating over Slack even when they are in the same floor in the same building. And if collaborating over Slack works then it doesn't matter if you're in the same building... or even in the same town.
Now, we regularly do screen-sharing for development and demos, with the process of screen-sharing being as normal a part of our development cycle as pull-requests.
I don't think either of these arguments hold water, for the reasons below.
First, with a VPN and modern controls on means of exfiltration you are able to maximize your protection against IP theft as well as to monitor your developers (see second point below though). That said, if a smart thief is going to steal your data, if they have physical access, if they are willing to accept the risk (this places doubt on smarts), and if they put the time and effort in, then they will likely manage to steal something.
Next, trust your people, but verify. Hire the best you can, pay them well so they are happy, and treat them like valued people. When hiring use background investigations, etc. to vet. The more you monitor, the more you say you don't trust them. The more they don't feel trusted, the less happy they'll be. The less happy they are, the more likely they are to leave or worse, commit the theft.
Last, a riff off the previous point. If you get good people, treat them well (incl. help when they have issues), and trust them to do their jobs - most people will perform at their best in a reliable and consistent manner.
It's easy, just look at the pull requests!
If your manager can't look at a PR and figure out what's going on, that's a red flag.
If goofing off is a big concern, you are hiring wrong.
And yet if they're at home, and they want to take breaks to improve their quality of living, this is suddenly a massive trust issue? In the past, commuting, we forced them to take two huge anti-breaks just so we can stare at them and so they can chit-chat with others? I just never agreed with the butts-in-the-cubicle-chair and the value of water-cooler gab.
It's not necessarily about attention, but about availability. Companies shouldn't care if employees take short breaks away from the computer while working remote. However, unless the business truly has perfectly isolated, asynchronous units of work to give everyone, you do need some level of availability to co-work with people and discuss things together.
Most remote companies end up with some core working hours where everyone is expected to be online and available for collaboration. Without this, it becomes a scheduling nightmare to try to get people online to answer questions or collaborate.
Jobs are more than just a collection of people working independently. You really need buy-in at all levels of the organization to enable remote work to work optimally. Partially-remote or half-baked remote policies (or rushed, during COVID) often leads to organizational and cultural problems, unrelated to the individual work performance of individuals.
I think if you ask anyone who already worked at a 100% remote organization before COVID, they'll tell you: being already 100% remote was a competitive advantage during COVID.
Remote vs non remote is kind of like setting up a system from a GUI vs setting it up from a script. One is easier, very ad hoc and doesn’t require planning other than intuition; the second requires deliberation but makes for a consistent, flexible and documented procedure.
It would be interesting to see how predictions about work from home from pre-pandemic played out, but this isn't a great sample.
Then there is the fact that not everyone is efficient with WFH.
Finally, if one manages to split his tasks in batches WFH/office hybrid could definitely become an option for many, e.g. work with team in office one week / work on long form client emails remotely. But that's a very big IF.
The problem is that it’s one of those things that we want because it just sounds better, like chocolate or a fast car, but then when our monkey brains slowly lives it through we realise it’s not really the most sustainable solution for our well being.
We evolved in tribes and social circles that are not in line with “what we want NOW because it feels safe and/or society prescribes it”. I do think that work offices were one of the few things in our highly individualistic society that allowed us to somehow subconsciously socialise and activate those primitive brain cells that we have become so detached from.
What I’m trying to say is that obligating people to come to office is horrible and it’s great pandemic is changing that, but humans need society to sponsor more ways to get us to live and interact more with one another.
And with offices being out of the equation I fear this will make it even harder for us to create subconscious tribes (ones that exist without even wanting them at first).
I am a contract programmer, and I have worked both in office, remotely, and also hybrid (3/2). I have no strong opinion on the matter. But, I always know I'm temporary, by choice, so the fact that I'm not really making strong connections doesn't bother me, and my loyalty to the company isn't an issue because I'm a "hired gun". Yahoo apparently encountered something they found to be a problem with too many people working remotely, and I'd like to know how it all looked from "ground level".
I think Yahoo had much bigger issues to tackle at the time.
We should count our lucky stars were not required to sleep at work.
- Most people don't have significant savings. Even in IT.
- Many people have dependents to support.
- Quitting a job and finding a new one is a big hassle.
- Your chances at finding a comparable job to your previous one are strongly correlated with your performance at your past jobs.
Combined, this means almost no one can just quit, without putting themselves into immediate, moderate-to-high threat to the lives of themselves and their families.
Let's throw in one more reason: health insurance being tied to current employer also means people may be forced to stay, at least until they line up their next gig.
The job did not require that. This individual chose to live in an exurb.
1. They live in one city, and received a job in another. 2 hours would be Philadelphia to DC or NYC for example. But they can't get a more local job (those don't exist, they can't land them, etc.)
2. They can't move for some reason. Their partner can't get another job. Their children are in a school and they don't want to move them until they graduate. Their parents are family are nearby and they must be near them, medical issues are possible, elderly, etc.
3. They just really love where they live
4. They Can't afford to live.
3. is an argument against empathy. they made their choice to prioritize where they are living over commute. That's exactly OP's point.
1. again, if they choose not to relocate then the commute is their responsibility not the job's fault.
2. is the main point i now have a lot of sympathy for now that I have kids. Kids benefit from continuity and uprooting your whole life for one of the partner's jobs is somewhat selfish.
But even in that situation, I feel like the onus is still on the person - they are choosing their kids over their commute. The commute isn't for the job. The commute is for the kids.
Modifying one of those (ideally the job half) to eliminate that commute is a great choice if available.
I don't think so. I know many people who for example wanted to keep their children in the same school so commute for a new job. I don't know anyone who commutes through two hours of suburbs. Where is that even possible? Los Angeles maybe?
> I'm making a point.
Well what is it?
My point is that you are not entitled to both your McMansion enclave and your cushy software engineering position at Big Corp. Denser development (in the U.S.) is necessary and would be achieved if people were willing to pay for it and vote for it.
Instead, they do the worst possible thing, which is imagine they can live a pseudo-bucolic existence and not be members of the urban center, or at least old growth dense suburbs, that actually support the jobs they want to have.
Is this pathology uniquely American? No, but arguably we invented it and have taken it to the most extreme level.
That's still totally unrealistic in the modern economy. I get it. All of you that have kids and a settled life want to flip the table and make yourselves as unavailable as possible. No more mentorship of younger engineers and new team members. No more face to face planning and strategy. No more conferences, after-work networking, etc.
It's selfish. You're going to be proven wrong by those who are willing to show up, collaborate, and innovate. We're going to run circles around you and leave your failing businesses in the dust.
!remindme 1 decade.